Bojangles Coliseum: The Dome That Changed Charlotte
Near Charlotte, North Carolina
The round building at the edge of Independence Park is older than most people realize, and when it opened in September of nineteen fifty-five, it was the largest unsupported steel dome in the world. That distinction belonged to Charlotte for several years, and it came from a design by the local firm Odell and Associates that covered three hundred thirty-two feet of interior space without a single interior support column blocking your view.
The venue opened as Charlotte Coliseum, dedicated by Billy Graham at a ceremony that drew an estimated thirteen thousand people. It seated around ten thousand, and in a city that would not get a major-league sports franchise for another three decades, it served as Charlotte's civic living room. It hosted concerts, conventions, ice shows, the circus, wrestling, and high school graduations.
The building became home to professional basketball in nineteen sixty-nine when the Carolina Cougars of the American Basketball Association moved to town. The Cougars never played solely in Charlotte, splitting time across the Carolinas, but they brought genuine ABA basketball to the Queen City during some of the league's most compelling years. In the nineteen seventy-two to seventy-three season, Billy Cunningham won the league's Most Valuable Player award playing for the Cougars, and a young coach named Larry Brown began his long career on the sideline here. The Cougars were sold and relocated to Saint Louis in nineteen seventy-four.
The building went on hosting events through the decades. The Charlotte Hornets also arrived in nineteen eighty-eight, but they played in a brand new coliseum built just for them across town, never in this building. The coliseum was renamed Bojangles Coliseum in a sponsorship deal in two thousand eight and later served as a satellite venue for larger events.
What it remains is a living piece of mid-century civic ambition, the physical proof that Charlotte believed in itself before the rest of the country had heard of it.
