Detroit's fallen stadiums: What happened to Cobo Arena?

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23-07-2025

This is Part 3 of a six-part series looking back at the arenas and stadiums that housed some of Detroit's greatest teams over the past century. Come back to freep.com every day this week for more historic Detroit sports site memories.
Cobo Arena stood on some of the most historic land in Detroit and only added to that history.
Allegedly built on the spot where the first French settler of the city, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, claimed the land for King Louis XIV in 1701, Cobo was constructed by the city in 1960. It was named after deceased Detroit Mayor Albert E. Cobo, who pushed for the construction of the arena as well as the convention hall attached to it.
Detroit Pistons owner Fred Zollner moved his NBA franchise – newly arrived from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1957 – from Olympia Stadium, on Grand River to the newly constructed Cobo Arena at the corner of Jefferson and Washington along the Detroit River for the beginning of the 1961-62 NBA season.
The Pistons were a franchise constantly struggling to remain afloat, but Cobo wasn't the issue. In 1990, Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum wrote, 'There was something special about Cobo, an intimacy, a connection with the essence of the game (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, no fan of fans, once called those in Cobo the most knowledgeable in the league) and, above all, a kind of bad-dude charm.'
The Pistons played at Cobo for 17 seasons – winning just two playoff series in nine tries – but they left after the 1977-78 when new owner Bill Davidson decided the team needed to move to the suburbs in order to draw crowds. Pistons games were regularly underattended at Cobo; in an arena that could seat 12,000, the highest average annual attendance was 7,492 in 1974-75, and wealthy suburbanites were wary to come downtown.
So, the team moved to the gargantuan Pontiac Silverdome, already home to the NFL's Detroit Lions.
Of the first game at the Silverdome, The Michigan Daily's Ernie Dunbar wrote, '[T]he crowd at last night's Piston game was predominantly white. … This is exactly what the Pistons hoped for when they announced their move-the financial support of the suburbs. The argument for not supporting the Pistons at Cobo was that Detroit is not safe at night. Well, now the more generally affluent suburbanites must feel that Pontiac is safe, as they turned out in record numbers to the tune of 13,688."
Cobo couldn't beat numbers like that.
When Davidson's widow, Karen, sold the team to Platinum Equity chairman Tom Gores in 2011, the team stayed in the suburbs. It was only in 2017 that Gores reached an agreement with Olympia Entertainment to bring the Pistons back downtown, but he wasn't bringing them back to Cobo.
Cobo survived for as long as it did because of the versatility of the building. An arena attached to a convention center, Cobo could host any sort of event. The horseshoe shape of the arena and its acoustics made it perfect for concerts. Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, KISS and the Rolling Stones were just some of the names that performed there over the years. The current convention center still hosts the Detroit Auto Show each year, as it has since 1965.
The arena might be most well-known for being the site of the 'Whack Heard 'Round the World,' figure skater Tonya Harding's attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. The event was held next door at Joe Lous Arena, but practices were held at Cobo Arena. While leaving Cobo after practice on Jan. 6, 1994 Kerrigan was hit on the right thigh with a baton by Shane Stant, an associate of Harding. The aftermath of the attack, with Kerrigan crying, 'Why? Why? Why?' was recorded by a local television crew. Stant went through the glass of one of Cobo's doors as an exit route. Harding won the U.S. title, and a spot in the 1994 Olympics, two days later while Kerrigan watched from the press box.
Eventually, Cobo became less popular as a venue as downtown added sites such as Little Caesars Arena and Ford Field. In 2015, the arena was deconstructed internally and renovated to become more convention space. Today, following the sale of sponsorship rights following a review of Cobo's tenure as mayor, and a few bank mergers, it stands as Huntington Place – a testament to Detroit's appeal to tourists, if not to championship sports teams.
Contact Matthew Auchincloss at [e-mail].
The series
Come back all week for our series on Detroit's fallen stadiums:
July 21: Tiger Stadium.
July 22: The Palace of Auburn Hills.
July 23: Cobo Arena.
July 24: Joe Louis Arena.
July 25: Pontiac Silverdome.
July 26: Olympia Stadium.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit's fallen stadiums: Cobo Arena