Madison Square Garden

Sun August 2

With the rain pouring down, today seemed like the perfect time to take a look around the world’s most famous (and busiest) indoor arena, Madison Square Garden or simply “The Garden”.

Incredibly, given the venue holds 400 events a year with more than four million visitors, I managed to find a day on which there were no events being held, with the main arena being prepared for a Depeche Mode concert tomorrow night.

Madison Square Garden is home to basketball teams New York Knicks (men) and New York Liberty (women), as well as the New York Rangers ice hockey team and, of course, numerous concerts and other events.

This is the fourth building in its history, and the current venue has been on the present site since 1968 and is owned by the Cable Vision company.

The unique thing about the complex, apart from its magnificent location in central Manhattan, is that it has two arenas on top of each other that are soundproof which allows, for example, a boxing match down below and a basketball match above it.

The tours leave every half an hour and I joined the first available tour of 30 people (no video allowed). Each of us was given a fact sheet about the venue, a shop discount voucher and a discount voucher to buy tickets to any of the remaining New York Liberty basketball matches this season. Shame I can’t use it! We were then given an introductory brief by our guide, who was young but very impressionable.

First stop was the former Paramount Theatre, now called

WaMu Theatre, which holds 5600 people and has hosted boxing, conferences, religious gatherings and two weeks ago held the NBA Draft day. It sits directly above Pennsylvania train station, the busiest station in North America – a great location for a venue!

Next was the Play-by-Play restaurant, where we were sat down and shown a five-minute video about Madison Square Garden’s history, with some great highlights and a narrative that included former basketball and ice hockey players taking us on a video tour through the dressing rooms.

This is a great concept and one we should look to introduce for the MCG Tour. Although it is worth keeping in mind that Madison Square Garden has its own media company (MSG Media) and actually broadcasts its own events, meaning far greater access to event footage than we would have at home.

Before we left this room, though, we were greeted by Amy, a cheerleader with the

New York Knicks City Dancers, who proceeded to tell us about what the dancers do, the training involved, their performance at charity events, how famous they are (they have performed in a dozen countries) and then happily posed for photographs and took questions. I couldn’t resist…

We then headed to the Club Bar and Grill, a 500-seat dining room for corporate, complete with a scrolling news ticker on the wall with the latest sports news. Lots of photographs and artefacts adorned the walls in this room and all the way into the suites themselves, where we got a look at the main arena.

After walking through the Music Memorabilia Hall – where Fred the Ted met Elton John’s platinum album cover – and then the players’ dressing rooms, we ventured down to the main arena for a better look.

The main arena holds 20,000 people and is very similar in appearance to Rod Laver Arena when in concert mode. The speed of turnaround between events in this facility is quite amazing, with numerous surface changes that sometimes sees two different events being held in the one arena on the same day.

Visiting Madison Square Garden was a great experience – next stop tomorrow is Citi Field (formerly Shea Stadium) to see a Major League Baseball match between the New York Mets and the Arizona Diamondbacks. Can’t wait…