On September 28, 1996, the biggest band to ever come out of Buffalo played the first concert in the biggest room Buffalo had ever built — and the Goo Goo Dolls didn’t have to travel far to do it. John Rzeznik and Robby Takac grew up playing the Aud, the old barn downtown that this new arena was built to replace, and now they were headlining its brand-new sibling on the strength of A Boy Named Goo and the song that was about to make them famous everywhere else, too. “It was our first time at the arena, and my grandmother was there that night,” Takac would say years later. “Unforgettable.” The building has worn four different corporate names since that night — Marine Midland Arena, HSBC Arena, First Niagara Center, and now KeyBank Center — but the bowl, the rigging, and that opening-night memory have stayed exactly where they were.
Crossroads Arena Becomes Home
Ground broke on November 4, 1994, for a downtown Buffalo arena that during construction was known simply as Crossroads Arena — a placeholder name for a $127.5 million building designed to finally give the Sabres, and the city’s concert calendar, a modern home to replace Memorial Auditorium. Marine Midland Bank bought the naming rights before a single game was played, and the arena opened as Marine Midland Arena on September 21, 1996, with a preseason hockey game between the Sabres and the Toronto Maple Leafs. A week later, after a September 27 opening gala, the Goo Goo Dolls christened the room as a concert venue, with fellow Canadian and Buffalo-market favorites Barenaked Ladies and 10,000 Maniacs opening the bill. Within days, Pearl Jam brought its famously Ticketmaster-less 1996 tour through for an October 1 show — a sign, early on, that this was going to be a full-service stop on the national arena circuit, not just a hockey barn with a stage bolted in.
A Building With Four Names
Part of this arena’s story is that it has never held a single name for much more than a decade. Marine Midland Bank’s parent company, HSBC Holdings, rebranded its U.S. operations in 1999, and after a legal tug-of-war over the naming-rights contract, the building officially became HSBC Arena on March 17, 2000. It carried the HSBC name for over a decade — arguably its highest-profile concert stretch — before First Niagara bought out the naming rights in a deal announced August 25, 2011, and the building became First Niagara Center for that fall’s hockey season. That name lasted five years. When KeyCorp acquired First Niagara Financial Group in 2016, the venue got its fourth identity: KeyBank Center became official on September 19, 2016, with new exterior signage having gone up the previous month. Four names in twenty years, all tied to bank mergers rather than anything that happened on the floor of the building itself.
Metallica’s Three-Name Tour
No band’s history with this arena tells the “same room, different marquee” story better than Metallica’s. The band played Marine Midland Arena on March 25, 1997, on the Poor Touring Me leg with Corrosion of Conformity opening. They came back to the same building, by then renamed HSBC Arena, on October 10, 2004, and again on November 10, 2009. By the time they returned once more, on October 27, 2018, the marquee out front read KeyBank Center. Same band, same downtown Buffalo address, three different corporate names spread across two decades — a tidy illustration of just how much sponsorship money has cycled through this building while the seats stayed put.
The Boss Says Goodnight to Clarence
Some nights at this arena carry weight beyond the setlist. On November 22, 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band closed out the Working on a Dream tour at HSBC Arena with a nearly three-and-a-half-hour, thirty-four-song marathon that included the only complete performance ever given of Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., dedicated from the stage to his old manager Mike Appel. It turned out to be the final time saxophonist Clarence Clemons ever appeared onstage with the full E Street Band before his death two years later. Springsteen’s archive team thought enough of the night to release it in full as an official live album on December 24, 2016 — meaning a random Sunday night in Buffalo now has its own catalog number in the Springsteen discography.
Garth Brooks Breaks His Own Record
Country music got its turn to make history here in 2015. Garth Brooks, in the middle of his comeback world tour, hadn’t played Buffalo since a run of shows in September 1998 — and when tickets for a return engagement went on sale on December 5, 2014, Buffalo bought 90,533 of them in a single day, breaking Brooks’s own first-day sales record for the market. The demand was enough to expand what started as a two-night stand into six sold-out shows over four days, March 5 through 8, 2015, at what was then First Niagara Center. It remains one of the more remarkable numbers in this building’s history: a single artist selling out the arena six times in one week, in a genre the room isn’t especially known for.
Same Bowl, Every Marquee
This arena has also hosted U2 on both the Elevation Tour (May 31, 2001) and the Vertigo Tour (December 9, 2005), Elton John’s thirty-three-song Face to Face show in 2003, and Barenaked Ladies’ October 9, 1998 concert, which was filmed for the Jason Priestley-directed documentary Barenaked in America. And in the summer of 2025, the Goo Goo Dolls came home again — co-headlining the Summer Anthem Tour with Dashboard Confessional at KeyBank Center on August 9, nearly thirty years to the season after they opened the building’s concert history in the first place. Whatever name is on the outside this decade, the room downtown by the Buffalo River has spent thirty years doing exactly what it was built to do: giving Western New York first crack at the biggest tours in the country, one marquee change at a time.
Photo Credits
- Photo: Michael Barera / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Photo: Daniellagreen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Photo: TonyTheTiger / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Photo: Fortunate4now / Wikimedia Commons (CC0 / public domain)
