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The story of the Palace: Somehow, it worked.
The Palace of Auburn Hills (Photo: Kirthmon F. Dozier, Detroit Free Press)
No one should be writing this story, and you shouldn’t be reading it. This narrative should not exist for one simple reason: The Palace of Auburn Hills should not exist — at least not in the way we have come to know it.
The Palace should have been an abject failure, run into the ground by ambitious but well-intentioned people who, truth be told, really didn’t know what they were doing. It should be an abandoned site. A mushy, ruinous pit. A parking lot overgrown with weeds. A crumbling structure, or perhaps one already done in by the wrecking ball. A faded memory and the subject of our ridicule and scorn.
“Oh, that?” we might tell the kids in the backseat as we whiz past the Lapeer Road exit on I-75. “That used to be where the Pistons played. They called it The Palace.”
Of course, it’s none of that.
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All-Palace Pistons teams, plus All-Palace opponents.
Top moments in Palace history: No. 1.
How Isiah Thomas became the greatest Detroit Piston ever.
It was, it is and it remains — at least for a while longer — the Palace of Auburn Hills, the home of the Detroit Pistons that will turn 29 on Aug. 13 but still looks like a teenager. Like an ingénue who burst onto the scene and has kept her good looks while growing old with grace and poise, the Palace should be celebrated for the rich life it has lived heading into its final Pistons game tonight.
Sure, it has been home to the Pistons, who launched the stadium with a bang by winning NBA championships in their first two seasons there. Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand performed there. Ron Artest brawled there. Gordie Howe skated his last shift there.
But we can’t forget about the building itself. We shouldn’t say farewell without remembering that, long ago, this structure set a shining example of what a sports arena should be. It’s an architectural triumph that has been copied the world over.
The funny thing is that it never should have turned out this well. Tom Wilson, the former longtime Pistons president and chief executive who was in charge of the whole project more than 30 years ago, conceded that “we had an architect that had never designed a (stadium), a builder who had never built one and a developer who’d probably been to one sporting event in his life. So that mix, you talk about destined to fail, that mix has no chance to pull this thing off.”
So why didn’t it fail?
The short answer: Bill Davidson. The long answer: The Pistons’ late owner was smart enough to know what he didn’t know.
“I think part of his genius was letting other people do it,” Wilson said. “He said, ‘At my age, I don’t know anything about this business. I don’t want to learn it. I’m going to count on you guys to sort of get it done.’ He turned it over to us, and we had a very small team of people.”
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Detroit Pistons' Palace good-bye tonight just seems right.
Zeke and the pirates.
When Davidson bought the Pistons from original owner Fred Zollner in 1974, the team played at 11,000-seat Cobo Arena in downtown Detroit.
“At Cobo, you were coming to the games with the same 5,000 intimate friends that you had every night,” said Mike Abdenour, the Pistons’ director of team operations who started as the team trainer in 1975. “Cobo was unique from the standpoint that it had its own vibe.
“The fashion show always began at the six-minute mark of the first quarter: Who was walking into the building and sitting in those very expensive $7 courtside seats at the time. It was like a place to be seen.”
But not for much longer. Davidson moved the Pistons in 1978 to the gargantuan Pontiac Silverdome, which seated 80,311.
An NBA playoff crowd of 41,732 stands for the national anthem before the Pistons' final game at the Silverdome. (Photo: Steven R Nickerson)
“And then I think Mr. Davidson’s vision was, you know, it’s got to be a little bit better,” Abdenour said. “And to his credit and a lot of guts on his part, moving to the Silverdome, that was a strong move because now you’re in a literally vast expanse. We weren’t necessarily treated like second-class citizens because the Lions were the main focus.
“But it’s amazing. When we started winning, when we started bringing bodies into that place, the feeling of second-class citizenship kind of went away. Not that we were co-equals with the Lions, but we knew what was happening 41 times a year when things were starting to really, really get good.”
And the crowds were getting really, really big. The Pistons drafted Isiah Thomas with the second overall pick in 1981, launching the Bad Boy era as attendance climbed each year.
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But for all the Silverdome’s size, it restricted the Pistons’ business potential. The city of Pontiac owned the building, which meant the Pistons were mere tenants — and not even the main tenants, thanks to the Detroit Lions.
After leaving Ft. Wayne, Ind., in 1957, the Pistons had gone from Olympia to Cobo to the Silverdome and, because of a fateful snowstorm, briefly Joe Louis Arena. And the Pistons still hadn’t owned their own home in Detroit after nearly three decades.
Thomas offered possibly the most politic and artful answer when asked if the Silverdome had ever felt like home.
“Absolutely,” he said with a chuckle. “That was part of the Bad Boys’ mystique as pirates. Every place, we made it our house.”
Detroit's Isiah Thomas gets a friendly well done from his court buddy Joe Dumars as Thomas heads to the bench for a break against Orlando. (Photo: Julian H. Gonzalez/Detroit Free Press)
The perfect storm.
On March 4, 1985, a snowstorm brought down the roof of the Silverdome and gave rise to an idea that would inspire the Palace.
While the roof was being repaired, the Pistons were forced to play their final 15 games of their season at Joe Louis Arena.
During one game, Wilson walked around the Joe’s concourse with John Ciszewski, a sales executive with the Pistons. Wilson asked Ciszewski a question that changed the sports world forever.
“You know what I don’t understand?” Wilson asked. “Why don’t people put suites here as opposed to putting them way up in the rafters? I mean, these people are paying premium dollars. Why don’t you let them see the event? Why don’t we look at it differently?”
There is simply no way to overstate the importance of Wilson’s simple question. What his question led to was, in the world of sports arenas, no less significant than Isaac Newton getting clonked on the head by an apple.
But before the concourse-level suites came, the Pistons needed an arena. The next question Davidson and Wilson had to ask themselves was, “What kind of arena do we want?”
A detailed view of rally towels on the seats before the Game 3 of the Pistons-Cavaliers series Fr /> (Photo: Tim Fulle USA TODAY Sports)
Nothing mediocre.
You have to remember that when the Pistons started thinking about building the Palace, arenas largely were publicly funded money pits. They also were cheaply built, ugly, unimaginative blocks of cement — much like what the Sacramento Kings devised when they built Arco Arena, which they managed to make worse recently by renaming it Sleep Train Arena.
“So we were really looking, when we sat down, at copying what Sacramento had done,” Wilson said. “They built a really kind of low-end arena for $10 million to $15 million. We thought, well, if we spend 20 to 25 (million), we should be able to build a nice place. And that would be fine.
“And Mr. Davidson didn’t want to build anything mediocre. He said, ‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it and let’s figure out how to make it work.’ ”
Davidson and Wilson didn’t have any grand plans to build a cutting-edge stadium. He actually had a rather simple directive.
“What was really important to Bill was that he have a home for his basketball team,” Wilson said. “Like a really, really nice home for his basketball team. And that was the biggest driver for him.”
His basketball team wasn’t disappointed.
“It was our house,” said former forward Rick Mahorn. “It was something that started from ownership. Bill Davidson had the vision of saying, ‘OK, I’m tired of being a renter. I’m going to own something and build a brand.’ ”
Davidson also was smart enough to hire good people, trust them and stay out of their way.
“And the great thing about Bill,” Wilson recalled, “is he said, ‘I don’t know anything about arenas. So you guys design it. The only thing I ask is that you design it in such a way that you’re not coming back and asking me for a check every two months because we couldn’t make it work.’
“So what that led us to do was sort of completely change the industry, because in those days arenas were just money pits.”
The Palace of Auburn Hills during construction. (Photo: Craig Porter)
The millions mount.
The original budget, Wilson said, was $50 million. That still would have put the Palace in line with some of the nicer arenas that were being built at the time, like the Charlotte Coliseum and Miami Arena.
But $50 million was an early estimate that accounted for just 100 suites: 52 on the club level that started at Row 16 and 48 more suites nine rows up. And, as anyone who has ever remodeled their house knows, final costs rarely end up resembling an estimate.
Skybox suites added another $10 million to $15 million. One of the first versions of the Jumbotron was used and soon things seem to get better everywhere in the stadium during planning.
“So we just upgraded everything as we went along,” Wilson said. “Better restaurant, better facility, better everything. And with each change, the price got a little higher, but the building got a little better. And we promised when we kind of came out of the block, this is going to be the finest building that you’ve ever seen. And I don’t think we failed.”
The Palace wound up costing $80 million, Wilson said. Some estimates peg the number closer to $90 million.
From his office which looks out towards the Palace of Auburn Hills where his Detroit Pistons play, owner Bill Dav /> (Photo: Eric Seals, DFP)
The bank of Dav >Davidson, along with fellow investors Bob Sosnick and David Hermelin, chose to privately finance the Palace for two reasons: Control and expedience.
“I think from Bill’s standpoint he was very much the kind of person that he just didn’t want to answer to anybody else,” Wilson said. “If there was a problem, he just wanted to fix it. He didn’t want to go to boards, he didn’t want to report to somebody, he didn’t want a process to take months and months and months. He just wanted to fix things.”
A good example that demonstrated the wisdom in this choice was the problem with having only about 10 entrance and exit lanes when the Palace opened.
“We couldn’t get people in, we couldn’t get people out,” Wilson said. “So the first games we had with the Pistons were a disaster. So we knew we had to change them.”
Instead of meeting with a zoning board, the Pistons approached Auburn Hills mayor Bob Grusnick, who told the Pistons not to worry about obtaining a permit. By the time the team got back from a West Coach trip, more lanes had been added and a permit was soon secured.
Hey, it was the ’80s. Auburn Hills had barely become an incorporated city in 1983. So, yes, this is how things were done.
A vision . on 10 cases of beer.
Having a friendly partner who could fast-track permits wasn’t the only advantage the Pistons had by putting their arena in Auburn Hills.
“You look at how difficult it is in a major city to get things done,” Wilson said. “There’s always restrictions and there are always historical problems and things like that and issues. And we called Bob Grusnick, who was the mayor out there. We’d just done renderings of the building. We hadn’t run this by anybody. Everything was being done in a clandestine manner.
“We said, ‘We’d like to show you what we’re thinking of doing in your city.’
“So they didn’t have any city offices. He said, ‘Come on out to my place of business.’ So we did. And his place of business was a party store. And we went to the back of the party store and on 10 cases of beer we unrolled the renderings of what would become the Palace of Auburn Hills.
“And he sort of said, ‘Geez, I love this. Let’s make it happen. Call my assistant.’ ”
With help from Grusnick and the city, things moved quickly. The Pistons announced their plans to build the arena on June 6, 1986, and broke ground that summer. Two years later, it opened.
“Very little red tape, or at least they made the red tape kind of a soft pink,” Wilson said. “And we were able to move quicker than you were able to move maybe anywhere. Certainly in any major American city it would have taken a lot longer: Years of negotiations and things like that.”
Furniture being assembled at the new club level suites at the Palace in 1988. (Photo: Free Press file photo)
The suite sweet life.
David Richards is a soft-spoken man. He is quiet and careful with his words, which makes it seem like he’s telling you a secret. And in a way he is as he stands over a thick book of original blueprints for the Palace.
Richards is the chief operating officer for Rossetti, the architecture firm in Detroit that designed the Palace. Richards was closely involved with the project and as he flipped through the thick book at Rossetti’s downtown offices, he seemed to recall something about every blueprint. He explained a part of the stands that lift up.
“We call it an elephant door,” he said, “specifically so an elephant and a rider can get in and out of the building during the circus.”
The seats were an important focus of the design.
“We made the individual rows wider than pretty much every other building,” he said. “We wanted to establish a new standard so that there’s a little bit more leg room.
“The use of the padded seats is something that is, once again, a unique sort of thing. Many, many buildings had the plastic-shell seats. A lot of building were still built with benches.”
Richards flipped through the book and found the blueprint he wanted. For all intents and purposes, it may as well be a modern-day Rosetta Stone for stadiums, a key for unlocking the secret, hidden riches every arena contained but that no one realized.
An upper-level suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills near its opening. (Photo: Craig Porter, Detroit Free Press)
“If you want to talk about things that had not been done before,” Richards said, “the Palace did some very, very unique things. I think probably the one that’s most well-known is putting suites in Row 16, and absolutely the first to do that. The first to bring those right down to the sweetest part of the building, and something that’s proven to be very, very popular and something virtually every building now tries to do. We didn’t know you couldn’t do it, and we found a way.”
Wilson’s nascent idea for the lower-level suites in March 1985 eventually became a mandate.
“A year or two later,” Wilson said, “when we decided to go forward, that’s really when we said, ‘Look, we’ve got to be able to put them on the concourse. There’s got to be some way to do that.’ ”
Wilson said Rossetti, to its credit, pushed back initially because the lower suites would create a lot of problems, such as changing sight lines. But Wilson pushed right back. Rossetti had never designed an arena, but neither had Wilson. It was an entirely theoretical argument, until Wilson whipped out a napkin and drew a rough sketch of what he was thinking. Napkin scribbles are one thing. Architectural schematics are another. But it was a start.
Then the breakthrough happened. Wilson and Richards were part of a group that went on a fact-finding tour of newer stadiums. Neither Wilson nor Richards could recall the actual arena where it happened, but they remembered they were all sitting together.
“We’d been on tour and we began to take a break,” Richards said. “We’re sitting at about Row 16. And that’s where somebody said, ‘Why can’t we have a suite right here?’ And I think it may have been (firm founder) Gino Rossetti. It may have been Tom Wilson. It may have been everybody at once saying, ‘If we’re going to put in suites, let’s put them right here. It’s the best place in the building. Why wouldn’t somebody that had that feature, that amenity, want the best?’ ”
Everyone began to see the same picture from the same place.
“Then they went away and came back a week later,” Wilson said, “and said, ‘You know what? I think this can work. If you want to do it, it’s expensive, but I think it can work.’ ”
Rossetti’s idea was to integrate the lower-level suites as seamlessly as it could into the design of the arena in a way that would satisfy form and function.
“We did this with the intent that the seating bowl looks continuous and it felt continuous,” Richards said. “We did it specifically so that we didn’t have a vertical wall of glass reflecting concert sound back and around. We had people seated in front of (the suite) that were absorbing sound, rather than it reflected. So the sound was better in the building.”
The concession to design Rossetti made was to create a step up from the suites to the actual seats. In modern design, concourse suites jut out conspicuously. But the Palace’s club-level suites are set back and tucked underneath the upper-level seats to retain the aesthetic of a bowl and only the seats protrude into the arena.
“It really makes it feel like a unified experience,” Richards said, “like everyone’s there together sharing that experience.”
When it was done, the Palace had 52 lower-level suites that started at Row 16. It had 48 more suites that started at Row 25. And it had another 80 skybox suites. Wilson went to each level of the suites and took a look. The vision was complete and it was astounding, even to the man who first saw it. He knew that he and Davidson and Rossetti and the whole team had built more than great new suites. They had created a new world.
“You just knew the world was going to change when you saw this and when you sat in them and you compared them,” Wilson said. “You go to the 16 rows. Then you go to the (25th row suites). The (25th row) looks pretty good. But then you go to the top and you realize that’s where the world was and now this is the where the world is going.
“It was just like you just bought a suite for the best seat in the house, literally the best seat in the house. I don’t think there was any question the arena world would never be the same. And that’s proven to be the case.”
Dav /> (Photo: Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press)
Tough sell.
Of course, the lower-level suites would have meant nothing if the Pistons couldn’t sell them. So, how do you sell something no one has ever seen or heard of before?
“All the family shows signed 10-year deals to play downtown,” Wilson said. “So the ice shows, the circuses all stayed downtown. So you’re selling suites to what? You’re selling it to a dream or a hope or a vision — and the Pistons. And that’s all you had.”
Not quite. The Palace also had Wilson, with his determination, his silver-tongued salesman’s pitch, and his intestinal fortitude.
“We made a list of 40 or 50 people that would be good prospects for suites and probably when the dust settled five of them bought,” he said. “So we were out scrambling trying to sell a new idea and a new concept to a whole new audience that had never had suites before or had entertained the way we were telling them they could entertain.”
And that was the good news.
“Remember, we were building this when interest rates were 17-18%, so it was costing a fortune,” Wilson said. “In addition to being a crazy idea, we were also doing it at the worst conceivable time economically in the country. It was really going against the wind.”
When Wilson and his sales team got the first domino to fall, the rest soon followed.
“There were automotive coatings and there were seven companies that made them,” Wilson said. “And we got turned down by six of them. We were calling everybody.
“We went to, I think it was Akzo at the time. They were the last one and they agreed to buy. So we went back to the top of the list. You call up DuPont and you say, ‘Would you be interested in looking at a suite?’
"‘No. We already said no.’
"‘Well, let me tell you what Akzo’s doing with theirs.’
"‘Oh, Akzo’s got one?’"
And so it went. Once they had Akzo, they had DuPont. Once they had Akzo and DuPont, they had everyone.
“Eventually all seven or eight of them bought; different levels, different prices and everything like that,” Wilson said. “But they couldn’t let somebody get a leg up.”
The suites were doing their job and generating the influx of money the Palace needed to cover it debt and ensure financial success.
“In our case,” Wilson said, “we had 52 suites down there paying premium prices, in those days. Just the dollars that were generated from that alone could cover most of your debt service, or a lot of your debt service.”
The Palace of Auburn Hills sign near the time it opened. (Photo: Free Press file photo)

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