How many memories can fit into the Frank Erwin Center?
Graduations, Paul McCartney, and a crumbling monument to the people we once were.
For an intangible object, memories sure take up a lot of space.
Maybe even an arena’s worth.
Earlier this week, I was driving by the Frank Erwin Center, the unmistakable concert and sports arena in downtown Austin that opened in 1977 and is being demolished to make way for two new hospitals.
Even when I was a kid visiting Austin, I knew we’d arrived when I finally saw “The Drum” right next to Interstate 35.
I don’t remember my first visit to the Erwin Center, but I can tell you about my most memorable experience there.
It was May of 2013, when Paul McCartney was on tour. It was right around the time my ex-husband, Ian, and I were celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary. It was our last year together, and this night out to see Sir Paul feels like our last happy memory together as a couple.
A year later, we’d be in the throes of divorce, one that had been coming since the day we met, but I’d learned to set aside my relationship worries so I could soak up these few hours listening to THE Paul McCartney.
Ian and I didn’t fight that night. I’m sure we both cried during “Blackbird” and laughed when Paul made a joke about a love song he’d written for his wife. No, not that one. The new one. “Go, Nancy,” he deadpanned.
Ian encouraged me to buy a knock off T-shirt outside that I’m so glad I still have because it reminds me that we did have some good times together. That you can love someone more when you divorce them than when you’re married to them. That you can move on with your life and still cherish the person you were when you were making decisions you wouldn’t make again.
The complexity of my feelings about that one night could fill up the whole Erwin Center. And when I posted a video on Instagram of the sides crumbling down, a moment that Austinites have been anticipating since the announcement of the demolition more than five years ago, I found out that you all have big feelings about this place, too.
“This is heartbreaking. We had been going to concerts there since the early 80s. That big flan 🍮 was very special to us and we will miss it forever,” an Instagram friend said in a comment. Another reminisced: “My first memory was Achtung Baby, when my friend drove down from Waco for the night and then surprised me with tickets for U2 when we arrived. Walked straight in.”
I wasn’t the only person with fond Paul McCartney memories from that night almost 11 years ago. “It was a simpler time,” one online friend said.
It’s surreal to think about the early 2010s as a simpler time, but it was.
Talk about simpler times: A few folks recalled when UT student registration happened in the Erwin Center, “on paper, in lines.” A couple of others worked there for a stint during school, getting backstage access to stories they’d be telling for the rest of their lives about that one time they walked that one celebrity to the green room.
Concerts, especially those big-name ones in venues like this, are where we experience that sense of “growing up” in real time. We remember how we felt as much as what we heard and what we saw while we were there.
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A few dozen people shared their most memorable concerts and events where I imagine something like this happened for them — New Kids on the Block in 1990, Dolly Parton in 2016, Lady Gaga in 2012, Sesame Street Live in 1985, the Harlem Globetrotters in 1979, the 1986 Longhorn women’s basketball national championship celebration.
One friend remembers her parents allowing her and a friend to drive to Austin from Corpus Christi in 1995 to see Boyz II Men: “I was a junior in high school, and it was my first big concert, my first road trip, my first overnight without parents. I felt SO GROWN UP.”
“Watching U2 right after Sept 11th and seeing the names sprawled across the arena. It was so moving,” one friend said on Facebook.
John Denver is recorded as having the biggest crowd ever at the Erwin Center — nearly 17,900 people — but if you were to ask people what was the single most significant event to happen there, a large number would say their own high school or college graduation.
The Frank Erwin Center is where tens of thousands of students, not just from UT, but from colleges and high schools across Central Texas, became graduates of their schools in front of an audience of their family and friends.
It’s one of the few coming-of-age rituals we still celebrate communally.
Just like going to concerts.
Most of our lives happen at home, away from big crowds, but arenas are where we gather, en masse, with others who we have at least one thing in common with: whatever had brought us to that venue.
A love of the Eagles, a grandkid graduating from ACC, a sister who buys tickets to your favorite 80s bands.
Or wrestling.
One of the last events I went to in the Erwin Center was Monday Night RAW, the WWE show that takes place at arenas like this one every Monday night for a TV audience of millions. I was covering it for the paper with another WWE-loving colleague. Wrestling was a remnant of a past boyfriend who had been hard to shake. I’d also just met the man who would become my husband.
Those are the complex feelings that a physical place like the city’s major concert and sports arena can bring up. And now, as that tan facade peels away and, soon, the steel bones of the building come down, we will watch that space transform, yet again, just like we do.
After the debris is cleared, the hospitals that are built on that land will save and improve the lives of millions of people over the years.
And we’ll continue to make music, sports and graduation memories in the nearby Moody Center and talk about that one moment in the Erwin Center that we can’t forget, that helped shape who we are.
What great memories you made! I was surprised to learn about Avery‘s big screen experience, and Carlee’s graduation. Time moves on… It reminds me of the saying, on the quilt that you made me: the only constant in life is change! Keep up the good work, Addie.
It’s great that you have so many memories of this place. I love learning about Avery being on the big screen! Carlee graduated from there. I’m now so many people are reacting with their memories too. Time moves on, and it reminds me of my quilt that you made me: the only constant in life is change!