Merle Hay Mall unveils planned hockey arena tenants. Who has signed up?
Addison Lathers- Merle Hay Mall's planned $30 million arena will be home to Drake University's hockey team and the Iowa Demon Hawks soccer team.
- The arena will seat 3,500 people and also will be able to host medium-sized music and performance acts.
- In addition, the project will include housing developments, a hotel, and unspecified improvements to the mall and infrastructure.
- The mall's plan to build an arena, first announced in 2020, originally involved the Des Moines Buccaneers hockey team, but the team backed out in 2024.
- The Des Moines City Council is expected to vote Monday on whether to support the mall's application for a share of $26.5 million in state funding for the project.
Merle Hay Mall's planned arena will become home to Drake University's hockey team when it opens, an application for state aid for the project reveals.
The Des Moines City Council is slated to vote Monday to support an amendment to Merle Hay's final application for a share of $26.5 million in Iowa Reinvestment District Program revenues for the project. The mall straddles the border of Des Moines and Urbandale and also is obtaining that city's support for the project.
The application says that joining Drake as arena tenants would be the Iowa Demon Hawks professional indoor soccer team and the Central Iowa Figure Skaters. Other, unnamed tenants also will be able to use an attached gym that Mall CEO Liz Holland has previously said would be outfitted for volleyball.
In addition to the 3,500-seat multiuse arena — large enough "to accommodate medium-sized music and performance acts," the application says — the plan calls for up to two housing developments, one of them a seniors apartment complex conversion of the mall's six-story office tower, and a hotel.
It also mentions unspecified improvements to the mall and infrastructure.
Most of the new construction will be located in Urbandale.
Arena plan has been a nearly five-year saga
The plan for the arena has been in the works since late 2020, when the mall unveiled a proposal to sells its former Younkers, vacated in 2018, to the Des Moines Buccaneers, a junior semipro hockey teams that plays in an aging arena further west in Urbandale. The Bucs intended to convert the empty department store into their new home, and even broke ground for the project.
The mall, for its part, built a new home for its adjacent Kohl's store, moving it to the site of a former Sears store on the east side of its property to clear the way for a planned hotel.
But the Bucs backed out of the plan last July and have now made the MidAmerican Energy Co. RecPlex in West Des Moines their temporary and perhaps permanent home after experiencing mechanical problems at their 55-year-old arena.
Holland, however, remained committed to the project as part of an ongoing effort to transform the retail center, which her grandfather built in 1959, by adding entertainment and activities that include a pickleball complex now occupying part of the old Kohl's building.
Holland said then that she was in talks with nearly a dozen potential tenants for the arena. She could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Ironically, one of the tenants the application says the mall has landed, the Demon Hawks, are currently tenants of the Buccaneers arena.
Des Moines' support, along with Urbandale's, is prerequisite to the mall getting at least a portion of the Iowa Reinvestment Fund financing from the state for the revamped plan. Holland has said she wants to start construction this year.
(This story was updated because an earlier version included an inaccuracy.)
Addison Lathers covers growth and development for the Des Moines metro. Reach her at 608-931-1761 or alathers@registermedia.com, and follow her on X at @addisonlathers.