It's Not the XL Center Anymore: A Year Inside PeoplesBank Arena

Say it out loud and it still catches in the throat: PeoplesBank Arena. Hartford's downtown arena — the barn on Trumbull Street that generations of us grew up calling the Civic Center, then the XL Center — was formally rechristened in a 2025 ceremony after PeoplesBank picked up the naming rights, with the governor on hand to make it official.

Names on arenas are, of course, a corporate ritual, and Hartford has done this dance before. But the renaming lands differently for a room that has spent a decade as a symbol of the city's stalled ambitions — perpetually studied for renovation, perpetually a line item in state budget fights, and still, stubbornly, the only true arena between Boston and New York on the I-91 corridor. A fresh sponsor's name on the marquee is at minimum a bet that the building has a future.

For live music, that future is the interesting part. The arena occupies the awkward, essential middle of the market: too big for a night at The Webster, too indoor and year-round for the Xfinity amphitheater's summer-only lawn. When a touring package is the size that fills a hockey rink, this is Hartford's only room that can hold it — which means the difference between the city getting a given arena tour and losing it to Mohegan Sun or Boston often comes down to whether this building can land the date.

That is the quiet stakes of a naming-rights deal most people scrolled past. Every year the arena stays viable is a year Hartford keeps a seat at the table for the tours that skip smaller markets entirely. Lose the building and you don't just lose a name — you lose the city's claim on an entire tier of live music.

So learn the new name, grumble about it, and then hope it sticks around long enough to get worn-in. In a state that spends a lot of energy debating whether its capital deserves nice things, an arena with a future is not nothing.

Sources: XL Center Officially Renamed PeoplesBank Arena (CT News Junkie); Connecticut's XL Center Renamed PeoplesBank Arena (Billboard); XL Center no more (Connecticut Public)