What Comes After The Garden?

But it wasn’t any of those things that made me consider the journey out to New Jersey. Instead, I was much more interested in visiting the indoor, NHL-sized ice rink located in the middle of the mall. In September 2022, the Metropolitan Riveters of the Premier Hockey Federation, a professional women’s hockey league, announced that their home ice for the season was going to be the rink at the American Dream. They’d allegedly be able to have up to 2,000 spectators—with the caveat that there were no built-in seats at the mall’s rink, so the stands would need to be set up before every game. Controversially, then-Riveters president Digit Murphy made a comment about how players could promote the game by doing fashion shows on the ice. I wanted to see a professional women’s hockey game in-person, and to root for the Riveters, but I also couldn’t get over the indignity of these top-tier women’s players calling a mega mall’s rink their home base. It was as if they were one of the many novel spectacles at American Dream, somewhere between the Nickelodeon theme park and the Angry Birds mini golf. As one Seattle Torrent fan, Katrina L., told me this past weekend, it felt like the last few professional women’s hockey leagues had been “really elaborate Ponzi schemes.”