A $1-billion home for the New York Islanders ice hockey team on Long Island is skating hard toward completion in time for the next National Hockey League season in December. The journey for the 19,000-seat UBS Arena, which broke ground in September 2019, was on a fast track when the project team faced a major obstacle—a nearly 50-day work stoppage from late March to late May last year under a COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
The ability to recover from that setback—and stay on schedule—has become a defining feature of the project, with the team adjusting design, staging, logistics and staffing elements in response to the pandemic as work advances on the 700,000-sq-ft structure at Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y., in Nassau County, near the New York City borough of Queens.