Northlands Coliseum must go to allow the area to be reborn

It’s increasingly clear where we’re headed with Northlands Coliseum: to the demolition of the old hockey palace and the building of a fourplex of community arenas on the same site.

For that area to be reborn, the old arena must die.

The Coliseum is located on one of Edmonton’s most inhospitable pieces of land. It’s surrounded by major traffic arteries: Wayne Gretzky Drive, 118 Avenue and the north leg of the LRT. This makes it a relatively easy place to get to, but not such an attractive place to be.

It’s hard to imagine it will be any more popular for condominium and housing development, which is one of the options that has been mused about, than has been the extremely slow-moving Station Pointe development at Belvedere LRT station just up the tracks.

Sporting history was made at the Coliseum. It was our own theatre of hockey dreams, but because of the inaccessibility of the arena’s design, its isolated location and the inwardness of the Northlands organization, the arena added little to the neighbourhood.

The old arena is a perfect example of 1970s suburban planning gone wrong. It’s a mess of forbidding concrete walls, closed off from surrounding streets, engulfed by highways and parking lots — great for cars, terrible for people.

The Coliseum was built to last, but the cost of gutting it and repurposing it by putting in four ice surfaces is almost certainly going to be too much.

Mayor Don Iveson summed up the basic structural problem succinctly in Tuesday’s debate on the proposal: “Part of the issue is to try to fit four rectangular pegs into one round hole.”

The dollar amounts aren’t yet entirely clear for the various options, but it sounds like building a new fourplex will be significantly cheaper than repurposing. We can also build a complex that is far more permeable, with windows looking in and out, with public spaces inside and out, so it’s welcoming, not walled off.

We have to be very careful about us talking about (reprioritizing) something and trying to find massive amounts of money.

If the

Coliseum sits vacant, it will represent a major kick in the shins to the aspirations of the 118 Avenue revitalization. That’s not an acceptable option, Coun. Tony Caterina argued.

“My last comment here is the site cannot go dark.”

The city is already underserved when it comes to arenas. Ice is difficult to find and expensive to rent. But the city has identified seven arenas that are old, cramped and in need of tens of millions in renovations.

Four of them — Russ Barnes, Coronation, Westwood and Oliver — are also relatively close to Northlands. It would serve the community well enough to shut down those four and open up a fourplex at the Northlands site, especially because fourplexes are more economical to build and to operate, and the city might otherwise have to purchase land to build such a huge complex.

“The advantage to the idea is predominantly our ability to close a number of arenas that have long outlived their lifespans and we’re on the cusp of needing to do something about,” city manager Linda Cochrane said.

As for the heritage value of the Coliseum, why not use the art dollars allotted to the new project to have part of the old structure retained as an urban ruin?

The idea of using old industrial sites and structures as sculptural elements in new developments and parks has taken off in other places. Why not leave a large section of rugged outer wall, or perhaps some reconfigured steel beams from the ceiling, as a monument to the arena’s glorious past?

Of course, a huge issue is the lack of $120 million-plus in funding for such a new structure.

Some councillors worry that a new Coliseum fourplex will jump the queue ahead of other planned sports and cultural facilities, such as the $100-million Coronation velodrome and the $215-million Lewis Farms rec centre, already slotted for the 2019-22 budget.

As Coun. Bryan Anderson said: “Now we get this opportunistic appearance of, ‘Gosh, we got to do something with Northlands.’ ... I think we have to be very careful about us talking about (reprioritizing) something and trying to find massive amounts of money that would almost preclude spending capital dollars on things that have been in the works for a decade.”

It’s a fair point. And, no doubt, the Lewis Farms rec centre is a must-build.

That said, given what has been lost at Northlands and given the popularity of hockey, the demand for more ice, and the urgent need of the community in that particular area for a boost, some amount of queue-jumping for the Northlands fourplex is a reasonable proposition.