Revisiting hockey’s first arena
New book tells the story of the Montreal building that was more than a mere rink
In Architecture on Ice: A History of the Hock
ey Arena, Howard Shubert examines the design and origins and impact of the rinks, arenas, forums, gardens and centres he calls North America’s “most important overlooked cultural buildings.”
The first purpose-built hockey arena in the world was Montreal’s Westmount Arena, which opened in 1898. An article appearing in the French-language Montreal newspaper La Patrie, soliciting investment prior to the building’s completion, explained why it was needed. “For many years now the popularity of hockey, Canada’s pre-eminent winter sport, has increased, so much that the rinks are too small for the crowds who attend the games.”
The Westmount Arena was also purpose-built from an economic standpoint. A group of Montreal businessmen led by Ed Sheppard, president of the MAAA (Montreal Amateur Athletic Association) joined to form the Montreal Arena Company specifically in order to profit from the growing interest in amateur hockey by constructing an arena that would serve as a venue for such games.
Its very name distinguished it from all predecessors. It is the first “arena.” Up to this date, buildings constructed for curling or skating were named rinks, just like those outdoors, and in either case their primary function was to serve their users. What distinguished the Westmount Arena from all other ice rinks in the city, and in the world, was that it provided for spectators and did so as a defining aspect of its design.
In 1900, two years after the Westmount Arena opened, there were 10 skating rinks in Montreal (most of them enclosed), yet newspaper accounts and advertisements for games or events held there simply refer to it as the “Arena,” no further distinction being required.
When one of these 10 rinks, the Montagnard, expanded in 1903, increasing its seating capacity from 1,200 to 5,000, it also announced a change in name, from “Rink” to “Stadium.” The newspaper article in which this change was described confirms that the Westmount Arena had established the benchmark for all when it noted that the new stadium was now “similar to the Arena in every respect, it will comfortably hold 5,000 seated spectators who will be able to follow the action of all the games that will be played there this year unimpeded by any obstacles.”
All subsequent buildings on this model will be named arenas. The building itself was unremarkable in appearance. A twostorey brick-faced block of wood construction with steel trusses arching over the ice surface enclosed the pitch-roofed auditorium. The principal facade featured three sets of round-arched entrances with the word “Arena” over the central doors. The interior consisted of a continuous graded amphitheatre rising in an uninterrupted span from the ground to the second-floor level.
It could accommodate between 6,000 and 7,000 spectators for hockey around a natural-ice surface measuring 200x85 feet. Four-foot-high boards separated the ice from the amphitheatre, segregating spectator and player and once and for all distinguishing arena hockey from the outdoor game.
Twenty-five years earlier, when the first organized hockey game had been played at the Victoria Skating Rink, spectators huddled around the ice surface.
This led to an episode described the following day in the Montreal Daily Witness: “Owing to some boys skating about during the play, an unfortunate disagreement arose; one little boy was struck across the head, and the man who did so was afterwards called to account, a regular fight taking place in which a bench was broken and other damage caused.”
Anyone who has skated at a local outdoor rink has probably encountered a similar scenario, with skaters and hockey players dodging one another as they engage in their separate activities on a shared surface.
While mischief on the part of the boys who interrupted the hockey match in 1875 cannot be ruled out, it is equally possible that they were simply acting as they would have had the game been played at their local pond.
At the skating pond the roles of skater and spectator were interchangeable, someone in conversation at rink’s edge might at any moment skip onto the ice to take a turn and various games might all the while be underway.
But at the arena the roles of spectator and participant became frozen. Architecture definitively established the spectators’ realm, in tiered seats surrounding the ice surface, and that of the players, upon the ice, with the boards as the unbreachable border between them.