Community cathedrals
Published Saturday December 20th, 2008
The humble local hockey rink has unified Canadians for more than a century. In New Brunswick, one architectural firm is making its name designing plush, efficient arenas for the next hundred years, without neglecting the endearing nuances that made the old barns so charming. They are the new temples, writes Marty Klinkenberg
In its heyday, the York Arena was so crowded, people stood on step-ladders to watch the Fredericton Capitals face-off against the Montreal Canadiens, Moncton Hawks, Saint John Beavers and Charlottetown Royals. Enterprising fans set planks across stairs to create more seats, and daredevils crawled out onto beams over the ice.
It was so frigid inside the rink on the north side of Fredericton that players wore earmuffs, and spectators used more traditional remedies to brace against the cold. Clean-up crews filled barrels with empty rum and whiskey bottles after games.
In those days, people would rush from work to the York Arena and stand in lengthy lines to get tickets for the evening's contest. Teenagers arrived early and secured spots along the boards - and then auctioned them off to the highest bidder.
"In its time, this place was the Holy Grail,'' says Royce van Horne, who has managed rinks in Fredericton for 30 years. "It was the place to be."
With the exception perhaps of churches, hockey rinks are the most recognizable buildings in Canada. They dot the landscape from Goose Bay to Grande Prairie and beyond in all directions, and serve as the centre of countless communities.
A part of our social fabric for almost as long as Canada has been a country, they are the thread that unifies us, a gathering place for the young and old and rich and poor, and the stage upon which are launched incalculable dreams.
Thousands upon thousands of kids drag hockey bags as big as themselves into frosty bowls from coast to coast every day, dress in cramped, musty quarters, and hit the ice with visions of Bobby Orr and Sidney Crosby.
"In Canada, hockey rinks are our bread and butter,'' says Bob Mabie of Fredericton, who played for the Capitals in the 1950s and 1960s and says there is hardly a rink in Atlantic Canada that he hasn't been in. "If you are Canadian and you don't play hockey, there is almost something wrong with you."
A retired coach and recreation director, Mabie is seated in an office that overlooks the surface at the York Arena. He is in his 70s, but still comes to the rink regularly, to kibitz with his pal van Horne, and revisit history.
One of the oldest rinks in New Brunswick, the York was built in 1947 and was heated by a furnace that burned sawdust produced by a mill next door. For eight years, it was the city's only indoor rink, and while aging, still remains beloved today.
It is used almost exclusively for youth hockey, but photographs and souvenirs on display in the lobby remind of its glorious past.
Boom Boom Geoffrion once brought his thundering slap shot to the York Arena with a barnstorming bunch of Canadiens, and the New York Rangers, Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks came for exhibitions, too. Sonja Henning and Barbara Ann Scott skated there, Grand Prix wrestlers entertained with sleeper holds, and evangelist Charles Templeton tried to save wayward souls.
"There is an awful lot of history here,'' says Mabie, who played junior hockey in Quebec in 1954-55 with Willie O'Ree. "They packed this place more than once."
Long before he shattered the NHL's colour barrier in 1958, O'Ree was a hockey-crazy kid who bedded down in the York Arena so he could be on the ice first thing the next morning.
"It was the first indoor rink I ever played in, and it was a fantastic building,'' says O'Ree, 73, and a member of the NHL Hall of Fame. "A lot of good hockey was played there."
A picture of O'Ree in his Bruins sweater hangs in the lobby, along with photos of Danny Grant and the late Buster Harvey, fellow York rink rats who went on to distinguished NHL careers.
O'Ree returned last month for a Capitals' reunion at the York Arena, and studied the photographs out front, and the score sheets and faded newspaper clippings from his youth, and wiped away tears.
"When I walked in there, it was like I walked back through time,'' says O'Ree, who lives in San Diego and works as a community relations officer for the NHL. "It brought back so many wonderful memories."
During the same trip to Fredericton, O'Ree brought the Stanley Cup to an elementary school and to the gleaming $16-million arena on the north side of town that carries his name. Opened last year, Willie O'Ree Place is the most beautiful new rink in the province, with two regulation-sized surfaces, spacious and comfortable dressing rooms, a walking track, fitness centre and flat-screen TVs.
There are rumblings that the York Arena will be closed when a new rink, named after Grant and Harvey and designed by the same architects who laid out Willie O'Ree Place, is built across town.
"I realize that you eventually have to say goodbye to the past, but it would be nice if the York Arena wasn't torn down,'' Mabie says. "The history in that place is unbelievable."
Adds van Horne: "In some places, you tear down a rink like this, and it's like ripping the backbone out of a community."
Flurries are flying as Monica Adair climbs icy concrete steps inside the E. & P. Sénéchal Centre, the hockey arena under construction in Grand Falls, a friendly little city of 5,800 in the heart of the potato belt in northwestern New Brunswick.
A dream of the community for nearly a decade, the rink is expected to open next fall, and become a showpiece for the region. The woman who designed it, Adair hopes it will help to transform Grand Falls, and change the way people perceive hockey arenas.
"We are trying to push the boundaries,'' says Adair, 31, an architect with Murdock & Boyd in Saint John. "There is no reason we can't build one of the best buildings in New Brunswick. There is a unique opportunity here.
"These are the buildings that will make a difference 50 years from now. They are the new cathedrals, the temples of today."
A native of Saint John, Adair received her architectural degree from the University of Toronto, where she met her husband, Stephen Kopp, who also works for Murdock & Boyd and is currently designing the Q-Plex, a long-awaited arena that will likely open in 2010 in the Saint John suburb of Quispamsis. The firm is also working on plans for a rink in Rothesay and on the Grant Harvey Centre, and also did the drawings for Willie O'Ree Place.
On a grey, blustery day with snow and ice pellets falling, Adair inspects the construction site in Grand Falls where the Sénéchal Centre is slowly taking shape. She is joined on the trip by Kopp and Malcolm Boyd, a partner in the firm, and a man who previously helped design the Palladium in Ottawa, the arena built for the NHL Senators.
Steelworkers look like tightrope walkers as they climb across the slippery skeleton that will eventually support the roof and walls. Workers lean over the sides of cherry pickers, tradesmen sand and weld, sending sparks into the air. Cranes move heavy materials, trucks in reverse sound alarms.
"This looks like a bunch of concrete to most people, but it's exciting to me,'' Adair says. "Every single visit up here, it gets more exciting.
"This is my baby. I know I'll have other babies, but this is my first."
A soccer player turned hockey player in high school, Adair jokes that she spent enough time in rinks to have the smell ingrained in her memory. A defenceman, she helped the Saint John High Greyhounds win a conference championship her senior year, even if her skills were rudimentary.
"I showed up to tryouts with hand-me-down peewee shoulder pads and giant hockey pants and there was no stopping me - primarily because I wasn't very good at stopping in general,'' she says.
Adair joined Murdock & Boyd two years ago and designed a military academy in Kuwait and an airport in China before taking on the Sénéchal Centre project a little more than a year ago. The building, which will seat 1,130, will replace an aging rink downtown that has peeling paint and squirrels living in its rafters.
Named after local business pioneers Emile and Philomène Sénéchal, the new arena will include a walking track and fitness centre that overlook a regulation-sized ice surface, and viewing decks in the corners. The floors, seats and dressing rooms will be warmed by recovering heat generated by the building's refrigeration unit, the seats will be painted to resemble hockey socks, and the players will file onto the ice through brightly coloured passageways.
The lobby will have sliding glass doors and ceramic tile, and feature an extravagant main stairway suspended from the ceiling. The staircase will lead to an upper level with a conference room and panoramic views of the city, and the walking track will sit atop a cantilever that juts outside part of the arena. The façade will be glass, and will be backlit to give passersby the illusion of what is happening inside.
Construction is being handled by Marco Maritimes, the same company that built Willie O'Ree Place.
"This has been a long time coming,'' Paul Castonguay, the head of the building committee in Grand Falls, says as he surveys the construction. "The process took us through three prime ministers, two premiers, three different mayors and two popes."
Castonguay says the city started raising money eight years ago, and expected that an arena with two ice surfaces would cost about $8 million. The current estimate for the Sénéchal Centre, which is being built to accommodate a second surface, is $15 million.
"What makes things complicated is that you think you have everyone on side, and then the government changes or your Member of Parliament changes, and you have to start all over again,'' Castonguay, an orthodontist with offices in three cities in northern new Brunswick, says. "But I am so thrilled to see it going up now.
"People will be jealous of Grand Falls. We have been out of the loop for a long time, but now it is our turn."
Federal, provincial and municipal governments contributed to the project, but it was secured with a $1.5-million donation from Rene Sénéchal, a former resident of Grand Falls who now lives near Montreal. Sénéchal made the donation on behalf of his family, which has operated a potato bag manufacturing plant in Grand Falls since 1950.
"My brother wanted to do something for the community, and at the same time, perpetuate our parents' name,'' says Jean-Eudes Sénéchal, who heads up Emile Sénéchal Et Fils Ltee. The firm makes potato bags for customers all over Canada and the United States, including Green Giant and McCain Foods. "By giving the money, my brother hoped to motivate other people to give as well, and what we have seen is a tremendous community effort.
"We are just a small community and can't dream like a big city, but you can still accomplish things. You don't have to play second violin all your life."
Castonguay, Jean-Eudes Sénéchal and other volunteers visited rinks all over the Maritimes and Quebec to help them decide what type of facility to build. In the end, they opted for a multi-purpose complex.
"It is important to note that this is going to be a building that can serve the community 12 months a year and be available for activities other than hockey,'' Sénéchal says. "We didn't have a nice, convenient place to assemble large groups for other things, and realized we could do a lot more business with the right type of building.
"We've talked to people with newer arenas in other places, and they tell us that hardly a week goes by that there isn't an event. But if you don't have the infrastructure, your hands are tied."
Sénéchal stops several times a week at the rink site and takes pictures, and sends them to his brother.
"It is just starting to dawn on us how nice it will be to have this in our community,'' he says. "It is going to be a hell of a nice place. Our dad would be very proud."
Adair makes the four-hour drive from Saint John to Grand Falls regularly to keep an eye on the progress at the rink, the first she has designed.
"Every kid that comes in here is going to imagine they are playing in the Stanley Cup, so we are paying a lot of attention to details,'' she says. "We wanted to represent the ceremony, the ritual that takes place, as part of the design, and we wanted to create moments for the public that are beyond box buildings.
"It is about feats of engineering as much as it is feats of sport. I don't know why anybody would build a $10 million dinosaur."
There are no architectural photos on display at Murdock & Boyd, the Saint John company that is carving a market niche by designing some of the country's brightest, most modern and energy-efficient rinks. There is a hockey table game for employees in one corner, and a Pittsburgh Penguins sweater autographed by Sidney Crosby on one wall.
The partners in the firm, Greg Murdock and Malcolm Boyd, met while attending the Technical University of Nova Scotia, did their thesis together in 1982 on European athletic facilities, and play hockey two mornings a week with three of their employees.
Almost everyone at the firm has a puck pedigree, from Adair and Kopp, who grew up playing shinny in Manitoba, to twins Kirk and Kyle Russell, who played minor hockey in Trenton, Ont., and attended a summer camp in 1998 hosted by Penguins winger Matt Cooke.
As a kid, Brad Goguen sawed hardwood logs an inch in diameter to make his own pucks, Nicole Maillet played left wing at Saint John High, and Jim Buckley played peewee, midget, and bantam, and in men's recreational leagues and tournaments throughout the Maritimes and Maine. Margot Levitt considers herself a devoted hockey mom, and Michael Colpitts is the office hockey pool shark.
"I played one season as a kid, but spent more time looking at the roof trusses than I did chasing the puck,'' Colpitts, an intern architect, says.
All of the staff members have company hockey sweaters, and all pitch in on rink projects.
"This is a marriage made in heaven for a hockey-passionate firm to do all these arenas,'' says Boyd, who began skating at five, played organized hockey at 10 and is still playing 41 years later. "For me, combining designing hockey rinks with my passion, what better job could I have?"
Boyd played schoolboy hockey in Saint John in 1967 under coach Tom Higgins, who later became the city's mayor, and hasn't taken a year off since. He has played minor hockey, seven years of intramurals, 12 years of Gents League and 15 years on weekday mornings, the last 10 before work with the company team, the Harbour Station Masters, in Saint John.
"Over the years, my passions have changed, but hockey has always been a constant,'' says Boyd, a distance runner who ran in the Boston Marathon for the first time at age 48. "At 51, I can still compete with our company's 23-year-olds, and that makes me feel good. If I can continue to play into my 70s, I will."
Boyd was working in Ottawa when he contributed to the Palladium's design, and later worked on the Steve Yzerman Arena in neighbouring Nepean. After returning to New Brunswick and forming a partnership with Murdock, he submitted a design proposal for Willie O'Ree Place, and that eye-catching facility has invited more business.
But Boyd almost sees his work as a patriotic mission.
"Hockey is such a big part of the Canadian fabric, that rinks are almost like the town halls,'' he says. "When a rink is under construction, the attention the place gets is amazing. Some people drive by two and three times a day."
In Ottawa, Boyd and his architectural team skated at the Palladium before the Senators got their first opportunity. He hopes the same thing happens in Grand Falls.
"We can't wait for this to open,'' Boyd says as he surveys the site, ice pelting the ground around him. "It's quite a thrill to play hockey in something you have designed."
Boyd grins as he watches Adair, who can barely contain her excitement as she tours the future rink, which is just beyond a hill from Hamlin, Maine.
"I understand how she feels,'' Boyd says. "This one is going to win an award."
Stephen Kopp and Monica Adair became a couple in university, and then applied for the same position at a firm in Manhattan. Their resumes were so impressive that both were hired, and worked in a skyscraper on Wall Street where the financier J.P. Morgan once lived in a penthouse suite. Eventually, they ended up packing a U-Haul, heading back north, and accepting positions at Murdock & Boyd.
"When we interviewed, I remember that Malcolm asked us if we played hockey,'' says Kopp, who, like his wife, is 31. "At the time, I actually thought it was weird for an interview question. Now, I obviously don't."
Kopp grew up playing hockey outdoors on the prairies, and while working at an architectural firm in Winnipeg helped design the arena that is home to the American Hockey League's Manitoba Moose.
Now he is designing the Q-Plex, a $22-million recreation centre in Quispamsis that is expected to go to tender in March and open in the fall of 2010. The complex, which will include a regulation-sized hockey rink and an outdoor swimming pool with waterslides, will be built on land adjacent to existing walking trails, bike paths, tennis courts and soccer fields.
"We are quite excited about this project,'' Kopp says. "We are not just trying to make a good building, we want to make one of the best in New Brunswick. Before, you built rinks for 50 years. Now we want to build them for 50 to 100 years."
The arena will include a hockey rink, walking track, space to house the local YM/YWCA, and a conference room. The front will overlook the ice surface, the back looks down onto a park and the pool.
Rain water will be collected to flush toilets, and water from the pool will be used to sprinkle the grass. Exhaust generated by the rink's cooling system will be used to warm the seats, dressing rooms, lobby, administrative offices and the YM/YWCA, and also to heat the showers, pool and water used by the Zamboni. In addition, coils buried in the ground will melt snow and ice near the entrance.
The front and sides of the building will be painted silver, gray and black, and incorporate black glass. The rear will be painted blue in the area closest to the pool, and green nearest the park.
"This isn't an office environment where you have to play by certain rules,'' Kopp says during a visit to the 80-acre site where the complex will be built off Vincent Road. The only hint now is a sign beside the road. "We are building a hockey arena, so the building can be fun.
"You can't forget that it doesn't have to be serious, like a hospital. With a hockey rink, you can be playful."
The rink that Kopp is nearly finished designing for Quispamsis, and the one that Adair designed for Grand Falls, look little if anything like most of the older buildings that are in existence in New Brunswick today.
A great many were built as part of centennial celebrations in 1967, or within a few years of that. Almost all are box-like, utilitarian structures that look like they came from the same cookie-cutter: windowless, made of corrugated metal, with small and smelly dressing rooms, and frightfully cold. In many, the sight lines are poor, the glass is low and there is no screen to protect the crowd.
"In the new buildings, you don't have to worry about taking a puck in the face,'' Kopp says.
In New York, the projects Kopp worked on included a hydro tower, a science centre at Brown University in Providence, and airports in China and the United Arab Emirates.
His former co-workers in the U.S. are amused that he and Adair returned to Canada, and are now designing hockey rinks.
"They can't believe it,'' he says. "It's like, 'How clichéd can you get?' "
The oldest wooden hockey rink in Canada is acknowledged to be the Stannus Street Rink, in Windsor, N.S., built in 1897. And while none of New Brunswick's rinks date back anywhere near that far, most are showing their age, and many communities are clamoring to have them replaced.
In Hartland, a central New Brunswick town of 1,000 people that is famous for having the longest covered bridge in the world, a new arena, the Central Carleton Recreation Plex, is on the drawing boards. Large enough to host regional trade shows, the facility will have walking tracks and meeting rooms and be more comfortable than the existing town rink.
"Anyone who says that we don't need a new arena has never watched a hockey game here,'' says Inez Glenn, a local restaurateur who runs the rink canteen.
Built in 1967, the Hartland Community Arena has a ceiling so low that shots sometimes ricochet off the rafters, and an electronic scoreboard so short you can almost stand in front of it.
The dressing rooms are tiny, the signs for them painted by hand, and players sit in wooden dugouts. The rink is so cold that the players' breaths hang, as if frozen in mid-air, and spectators' fingers and toes go numb in minutes.
Frost clings to the concrete floor, and heaters rent for $5 per game.
"You think it's cold, now?'' Randy Stairs, a peewee coach, asks. "It's so cold in here in February that I have no problem getting the kids to skate hard.
"They have to do that to keep warm."
Stairs says that the metal building is so poorly insulated that it gets foggy inside when it is mild outside. Condensation drips from beams, forming bumps on the ice.
"During a practice three weeks ago, it got so foggy in here that my kids were disappearing at the first blue line,'' Stairs says as his team dresses for an evening practice. "I had to keep them from bumping into each other."
Still, the coach wouldn't have it any other way. He likes the Hartland Community Arena so much that he claims it as his team's home rink, even though they have to come from Woodstock, which is about 20 kilometers away and has a civic centre that opened in 1995.
"It's terrific watching a game here," Stairs says. "If we had a chance to play home games here or at the Aitken Centre in Fredericton, I'd choose this place nine times out of 10. This place is easy to fill, and the game looks a lot faster here because you are right on top of the ice."
Such is the conundrum of classic hockey rinks like the one in Hartland, and so many across the country. What makes them insufferable is also what makes them endearing.
A shiny new recreation centre will undoubtedly be more comfortable, but will also lack the character of the quaint, old Hartland Arena, where banners are strung from the ceiling, Christmas carols play in the background as boys and girls walk into the arena dragging great big bags full of gear, and a crowd lines up for a $2 bowl of home-made chicken soup at Inez Glenn's canteen.
"People come here just to socialize,'' Glenn says. "It's more of a meeting place than it is a place where you come and drop your kids off. It's cold, but you tend to go numb and forget about it pretty quick."
Mike Weeks, an assistant coach of the Hartland High Huskies' boys' team, says people are already saying they are going to miss the old rink.
"There is a lot of history here,'' Weeks says. "My father used to bring a siren from the fire department and set it off every time my team scored a goal as a kid, and the sound was just ear-splitting.
"But I took that same siren to the new arena in Woodstock once and tried it out, and the players on the bench said they couldn't even hear it.
"It's just not the same."
From Belledune to Blacks Harbour, Hampton to Hartland, and Sussex to St. Basile, the hockey rink is the thread that unifies New Brunswickers. In a bilingual province, the game has a language all its own, understood by the people who play it, and those who gather to watch, no matter how young the combatants, or how old.
A rink has a feeling and sense about it, and a smell, too, whether it is a stale dressing room or a paper tub of freshly cooked French fries or a box of hot popcorn. Players throw sharp elbows as they battle for pucks, and then later shake hands and share a ride home.
The new arenas are gorgeous and as cozy as a movie theatre, the old ones are wonderful and still wickedly cold.
"The York Arena is known to have the best ice in the Maritimes because it is so cold,'' Royce van Horne says. "You can't have a warm rink and good ice."
Police used to guard the edge of the surface at the York Arena when the Capitals played at home, and Willie O'Ree streaked like a meteor from one end of the ice to the other.
"Those were the good old days,'' Bob Mabie says, "but I am afraid they are gone forever."
But they are not, really. They are still taking place in Hartland and Hampton, and at Willie O'Ree Place, and will soon be happening at the Sénéchal Centre in Grand Falls, where the dressing rooms will be heated, and the seats will be, too, and, as Monica Adair says, "You won't have to dress like a player to attend games."
Marty Klinkenberg is contributing editor of the Telegraph-Journal. He can be reached at martyklinkenberg@hotmail.com.
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