Maple Leaf Gardens 1931-2011
From the day it opened in the fall of 1931, Maple Leaf Gardens has been a social and cultural hub in the City of Toronto. Best known as a "cathedral of hockey", it also hosted political rallies, war rallies, religious assemblies, and pageants. Maple Leaf Gardens provided the setting for every conceivable form of musical entertainment, from the opera to heavy metal concerts. It was the battleground for boxers, wrestlers and runners, and has hosted innumerable bicycle races, tennis matches, ice follies, basketball games, rodeos, track meets, ballets, bingos, and circuses.
The thirteen-thousand seat arena was built at the tail end of the Great Depression, in just over five short months. The building style broke with traditional revivals and achieved a popular modernism - a machine aesthetic articulated in streamlined, geometric forms. Retail openings at street-level gave the building a human scale, and both connected it to and enlivened the surrounding neighbourhood.
The interior of the building was utilitarian and functional, with exposed structural concrete and block walls. The dome roof was designed as a series of massive steel trusses sitting on four concrete trusses, which allowed each spectator a clear view of the action at the centre. Large vertical windows on the north and south sides of the building originally allowed daylight into the arena, and smaller windows on the east and west lit the office spaces tucked beneath the bleacher seating.
Maple Leaf Gardens was one of the largest and most popular gathering spaces in the city, and the wide variety of events held here influenced the cultural development of the nation. The building is widely acknowledged as a local and national landmark, and has been recognized as a National Historic Site.
Plaque via Alan L. Brown's site Toronto Plaques. Full page here.