[LINK] "Opening the Gardens"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn writes about the Maple Leaf Gardens' opening in 1931. Even though the building's been closed for years and might well be demolished, thanks to the Toronto Maple Leafs' shift to a newer and more modern forum, it's still a big thing.

From the dawn of the National Hockey League in 1917, its Toronto franchises had called the Arena Gardens on Mutual Street home. By the late 1920s, its small capacity (eight thousand seats) and lack of amenities like reliable heating led Smythe to push for a new facility at any opportunity. Larger arenas in Chicago, Detroit, and New York allowed those teams to offer higher salaries to top players, which made Smythe fear that Toronto’s limited financial resources would leave the team uncompetitive. He also felt the arena’s drawbacks prevented a higher-quality clientele from attending games. As he told the Star’s Greg Clark, “As a place to go all dressed up, we don’t compete with the comfort of theatres and other places where people can spend their money. We need a place where people can go in evening clothes, if they want to come there from a party or dinner. We need at least twelve thousand seats, everything new and clean, a place that people can be proud to take their wives or girlfriends to.”

By early 1931, Maple Leaf Gardens Limited was established to raise funds for a new building. The first site considered was near the foot of Yonge Street, but the property was not for sale. The company then looked at land that had belonged to Knox College on Spadina Avenue north of College Street, but opposition from nearby residents spearheaded by future Toronto mayor Nathan Phillips scuttled those plans. Smythe then approached Eaton’s department store, which had just opened its College Street location and was open to drawing more customers from a nearby arena, even if its clientele might not be the type of people they hoped to attract to their frou-frou new store. Eaton’s initially offered Smythe the block north of Wood Street, but he insisted on land the company owned at the corner of Carlton and Church due to its direct access to streetcar service. Maple Leaf Gardens ended up with an option on the property, while Eaton’s received twenty-five thousand dollars worth of stock.

[. . .]

Smythe, Bickell, and the other executives prodded local business titans to invest, despite questions about the timing of building a $1.5 million facility. As Elias Rogers Coal head Alf Rogers asked Bickell, “Don’t you know there’s a depression on?” (Rogers eventually bought twenty-five thousand dollars worth of stock). When construction bids were tendered, the Gardens found itself $250,000 short of financing the lowest offer. When Smythe came out of a meeting with the Gardens board and bankers indicating that they felt construction should be delayed for a year, Maple Leafs business manager Frank Selke ran down to an Allied Building Trades Council meeting on Church Street. Selke, who also served gratis as the business manager of an electrician’s union, proposed to the attending unions that any labourers who worked on the Gardens would receive 20% of their pay in Gardens stock instead of cash. Few objections were raised toward Selke’s scheme and he proceeded to sign agreements with twenty-four unions. When word of this plan reached Sir John Aird of the Bank of Commerce, he agreed to fund any lingering shortfalls. Workers who held onto their shares would have eventually made a nice little profit, as prices fluctuated from the fifty-cent range in the mid-1930s to the hundred dollar level by the end of World War II.