Phantom of the Rink: LRC Review of Architecture on Ice

Howard Shubert’s new book Architecture on Ice: A History of the Hockey Arena, was recently reviewed by Stephen Smith for the October issue of the Literary Review of Canada.

Below is an excerpt from the review.

Phantom of the Rink
ARENA ARCHITECTURE SHAPED HOCKEY, BUT WILL THE NEW GENERATION OF ENTERTAINMENT MULTIPLEXES DIMINISH THE GAME?

Hard to say just when the ghosts got into the Montreal Forum. We know that they were definitely ensconced in the rafters of that bygone rink by 1989, if only because the upstart Calgary Flames, in town that spring to challenge the Canadiens for the Stanley Cup, are on the record talking about having to conquer them. The Flames’ 20-year-old dynamo Theo Fleury, for instance: “I’ll bet if you sat there with all the lights off, when it was quiet, you’d see the ghosts skating,” he said. “Morenz, The Rocket. I don’t really believe in ghosts. But in your mind, I bet they’d be there.”

But since Fleury is not the first to have evoked the spirits aloft in old hockey arenas (even as he denies them), let’s stick with the ectoplasm for a moment. To speak of a hockey arena’s ghosts—or, for that matter, to talk about the game as religion, played out in “cathedrals”—may be fanciful, but that does not mean that it is without meaning.

If the spirit of Howie Morenz did ascend after he died of a broken hockey heart in 1937, it was mixed with the clouds of collective memory and nostalgia that had already been accumulating under the Forum roof over the years. That is what we are talking about here, I think: the connections we make with venues where we gather as communities, where strong feelings take hold and activate our own memories of playing the game, or watching our kids play, of the rituals of taping our sticks and tying our skates, of the smell of Zamboni exhaust, of what it is to skate out on pristine ice after the flood.

Read the full review on the LRC website