Passive Participation: the Selling of Spectacle and the Construction of Maple Leaf Gardens, 1931

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Passive Participation: The Selling of Spectacle and the Construction of Maple Leaf Gardens, 1931

Russell Field

In 1927, Conn Smythe, a Toronto businessman and hockey enthusi- ast, organized a group to purchase Toronto’s entry in the National Hockey League (NHL). Operating out of the fifteen-year-old Arena Gardens, the St. Patricks (who Smythe renamed Maple Leafs) had for years been only moderately successful both on the ice and at the cashbox. Compounding Smythe’s local and competitive circumstances was the changing nature of the NHL in the mid 1920s. Beginning in 1924, the Canadian-based NHL clubs reaped the short-term benefits of expansion fees paid by the new American teams, but the latter’s greater capital resources and newer, larger playing facilities soon shifted the economic balance of power within the “cartel” south of the border.1 As Thompson and Seager note of this period: “Canadian hockey was revolutionized by American money.”2· Despite the Maple Leafs’ bleak economic circumstances, Smythe had big dreams for himself and his hockey team. In attempting to realize his vision, he built Canada’s best-known sports facility, Maple Leaf Gardens, managed the Maple Leafs into one of the NHL’s wealthiest clubs, and assumed majority ownership of the team. The economic and cultural impact of the major NHL-inspired arena projects of the 1920s and early 1930s—the Montreal Forum, New York’s Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden, Chicago Stadium, the Detroit Olympia, as well as Maple Leaf Gardens—has received little attention among scholarly contributions to the study of sport.3 However, there has been greater interest in the politics of arena and stadium construction, and work by scholars such as John Bale and Karl Raitz has helped to define and explore the notion of arenas and stadiums as sport spaces.4 Adding a fur- ther temporal context to these issues then, allows changes over time to be meaningfully explored. It is within this context, and as an attempt to position

R. Field is a PhD student in the Faculty of Physical Education and Health at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M55 1A1.

35 36 FIELD sport spaces as elements of spectacle and consumption, that this case study of Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens is presented. Bale has called the modern sport stadium “an icon of modernity”.5 Each stadium or arena—a sport space—is created to serve the needs of two groups, according to Raitz. The formation and codification of game-playing rules and conventions, as well as their consistent application over time, allows for the creation of specialized sport spaces for players or partici- pants. At the same time, modern stadiums need to accommodate specta- tors by providing seating, concessions, parking, and other services that are components of “fulfilling the basic requirements for successfully putting on a game.” Raitz also identifies a third concern: “Cultural traditions, taste, and social differentiation all interrelate to mold the form, design, and loca- tion of sports facilities.” Maple Leaf Gardens was emblematic of such a shift in “cultural traditions”.6 The motivation to build Maple Leaf Gardens was clearly financial—in the first season in the new arena with 70 percent more capacity, gross revenue increased by more than 170 percent—yet the success of the venture was inextricably linked to contemporary societal changes.7 To realize the profit potential of Maple Leaf Gardens, Smythe and his directors capitalized on emerging trends in the 1920s: the increased consumption of entertainments as people moved into the role of spectator at the expense of participation. These trends were evident beyond the hockey rink in the 1920s— for example, the growing popularity of the radio industry and the musical concerts it broadcasted came at the expense of local choirs—but they certainly affected the sports world.8 These societal changes meant that Maple Leaf Gardens, to be successful, was not simply envisioned as a larger Arena Gardens. To under- stand the implications of such a transition, Raitz differentiates between vernacular sport spaces (intended for use by a local community) and com- mercial sport spaces (created by entrepreneurs and intended as places of mass consumption). “This distinction is important because vernacular and mass consumption sport places are organized and built in very different ways.”9 The construction of Maple Leaf Gardens was evidence of a shift from a vernacular to mass consumption form of sport space and was a product of the growing commercialization of hockey in the 1920s.10 Entre- preneurs such as Conn Smythe encouraged this shift by turning hockey into a commodity that was to be enjoyed as spectacle. In doing so, they created arenas such as Maple Leaf Gardens that emphasized spectatorship at the expense of participation, and that offered amenities unimagined at an earlier generation of sport facilities. In exploring the notion of the stadium as a site of spectacle, Bale uses the theatre as a metaphor for the stadium. He cites Guy Debord in noting that both theatres and stadiums “share in the hosting of ‘spectacles’.”11 The emergence of sport spectacles were the result of the modernization of sport, which led to both role definition and spatial separation within sport spaces. Sport spaces were designed as gathering places for passive fans, rather