Birth of the Saddledome: Piece By Piece

Over the course of the preseason, we’re setting up the Farewell Season at the Scotiabank Saddledome with a three-part series on how Calgary’s iconic arena came to be.

In our third and final part of the series, we look on as the Olympic Coliseum turned Olympic Saddledome rose from cutting-edge architectural concept into an integral part of Calgary’s sports and live entertainment community and city skyline.

With each passing day in the early 1980s, Calgary got one step closer to seeing its new Olympic Saddledome come to life.

Construction on the state-of-the-art facility got underway on July 29, 1981, and just over 26 months later, the building opened its doors when the Flames hosted the Oilers in a Battle of Alberta. But right from the jump, proponents of the project - originally known as the Olympic Coliseum - were eager to showcase its features to sports fans and showcase the city of Calgary to the world.

“The building will be the most pleasing I’ve ever seen,” Art Froese told the Calgary Herald in June of 1981.

Froese, the former Calgary Stampeders halfback turned construction committee chairman for the Calgary Olympic Coliseum Society, was one of the key spokespeople of the era as excitement ramped up about the new building.

But the Flames, who skated across the street at the 7,000 seat Stampede Corral for the first three years of their history in Calgary, were excited, too.

Winger Tim Hunter, a born-and-raised Calgarian, marvelled at the work being done as he began his own NHL career after being selected by the then-Atlanta Flames in the 1979 NHL Draft.

“Being from Calgary, I had so many buddies that were in the construction business that were working on the Saddledome,” Hunter recalled. “I’d be going to practice, I’d get a wave or a whistle from one of my buddies growing up, a pipe-fitter, plumber or some sort of construction guy. ‘Hey Hunts, how ya doin? Just bangin’ away on this Saddledome, here!’

“That was really something to see, the building going up beside the Corral where we were playing, and every day you’d get to see little bits of it get more and more put together, and just morph out of the ground into this beautiful, new building that we were going to play in.”

Of particular interest, the ‘Dome’s iconic roof. And putting it in place was no easy task.

But piece by piece - in this case, cable by cable - the job got done.

“The safest way to build a roof is to build a cable-supported, tension-ring roof,” Froese told the Herald in December of 1981. “The cable system is inherently failsafe. It’s like a tennis racket. All these cables crisscross and there’s enough of them so that even if you had a failure in one cable, the roof isn’t going to fail. It’s like breaking a string in your squash racket or tennis racket.

“Then eventually, when everything is up, it’s cast in concrete and it acts just like the shell of a turtle.”

The building originally was slated to open with 17,400 seats, with a further 2,600 to be put in place in advance of the 1988 Winter Games. Cana Construction, the same firm tasked with bringing Scotia Place to life, had 300 tradespeople on-site by the spring of 1983.

Not to mention the odd curious passerby.

“We get a lot of people saying ‘Can I come down and see where my seat is?,’” construction manager Bert Seedhouse told the Herald in 1983, all part of a piece on how Cana were forced to restrict access because their hard hats kept disappearing. “We felt we would be good guys for a while and we let a few in to look at their seats.”

Part of the construction process, too, involved settling on a name. The Herald ran a contest in 1982 and while the majority of the entries included what writer Crosbie Cotton termed a ‘rugged western flair,’ other monikers like the Calympiad, the New Corral or even the Southlands Coliseum (a play on the Oilers’ Northlands Coliseum facility) also garnered interest.

In all, the building offered a showpiece for community pride, one that stretched across the city from Flames players, to fans, to builders and designers alike.

“It's always exciting for an architect to be part of that kind of community-making project,” said Andrew Tankard, partner at GEC Architecture, the Canadian firm tasked with designing the ‘Dome among many other projects in Calgary. “Because I think for us, although obviously there's a satisfaction in just the scope of the project or the technical side of it, I think the satisfaction in all of these projects is that they're part of the community, and they do help give an identity and create a venue for the community to express itself.”

And now, 43 years on from its grand opening in October of 1983, it’s safe to say the Saddledome has done exactly that.

And those expressions offer Hunter the opportunity to reminisce.

He called the Saddledome home for nine NHL seasons, winning a Stanley Cup in 1989 and etching his name into Flames lore - particularly the Battle of Alberta.

Memories made, memories shared.

But as we enter the Farewell Season, the Calgarian admitted has one final Saddledome fight in front of him.

“No one had more penalty minutes in those 10 years against the Oilers than me,” he said. “No one had more fights against the Oilers in those 10 years than me.

“I’m petitioning that when they tear the Saddledome down, that I get the penalty box, ‘cause I spent 2,405 minutes in there for the Calgary Flames.”