Scotiabank Arena
Scotiabank Arena, formerly known as Air Canada Centre, is a multi-purpose arena located on Bay Street in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the home of the Toronto Raptors of the National Basketball Association and the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League. In addition, the minor league Toronto Marlies of the American Hockey League and the Raptors 905 of the NBA G League play occasional games at the arena. The arena was previously home to the Toronto Phantoms of the Arena Football League and the Toronto Rock of the National Lacrosse League. Scotiabank Arena also hosts other events, such as concerts, political conventions and video game competitions.
The arena is in size. It is owned and operated by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., which also owns the Leafs and the Raptors, as well as their respective development teams.
The building was constructed in 1941 as the Toronto Postal Delivery Building for postal deliveries and was temporarily used by the Department of National Defence during World War II. After the war, the building was transferred to Canada Post in 1946 where it functioned as the main postal terminal for Metropolitan Toronto until 1989 when Canada Post moved its services to the Eastern Avenue facility. The Postal Building was sold to a consortium of developers but was reverted to Canada Post ownership in 1993 due to financial woes, but the new ownership of the soon-to-be Toronto Raptors basketball team acquired the building in December 1994 to construct the new arena. However, the Raptors were acquired by Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd., the owners of the Maple Leafs hockey team in 1998 during construction that began a year prior, to replace their outdated Maple Leaf Gardens arena. The arena was opened on February 19, 1999, at the cost of $288 million, with the Leafs playing the Montreal Canadiens the following night, and the Raptors playing the Vancouver Grizzlies the night after that.
In 2018, Scotiabank Arena was the 13th busiest arena in the world and the busiest in Canada. It is also the most photographed location in Canada on Instagram according to BuzzFeed. Scotiabank Arena is connected to Union Station's railway, subway and regional bus services and is connected to the Path.
History
The venue is located on land that was once part of Toronto's inner harbour. Infill of the inner harbour began in the 1850s and accelerated with the arrival of the railroad resulting in the current-day shape of downtown. By 1858, the site was located between two wharves. As land was expanded southward, it remained under government control as possible locations for various Union Station expansions. The majority of the land was still part of the lake up until the early 1900s. By 1925, the northern parcel of the property was turned into Bayside Park, which had been part of an early proposal that was to have seen the lands south of the rail corridor transformed into an extensive lakeside park that followed today's Esplanade. The remaining land was most likely under the control of Central Harbour Terminals.Postal Delivery Building
In the 1930s, the property became the proposed home to Canada Post's Toronto Postal Delivery Building. In the 1920s, a postal handling facility already existed in the east wing of the city's then-new Union Station. However, it quickly reached capacity by the 1930s due to major population growth of Toronto and its surrounding region. In 1937, the Postmaster General appealed to the Minister of Public Works to approve a new replacement facility at the corner of Bay Street and Fleet Street. Approval was granted by the federal Department of Public Works in part to stimulate the depression impacted construction industry. Design and construction of the warehouse built with steel and concrete would begin in 1938. Designed by Charles B. Dolphin, it is a building that incorporates a combination of Art Deco and Art Moderne architectural style. The original building would be built for around $2 million . The building was strategically located south of Union Station and was connected directly to the train platforms via an underground tunnel. Trains would be able to directly unload mail and move it directly to the mail sorting centre.Amid World War II, upon completion in 1941, the building would be temporarily handed over to the Department of National Defence for wartime storage purposes, and be finally turned over to Canada Post in 1946. Required modifications were made to the building to return it to its postal delivery purposes as a result of alterations done by the Department of National Defence. After the refurbishment work was completed in 1948, the building now possessed the capability and equipment for proper mail sorting and other mailing processing functions. Though it was designed as a mail sorting warehouse, it was also the home of Postal Station "A", which served mostly institutional and commercial clients. The ground floor was where the mail was dropped off by both railway carts and postal vans. Unsorted mail was moved by conveyor belts to the top floor and via gravity-fed mail chutes sorted by size and destination. Eventually, the sorted mail would end up back on the ground floor where it would be sent out for delivery. The building would be used as a postal sorting centre up until 1989.
Postal building sculptures
The structure's most notable features, which have been retained, are the exterior 13-part series of limestone bas relief carvings by Louis Temporale Sr. CM, which depicts the history of transportation and communication in Canada. Carved in 1938–39, the bas relief begins with scenes showing human speech, a runner carrying a message, aboriginals communicating by smoke signal, a group of voyageurs, a schooner and a Royal Mail steamship crossing the Atlantic Ocean from England, the CN train used during the 1939 Royal Tour, the mythical flying boat named 'Canopus' and northern travel by dog sled. The sculptor's son Louis Temporale Jr. helped with restoration efforts in 1998 and in 2016 was still critical of the lack of protection of the artwork by stadium ownership for over 20 years since the creation of the artwork. Being near the elevated Gardiner Expressway results in salt spray, which is speeding up the deterioration of the limestone.Moving postal operations
In the late 1980s, the building and antiquated sorting equipment was in need of major renovations and expensive upgrades. In a cost-cutting move, Canada Post decided to close the facility and move operations to an alternate more modern circa 1970s letter processing faculty on nearby Eastern Avenue. A structure with easy access to highways was designed specifically for transport truck bulk delivery of mail. By 1989, all of the old building's work was transferred here. The 1980s real estate boom saw the building site become surrounded by numerous skyscrapers, hotels, convention centres, SkyDome stadium and condo towers. In the early 1990s, real estate developers Bramalea Limited and Trizec arranged to purchase the building from Canada Post, with plans to redevelop the site into a office, retail and residential space. Financial and development details of the purchase imposed various conditions prior to development, including rezoning by the city and remediation of soil contamination by Canada Post.By this time, a deep prolonged recession had taken hold in the province, which saw many downtown Toronto high-rise construction projects paused or cancelled outright. There was limited market demand for new office space, one of the key requirements for acquiring bank loans. The resulting financing difficulties resulted in the building's ownership being reverted to Canada Post in 1993 with the structure remaining unused and abandoned. The Toronto Raptors' owners purchased the unused building from Canada Post the following year.
Multi-purpose arena
By 1993, it had been decided that the NBA would expand into Canada. Three competing bids were entertained in July of the same year. The NBA Expansion committee visited the various proposed stadium sites. Major selling points to the committee were a downtown location, easy underground access to the subway and Path system and proximity to the business core, which would hopefully make corporate boxes enticing to corporations.On September 30, 1993, the NBA awarded the team to Professional Basketball Franchise Inc., a company headed by Canadian businessman John Bitove. The Toronto Raptors were created and were required as terms of the winning bid to provide a suitable arena to play in. As part of the PBF proposal, the Canada Post building was ultimately chosen to be the new home of the Raptors in part due to its downtown location, proposed design and features along with lot size. Other sites considered included government-owned lands at Exhibition Place, North York City Centre, and downtown at Bay Street and Wellesley Street. Another site under consideration by the Bitove group PBF, was at Bay Street and Dundas Street and would have been part of the neighbouring Eaton Centre. PBF purchased the Canada Post building and the land the building is on for million.
The Raptors would initially play their first two seasons just a few hundred metres away in the multipurpose SkyDome stadium while the arena was constructed. Groundbreaking took place in March 1997. The building retained the Art Deco Queenston limestone façade of the Toronto Postal Delivery Building along the east and south walls of that structure, but the rest of the building was demolished to make room for the arena, through the process of facadism. The original building is protected under the Ontario Heritage Act.
Arena 'Wars'
, at the time the controlling owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, were considering plans to build a new arena when the Raptors were awarded to Bitove's PBF Group. A race between the Raptors and Maple Leafs heated up centred around venues. The Raptors did not want to play in the antiquated Maple Leaf Gardens and preferred the brand new multi-purpose SkyDome despite its vast size while their new arena was being built.The 1930s-era Maple Leaf Gardens was showing its age; the Maple Leafs in desperate desire for a new facility began developing plans for building an all-new stadium with one of the key criteria for the new location that it must be within close walking proximity to both the subway system and GO Transit. During the early stages of construction, MLGL floated to the media plans of their own to build a competing single-use stadium on adjacent property just to the north of the stadium atop the train sheds at Union Station as the new home for the Toronto Maple Leafs. The reaction from Raptors was nothing but anger. The major problem of the Union Station proposal was that the land that the stadium would have been built on was actually City of Toronto land that was leased out to Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway, which were in a major, long-standing dispute over rent payments. As a result, MLGL offered the city $156 million in cash and assets to settle any and all outstanding claims and to buy the air rights above the Union Station train platforms.
During this period, the Raptors were twice fined a million dollars by the NBA for missing deadlines to begin construction of their new arena, and disputes over the future of the arena resulted in John Bitove selling his stake to Allan Slaight as a result of a shotgun clause. Slaight then had majority ownership and immediately went into talks with MLGL, but realizing he could not share the building with the Maple Leafs, he subsequently sold both the Raptors and their partially completed arena to MLGL. This subsequently resulted in major modifications to the original design, which was basketball-specific, to make the arena become more suitable for hockey. Originally planned to cost $217 million, MLGL increased the budget to $265 million after taking control.