Arenas play a huge role in the life of a Northern community. That will be the topic for the next couple of instalments of our weekly look at Timmins history.
Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann says the first arena was built in 1914 by the Hollinger Mine, for its hockey-playing workers.
“There’s nothing to it, right?” Bachmann remarks. “There’s no systems underneath or anything, it’s just a cold barn to make sure to keep the ice surface nice and level. It was natural ice. So it was used by a lot of the mining hockey teams particularly. It was used by the community. There was a band in there that played and you went skating with the band. There was all kinds of wonderful things.”
The Timmins Arena was on Balsam Street at Second Avenue, where the post office now stands.
“It was an area that was used as well to stage wrestling events, because wrestling was big, and boxing events, all big at that time. That unfortunately burnt to the ground in the 1940s,” says Bachmann. The exact date was February 23rd, 1947.
Next Monday: the most iconic of all arenas in Timmins, if not the entire North. No points for guessing which one.