A Glimpse of hockey’s past

Aesthetically unchanged since it opened in 1924,
Stratford’s William Allman Arena is a window to history.

BY SHANNON PROUDFOOT | PHOTOGRAPHY BY EUGEN SAKHNENKO

An unusual sort of museum sprawls on the banks of the Avon River in Stratford, Ont. It features burnished hardwood floors and lovingly preserved glimpses of the past, but this is no silent, dusty curio cabinet—the air is alive with the snap of frozen rubber, the manic scissor sound of blades carving ice and the shouts and thuds of bodies in motion.

Stratford Arena—now known as William Allman Memorial Arena—opened its doors in 1924, making it two years younger than Cambridge’s Galt Arena Gardens and one of the oldest continually operating arenas in the world. But while there are a few other hockey temples of this vintage still standing, none look like this.

The Allman’s bland brick facade conceals a perfect time capsule, a moment of hockey’s past frozen forever. The original wooden bench seats overlook the ice, painted the same gleaming red and blue they wore when the rink opened, and framed by the hardwood concourse floors. No one makes the steel brackets that hold the seats together anymore, so the city scrounges spare parts from discarded seats. Thick steel girders support an arched roof that soars over centre ice, as close to a hockey cathedral as you can get. You barely have to squint to picture players in leather helmets buzzing around the ice, and stands filled with men wearing fedoras and women in tailored dresses. “We look pretty much today as we did when we opened,” says Jamie Tuffnail, a facilities maintenance worker who’s spent 20 of his 28 years with the city at the Allman. “If we spent $1 million on the building, the public wouldn’t know what we did. We always kept it more behind the scenes.”

Stratford is known for its Shakespeare Festival, but the Jr. B Cullitons have always packed in a capacity crowd of 2,500 on Friday nights at the Allman. Ed Olczyk, Rob Blake, Chris Pronger and Tim Taylor all played here, on the same ice where minor hockey teams and figure skaters practise. Six-year-old Wayne Gretzky scored his first goal here, and Walter immortalized the moment on film. Decades before he won two Stanley Cups, first with Detroit and then Tampa, Taylor grew up next door to the old barn. When he was a little kid, the big deal was to play a tournament in what was known as “the main arena.” A few years later, when he was playing minor hockey there regularly, he would dream of wearing a Cullitons jersey and storming out to a thunderous ovation from the end zone corner where the hometown heroes entered. “That was Maple Leaf Gardens to us,” says Taylor, who played briefly with the Cullitons before moving on to the OHL.

The building was renamed in the mid-’90s for long-time arena manager William Allman, a man Taylor spent hours of his rink-rat youth trailing around. When they weren’t on the ice, the kids would scour the dusty crevices of the building for hidden treasures: helmets, gloves, pads and skates from another era. “It was almost like the dinosaurs, looking for the bones,” says Taylor, who moved back to Stratford after he retired in 2007. Even now, every time they rip out a board to make a repair at the arena, they find pieces of the past hidden in the walls.

The structure isn’t as tight as it once was—a pop spilled in the stands usually makes its way into the dressing rooms below—but the building’s bones are strong, and the Allman is one of the few grand old barns in Canada that appears safe for now. The city poured almost $2 million into renovations a few years ago, all of it as invisible as possible, and in a department where Tuffnail’s nearly three decades of service make him one of the pups, the keepers of the rink take their roles seriously. “We’ve got guys who have spent their whole careers in the arena,” says Tuffnail, 47. “So we take pride in it.”

Allman died almost two decades ago, but those who know the arena best believe he still watches over it. The day he died, the clock in the compressor room stopped, despite being plugged in. Now, Tuffnail occasionally hears a sound like Allman used to make, blowing a raspberry through pursed lips as he wandered the hallways, and though the wires have been cut on the old sound system for years, he sometimes hears people muttering through the speakers. “I’m not really superstitious, but I believe he’s still in there,” Tuffnail says. “It’s not a bad feeling. It gives you the tingles, that’s for sure.”