Scholars have written entire theses on the decision to build an ambitious new hockey rink in Toronto in the middle of the Great Depression. Was Conn Smythe a civic-minded citizen with a strong sense of duty who sought to lift the spirits of a demoralized city while providing badly needed jobs or a cynical capitalist out to exploit the misery of the unemployed?
Was he a visionary who saw the future of professional hockey long before others or a self-centred martinet unconcerned with anything but having his own way? Was he inspired by (and jealous of) Tex Rickard’s Madison Square Garden or a local yokel with a swollen ego who wanted to build a gaudy monument to his own pride?
It depends on your point of view. Smythe would have scoffed at the deep thinkers and their analysis of his motives. In his mind, if you owned a hockey team and wanted to attract fans, you needed a place for them to watch the game. The more attractive the arena, the more tickets you’d sell. He also wanted to elevate the status of the game he loved, away from dingy surroundings and drunken, rowdy fans. He wanted a place where men could bring their wives or girlfriends and where ladies wouldn’t object to being taken. To achieve that he needed an arena swish enough that women could justify wearing their best shoes and evening clothes and could sit in comfort without shivering from the cold.
He also wanted to make money, though getting rich wasn’t the driving force behind Maple Leaf Gardens. The Gardens was heavily mortgaged and Smythe ran it as a hockey venue first and entertainment centre a distant second; under his direction it never approached the money-spinning heights achieved after his departure. Foster Hewitt, calling the plays from his gondola, grew far richer, far faster than Smythe did.
In the end the Gardens proved to be a bigger success than anyone anticipated. The city got a building and a team in which it took inordinate pride, and still does. But none of that was evident when the notion came to Smythe to spend more than $1 million on a hockey rink just as the stock market was crashing and the economy was grinding to a halt. Most people in 1930 just thought he was nuts.
Putting finances to one side, it wasn’t hard to understand his drive for a better place to play. The five-year agreement he’d signed with the Arena Gardens in 1927 had been a poor deal. The Leafs had the rights to just two Saturday night games a month, the other nights being reserved for senior amateur teams. They had access just an hour a day between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. for practices, with no practising allowed on Sunday. The arena, not the club, controlled concession licences for refreshments, and the sale and pricing of tickets. The Leafs got a cut of the gate, but the arena collected the money and only later handed over the team’s share. Arena Gardens management also got forty free tickets a game and a free box for the use of directors. The agreement awarded the owners 30 per cent of gross receipts up to the first $80,000 a year and 35 per cent thereafter.
Smythe couldn’t be blamed for feeling his team was playing for the benefit of the rink owners rather than the club itself. To address the problem of limited seating, arena management agreed to consider adding galleries at one end to squeeze in an additional eight hundred to sixteen hundred fans, but only if the Leafs produced at least five sold-out games a season and gross receipts of at least $150,000. And if they did hit those targets, the rink’s share of the gate would increase to as high as 35 per cent, and the lease would be extended by an additional ten years. Toronto would be stuck in a building that could accommodate nine thousand or ten thousand at most – and then only if the fire marshall wasn’t looking – in a league where U.S. teams could accommodate seventeen thousand or more.1
Smythe wouldn’t have signed a deal like that if he’d had an alternative, but he didn’t. In 1927, Arena Gardens was the best available, followed by the much smaller Ravina Gardens in the west end. The Leafs played at the Arena or they didn’t play at all.
By 1930, though, things were changing. The Leafs were a better and more exciting team. Tickets were increasingly difficult to come by. Smythe had engineered a complete makeover and could now ice a team of future stars that included Conacher, Primeau, and Jackson – soon to be united in the dominating “Kid Line” – high-scoring Ace Bailey and left winger Baldy Cotton, with reliable Hap Day and the twenty-one-year-old bonecrusher known as Red Horner on defence. With the addition of Clancy, Smythe knew he had a team able to compete with the best in the league.
Increased attendance reflected the growing hold the Leafs had on Toronto. About half the games were sellouts, and fans sometimes filled not only all the seats and available standing room, but crowded the aisles and the passageways as well. Revenue increased sharply every year from 1927 on, from $83,000 in Smythe’s first year to $123,000 two years later.2
The days when pro hockey was buried deep in a corner of the sports pages were also fading; the Leafs were news from the start of training camp until their last game of the season. Smythe was increasingly recognized as the face and the voice of the team, appearing as regularly in the sports pages as he felt inclined.
It was all heading in the right direction, but Smythe could see trouble ahead. It was fine to win $10,000 in a horse race and use it to buy a player, but he couldn’t be counted on to repeat that miracle every year. (Tragically, Rare Jewel died of pneumonia barely six weeks after the race of her life.3) The limited seating capacity at Arena Gardens was a de facto salary cap on Smythe’s ability to recruit big names or to pay players the amounts they could command elsewhere. Clancy might have been satisfied with $8,500 and the promise of a raise if he performed well, but he wasn’t the best-paid player in the league and it might enter his head at some point that he should be.
Smythe understood instinctively a truth that still stands: owning an NHL team without control of the arena is a lesson in frustration. Black Hawks owner Frederic McLaughlin learned that the hard way when, after three seasons in the dilapidated five-thousand-seat Coliseum, he signed a long-term lease at the seventeen-thousand-seat Chicago Stadium and spent the rest of his days being squeezed mercilessly by “Big Jim” Norris, who controlled the building and hoped to hound McLaughlin into selling him the team.
Even at his most prosperous Smythe would never match Norris’s bottomless millions, but without a bigger rink he might not even manage to stay in the league. Montreal, Detroit, Boston, and the New York teams all played in larger, newer homes. If he wanted the Leafs to have a future, he needed one too.
The problem was in the timing. There couldn’t be a less promising moment to take the sort of risk Smythe had in mind. “Awful” doesn’t begin to describe the state of the Canadian economy at the start of that most depressing of decades. Calamitous, appalling, unnerving … it was all of those. Even the most pessimistic of forecasters couldn’t have imagined the depths the Depression would reach and the years it would drag on.
On the day the market crashed in October 1929, the Leafs were just wrapping up training camp in Port Elgin, where they’d engaged in their by-now traditional routine of calisthenics, roadwork, baseball, soccer, and golf. Smythe was being hailed for the wisdom of acquiring centre Andy Blair from Colonel Hammond for a no-name college player. There was talk that Lou Marsh, while hanging on to his job as a newspaper columnist, was pondering retirement as a referee.4
The next morning, everyone awoke to headlines that signalled ten years of misery ahead. “STOCK PRICES CRASH EARLY, SLIGHT RALLY LATER,” “RUSH TO ‘GET OUT,’ ” “MARKET FLOODED IN WORST CRASH IN TORONTO’S HISTORY,” wailed the Star. “UTTER COLLAPSE IN STOCK MARKET NARROWLY AVERTED,” “STRENUOUS EFFORTS OF GREAT BANKS TURN STAMPEDE OF FRANTIC SELLERS DURING RECORD DAY ON WALL STREET,” reported the Globe. There was a sense that Armageddon was upon the land and a real sense of fear, though as the weeks went on and life appeared to be unfolding as normal, the fright temporarily faded. Optimistic reports suggested the worst was already over, and there were signs of recovery. Occasional rallies came along to reassure investors that sanity would prevail. Investors persuaded themselves the crash was just a short break for the market to catch its breath before easy money returned.
There was no evidence of panic in the sports pages, where Leaf prospects were also being looked on with optimism. After making the playoffs the previous year, great things were expected from the speedy young team. CFCA Radio announced it would broadcast the team’s games, with popular young Foster Hewitt at the microphone “as usual.” Broadcasts would start at 9:00 p.m. and end about 10:15 p.m. “Between periods J. Wilson Jardine and his Orchestra will provide an excellent dance program from the Palais Royale.”5
More than two thousand fans turned out just to watch a practice. Red Horner wowed the crowd – a “brilliant defence player” with a “wicked” shot, said the Star. The papers were also agog at a remarkable new tactic Smythe introduced early in November, just a few days after the stock market debacle. In a pre-season game he began using “two full teams” – i.e., two forward lines – changing them in “rapid fire” shifts every five minutes. Musing on the innovation, Charlie Querrie remarked in the Star that it wasn’t entirely new. Eddie Livingstone had tried something similar back in the old days, he recalled. But this time it looked like it would catch on: Querrie reported that Art Ross was planning to use three complete forward lines when the season opened. That would mean players making $6,000 to $8,000 a year would only have to play twenty minutes a game. Querrie reminded his readers that old-timers like Sprague Cleghorn and Newsy Lalonde “played every minute and every game for somewhere around one thousand smackers for the season.”6
Inevitably, though, the reality of the times became evident. The Ottawa Senators – suffering poor attendance even for their small arena – announced they would play five “home” games outside Ottawa: two in Detroit, one in Boston, and two in Atlantic City, in an attempt to “at least meet operating expenses.”7
In Pittsburgh it was evident the Pirates were not long for this world. They were in the middle of an abysmal campaign, their arena needed upgrading so badly the team left town in February and finished out the season on the road, and the steel industry on which Pittsburgh depended was crumbling beneath the weight of the Depression. Pirates owners announced the team would spend the next season in Philadelphia, where they played a single, final season as the Quakers.
In Detroit, too, the Cougars were in trouble. The owners were tight-fisted and ham-handed, the club was a perennial also-ran, and playing in a pint-sized arena in Windsor hadn’t helped. Manager Jack Adams had slowly improved the quality of the club, but support was so fragile the team let local newspapers hold a contest in 1930 to pick a new name, The Falcons. At one point Adams traded standing room seats to an exhibition game for five bags of potatoes.8
Even as determined an optimist as Smythe could hardly miss the accumulating signs. By mid-1930 construction in Toronto was plummeting, unemployment was soaring, calls for relief were multiplying, and the politicians were fighting over whose fault it was. William Lyon Mackenzie King was ousted as prime minister that summer when it became evident he had no solution to the crisis – he continued to insist, in fact, that there was no crisis. Before the election he argued it would be madness to call a national conference to debate the growing ranks of the jobless because it would only serve to draw attention to the problem, which was bound to go away on its own if just given time.
The seriousness of the situation was no secret to the growing crowd of men who, lacking jobs and anywhere better to stay, had taken to sleeping in and around a brick factory in the Don Valley, establishing a “hobo jungle” of tents, huts, and claptrap lean-tos of scavenged bits of wood and plastic. Managers of the brick works had taken pity on the men, letting some of them sleep inside on the warm bricks on cool nights.
Smythe wasn’t immune to the sense of desperation, but he wasn’t intimidated by it either. He’d been working on plans for a new arena since at least June 1929, when he and his friend Larkin Maloney played golf with a young advertising executive named Jack MacLaren at a course near Smythe’s cottage. During the round he agreed to sell MacLaren the rights to find a sponsor for Hewitt’s radio broadcasts for an arena with no investors that still existed only in his own mind.9 Hewitt himself wasn’t aware of the arena plan, much less that he was expected to broadcast from it. Smythe brought him into the picture a few months later and they agreed Hewitt would form Foster Hewitt Productions, which would not only broadcast Leafs games but have authority over other broadcasts from the new building and commercial rights to sell advertising.10 At that point Smythe planned to have the rink built in time for the 1930–31 season, a deadline the onset of the Depression rendered impossible. He was already working up his promotional pitch: Maple Leafs Gardens, he insisted, would be the biggest and best in Canada. It would seat twelve thousand and change hockey into an evening’s entertainment suitable for the best sort of people. He’d get rid of the dinginess, the drunkenness, and the rowdiness that tainted hockey’s image. Going to the Gardens would be equivalent to a night at the theatre. People would dress up.
It would also be a credit to the community. He took immense pride in his hometown and wanted a facility that reflected its rising glory. The Gardens, he told prospective investors, was a civic betterment project, a means of projecting the pride Toronto increasingly felt in its status and stature. It was something Torontonians should get behind. When Smythe organized the purchase of the Toronto St. Patricks in 1927, he’d convinced J.P. Bickell to accept his bid even though it was lower than other offers, on the basis of civic pride. As a corporate titan and community figure, Smythe insisted, Bickell had a responsibility to keep the team from leaving town. Now he used the same argument to sell investors on the merits of backing a piece of his dream.
It was still not an easy sell. Smythe and Maloney put together a lunch meeting at the King Edward Hotel with Ed Bickle and Bill MacBrien, both Leafs directors who they hoped would help bring in investors. Bickle was a stockbroker, MacBrien an insurance executive. Neither was as enthused as Smythe had hoped. MacBrien was lukewarm; Bickle was against the whole idea, arguing it was the wrong time to be risking $1 million. Maloney and Smythe were both annoyed; Maloney was particularly upset that the two men seemed to think he and Smythe were in over their heads. Maloney, like Smythe, wasn’t afraid of risk; they’d bought their first horse together, and Smythe trusted him.
They kept up their search even as the fallout from the crash spread. In September, bricklayers agreed to a three-day week and a cut in pay from $55 a week to $27.50 so jobs could be shared around.11 Ottawa proposed spending $20 million on construction projects to relieve unemployment, and the Star launched a new campaign – “Give a man a Job” – in which readers were invited to fill out a coupon and send it in, listing odd jobs that needed doing around the house. The paper would then dispatch an unemployed person to the scene.12 In the midst of this Smythe decided he was too busy looking for investors to continue handling his coaching duties, so four days after Leaf directors approved the trade for Clancy, he announced that Art Duncan would serve as coach.
As he did his rounds of potential backers, it occurred to Smythe that a show of public enthusiasm might help bring investors on board. It was similar to the tactic he’d used to pressure Leafs directors into approving the money he needed to buy Clancy. This time he asked Selke to prepare a program extolling the benefits of a bigger and better arena and then pressed Hewitt to plug it over the radio during his next Leafs broadcast. Hewitt agreed, even though he’d be extolling the merits of a new rink from the rafters of the old one, whose owners were sure to be hurt if Smythe succeeded.
Selke readied the program, which included photos of all the Leafs directors, a shot of Rare Jewel crossing the finish line, a second shot of the tote board showing the winning payoff of $214 on a $2 bet, and a third shot of Smythe posing proudly with his horse and its Maple Leafs colours. The case for a new arena was written by Nutsy Fagan, a character invented by the Telegram’s Ted Reeve:
Now that they have brought the matter up, I will tell you all why we need a bigger Arena in case you think we are building one just because some of the players are putting on weight.
Civic pride demands it, that’s what. Have we not in this grand and glorious hamlet the Canadian National Exhibition, the tallest skyscrapers in the British Empire, the most beautiful race track in North America (Woodbine not Dufferin), government control, the University of Toronto, and the Balmy Beach Canoe Club? The answer is, ‘Yes, we have the Canadian National Exhibition, the tallest skyscrapers in the British Empire the etc.’ We have all these and many more remarkable and prepossessing public institutions, and why, then should we be curtailed to a theatre of thump that will only hold eight thousand people with one foot in the aisle?
Selke contributed his own testimonial, in the guise of Abner Tiffen, another invented character, who he’d dreamed up one summer while working at a hotel in Muskoka. Abner was a rube who had a high opinion of his hockey skills and continually pestered the Leafs for a tryout.
I seen in the Daily Star that the Leafs are selling shares in Maple Leafs Gardens Arena. I don’t see why you should have a garden by the Arena when the farmers have lots of stuff to sell but city folks are queere and I guess you know best.
I want to buy some shares in the rink. Kate and I have been saving our money and she wants ten shares and I want twenty. Sell us Preffered shares cause I cant be bothered with no common stock.13
Smythe had hoped to sell thirty-two thousand programs with the help of Hewitt’s on-air endorsement. Instead, requests poured in for three times that number. To boost interest, Smythe had priced it at just ten cents, less than the cost of production. But the loss was well worth it as far as he was concerned, giving a shot of adrenalin to his fundraising drive. Until that moment his plans had remained under the radar of most Torontonians, as Smythe had avoided a grand announcement until he was sure he could deliver. In the weeks after the printing of Selke’s brochure, however, more frequent reports began to turn up in the newspapers. He still didn’t have the financing he needed, and he didn’t have a site to build on. But the bags of mail that poured into his office expressing excitement and impatience for a new arena renewed his faith in the proposal and fed the urgency he felt to get it under way.
He had begun looking at potential sites months earlier and had whittled the possibilities down to three: a piece of land owned by the Toronto Harbour Commission on the Toronto waterfront, the site of the old Knox Divinity College in the Spadina Circle just north of College Street, and a parcel owned by the T. Eaton Company on Carlton Street east of Yonge. On January 7, the Mail and Empire broke the news that a business group was planning a rink at the Spadina location, then being used as an armoury. It would be called Spadina Gardens and cost $1.5 million, seat sixteen thousand for hockey and up to twenty thousand for wrestling and other sports, and include the novelty of underground parking for one thousand cars. The announcement indicated construction would start soon, and the builders “expected to house the professional hockey games next winter.”
The announcement caused a small uproar. Alderman Nathan Phillips and two local clergymen – the Rev. Dr. John Gibson Inkster of Knox Presbyterian Church and Dr. Salem Bland, a well-known Methodist preacher – declared their opposition. The Rev. Dr. Inkster, described as a “pillar of Presbyterianism and Calvinist theology,” declared he wasn’t against sport, just professionals. “These people who follow professional sport do it for the sake of blood. It would be a crime to permit the building of an arena where thugs could gather and infest the neighbourhood.”14
Despite the claims of its backers, the project had nothing to do with the Leafs. Smythe confessed he was mystified. Although he had investigated the same site, he said, he had dismissed it due to objections from local businessmen. Still, it gave him another excuse to press Leafs directors to quit stalling. Accordingly, a week after details of the Spadina plan were released, Smythe put out a statement of his own indicating that Maple Leafs directors had gathered that day and “unanimously decided that they will sponsor and build an arena themselves.”15
He told reporters it had been evident for three or four years that the Mutual Street rink wasn’t adequate. There had been discussions about a new arena since early 1929, just two years after he had signed the five-year deal with the Arena Gardens. “Unforeseen delays” had stalled plans but now, at last, it was time to forge ahead. Although the site was still not finalized, the Star related, “it is practically assured the magnificent new hockey arena … will be located within four minutes walk of King and Yonge streets, at the corner of Yonge and new Fleet St.”16 Smythe admitted he was keen on the Fleet Street site, on newly reclaimed land on the east side of Yonge, a block east of today’s Air Canada Centre. Plans for a lakefront boulevard meant it would have easy auto access, and it was close to trolley lines on Bay, Front, and Yonge.
While pursuing the waterfront site, Smythe and Ed Bickle had also been in negotiations with Eaton’s. On March 4, 1930, Eaton’s director James Elliott sent a memo to secretary-treasurer J.J. Vaughan noting that he’d had an inquiry from a real estate broker about a lot fronting Church Street and stretching from Wood to Alexander. Elliott wasn’t sure, but he thought the broker, J.A. Gibson of Gibson Bros., was working for someone who wanted to build a hotel. The structure, whatever it was, would cost no less than $500,000, Elliott reported.17
Two days later Elliott wrote to Vaughan again informing him the interested parties “are those who own or control the present Mutual Street Arena.” They wanted to build a new rink with at least double the seating “with probably stores around the front of it on three sides.… They also intend to have Bowling Alleys and any other sports which might possibly be included.”
Elliott noted that Eaton’s had paid $200,000 for the site and would likely need $350,000 to break even, but would probably have to take less, given the market. Vaughan was willing to sell, but the deal ran into an immediate problem in the form of Charles G. Carmichael, owner of 60 Wood Street, the only lot on the property Eaton’s didn’t own. Carmichael’s lot was crucial to the plan, but, Elliott noted, he wanted “the ridiculous price of $75,000” for a lot worth closer to $10,000.
Talks between Elliott and Gibson dragged on all spring. When the problem of Carmichael’s greed couldn’t be overcome, Gibson asked about land farther south, fronting Carlton. Like the Wood Street lot, it actually belonged to International Realty Co., a firm owned by the estate of Sir John Craig Eaton. It was a better site, with direct access to the Carlton streetcar, but Vaughan was a lot less enthusiastic about selling it, and Elliott wasn’t sure the hockey men could afford it – he’d heard they were having difficulty raising money. Eaton’s suggested they might be happier with an “inside lot,” either on Wood Street, or Carlton, but without frontage on Church. Smythe wasn’t interested: he wanted fans to be able to step off the trolley and directly into an entrance on one of those two streets.
The issue for Eaton’s came down to more than just price; Vaughan and the other executives assumed they’d lose money on the sale of either site. They were more concerned about the sort of people who attended hockey games. Like Inkster and Bland, they weren’t against sport per se, they just didn’t want a professional hockey team nearby. The company had just opened Eaton’s College Street department store, an art deco showpiece on the corner of Yonge and College. Eaton’s planned it to be the first leg in a massive business and retail complex to rival Rockefeller Centre in New York, with a soaring office tower and developments to the west and south.18 The store included its own world-class concert hall, approached by a grand foyer on the seventh floor. It was intended to be the latest word in haute shopping, aimed unapologetically at an upper-class clientele, and the firm’s executives weren’t convinced the patrons of a professional hockey team were the sort of folks they wanted in the neighbourhood.
Gibson promised his clients would erect “a building of a handsome appearance with first class modern store fronts to produce the maximum amount of rental and give the best possible appearance,” and would pay as much as $350,000. But Vaughan refused. “Therefore, unless the Arena people wish to negotiate with respect to an inside block the matter is closed,” Elliott wrote in May.
And it was – at least for six months. But late in November Gibson was back, this time bypassing Vaughan and appealing to vice-president Harry McGee. The Leafs, he said, were willing to pay $250,000 for 350 feet of frontage on Carlton – less than he had offered in the spring. The proposal was submitted at a directors meeting and rejected. Eaton president J.A. Livingstone noted the arena would be empty most of the day and instructed Gibson to “Keep it off” either Church or Carlton.
For the next two months letters flew back and forth weekly, and sometimes daily. Eaton’s was determined to pawn off a lesser lot on the buyers; Smythe and Bickle, through Gibson, were determined not to take it. Numerous variations were proposed: an inside lot with passageways to Carlton and Church; a rink on Wood to the west of the troublesome Mr. Carmichael; a rink on Church north of Wood that would require paying Carmichael his bounty. The price rose and fell: Eaton’s variously calculated the value of the preferred Carlton Street site anywhere from $211,000 to $600,000. Gibson raised the offer back to $350,000 and insisted it was more than generous. Just after Christmas Bickle pointed out the proposed building would serve as a much-needed convention site in addition to hockey, that there would be motor shows, circuses, bicycle races, track and field, and possibly a large pool, and even offered to name the building “Eatonia Gardens,” a suggestion he can only have made without Smythe’s knowledge.
The logjam finally broke at the end of January. Smythe and Bickle visited J.J. Vaughan personally to lay out their position and somehow managed to win his support. Until then Vaughan had been the biggest obstacle in their path. While Smythe might still have preferred the Fleet Street location, he balked when someone involved in the sale demanded a $100,000 kickback, leaving Carlton Street as the last best hope. The meeting with Vaughan took place just two weeks after Smythe had told the papers he’d have a new rink built for the next hockey season. At that point he had nothing to back up his promise, and if construction was to begin in time he needed something soon.
He got it from Vaughan. After insisting for the better part of a year that Smythe’s people would just have to make do with a lesser lot, he suddenly changed his tune. Three days after the meeting, Elliott informed other Eaton’s directors the firm would sell the Maple Leafs organization a site on Church extending from Carlton to Wood for $375,000 (later lowered to $350,000) and the right to approve the exterior of the building. The arena group would have to build stores on Church and Carlton – which Eaton’s would approve – and meet set construction dates. Eaton’s also reversed its refusal to invest in the project, agreeing to purchase $50,000 in preferred shares or bonds.19
In his memoirs, Selke suggested Vaughan’s change of mind resulted from inroads Smythe was finally making with investors. Alfred Rogers, a coal and cement baron, had agreed to buy in. Perhaps more significantly, Maloney and Smythe had recently returned from a trip to Montreal where they had finally hooked a big fish: the Sun Life insurance company, with some prodding from their Toronto directors and the powerful architecture firm of Ross and Macdonald, had agreed to invest $500,000.20
Ross and Macdonald had designed the Château Laurier in Ottawa, Toronto’s Royal York hotel, the new Union Station – and, crucially, Eaton’s College Street store. At Gibson’s urging, the firm contacted Eaton’s and voiced support for the arena plan, declaring, “We are familiar with the property mentioned and are of the opinion that the location is admirably suited for the project in mind.” 21 Elliott forwarded the letter to R.Y. Eaton, who had been running the firm since the death of his cousin Sir John Craig Eaton in 1922.
As Smythe made his rounds of wealthy Torontonians, his new-look Maple Leafs were playing just the way he’d hoped they would. They lost their first game of the season, but played solidly from then on, and by mid-January were challenging for the league lead. The trade for King Clancy was making Smythe look like a genius. Clancy’s high-octane blend of skill and enthusiasm helped push the team from its traditional spot in third or fourth place straight into the top rank. Howie Morenz, everyone’s choice as the league’s biggest star, volunteered in mid-season that Clancy was the best all-round player he’d ever faced. He was, as Smythe once marvelled, the most “amateur” player in the league: he played for the sheer love of the game and the desire to shove the puck – and maybe his stick and fist as well – straight down his opponent’s throat. His will to win was infectious, and the Leafs became a club that refused to give in, refused to surrender, refused to acknowledge the possibility of defeat until the final bell had rung.
Added to Clancy’s verve was Hap Day’s leadership and defensive skills and the puppy-like joy with which the litter of talented young new Leafs played the game. Coach Duncan was able to ice an entire line – Conacher, Primeau, and Jackson up front, with Red Horner and Alex Levinsky on defence – consisting entirely of recent graduates of Selke’s Toronto Marlboros. Primeau, the oldest of the five, was all of twenty-three. (Levinsky, one of the first Jewish players in the NHL, was known as “Mine Boy,” allegedly after his proud father’s boast, “That’s mine boy!”) After a comparatively fallow season, Ace Bailey was back among the league’s scoring leaders, bracketed by Conacher and Primeau, with Jackson not far behind.
Even more satisfying to Smythe was his team’s pugnacity. They played with a constant edge, with Conacher, Jackson, and Horner surpassing even the ever-belligerent Clancy in racking up penalty minutes. Jackson led the team overall, but Smythe was impressed by the emerging nastiness of the twenty-one-year-old Horner, which would only increase as he grew in confidence. The fans responded with enthusiasm. For a Saturday night game against Montreal, Smythe received twenty-five thousand ticket requests, more than three times what the rink could accommodate. In another game that month, Lou Marsh claimed Foster Hewitt got so excited “they had to shackle him to his perch” in the rafters. Both games paled, though, next to a classic confrontation with the Canadiens in which the Leafs pulled off a “double comeback,” spotting the Habs a two-goal lead in regulation time and another in overtime, yet storming back each time for a tie. (Overtime periods lasted a full ten minutes, no matter how many goals were scored.)
It was a wild, brawl-filled night during which the teams took turns making the other look ill prepared. A movie camera had been set up to capture the action – the first indoor hockey game ever to be filmed, according to the papers – and the players and fans alike responded with appropriate lashings of drama. Someone in the crowd threw a knife at referee Bert Corbeau – it was a “heavy, horn-handled knife,” according to Marsh. Corbeau said it was the second time he’d had a knife flung his way and he intended to keep it as a souvenir, to go with the frozen turnips once directed at him during a game in Ottawa. The game’s other official, Vic Wagner, also had an object aimed at him, but in his case it was a watch and he kindly returned it to the abusive fan.
Partway through the third period, with the Leafs down two goals, Conacher ran Canadiens’ defenceman Marty Burke into the boards and was sent to the penalty box. On the next play Burke cross-checked Jackson, and Jackson responded “with a clean-cut right that dropped Burke on his back.” Burke popped back up and they started swinging at each other, until Corbeau escorted them off the ice and warned them against trying to mix it up in the box, which served for players of both clubs. Burke and Jackson ignored him, leaping on one another right away, joined by Conacher, who “suddenly turned and whipped a series of rights into Burke’s face as he was struggling with Jackson.” A policeman gamely tried to separate the players, but was dragged into the brawl as the bench turned over and all four tumbled to the ground, still swinging.
Suddenly, reported Marsh, Conacher rose up from the jumble and swung at the cop, catching him in the eye. The officer swung back with “some more plunks and a couple of blams, and Conacher was left with a blinker from an official fist.”
Jackson and Burke were ejected from the game, but Conacher was back on the ice after serving his two minutes, slugging a cop not being a violation of any known NHL rules. Buoyed by the battle, the Leafs scored twice in the dying moments to send the game to overtime, then just as quickly gave up two goals before finally fighting back again for another tie, with Conacher putting the last puck past goalie George Hainsworth with just forty seconds left.
“Wotta night brother, wotta night,” marvelled Marsh, calling it “the greatest hockey hoedown Toronto fans ever saw.” After the game, he noted, Conacher “apologized to the cop he hit. Said he was a little off when he let his right go. He probably intended to hit someone in China.”22
Smythe could have used more nights like that. The fans gobbled it up, the papers were excited, and Smythe could legitimately claim that despite the Depression his team was doing better than ever. Revenue was up for the fourth year in a row; one January game raked in the biggest one-game total in team history. Six times that season – usually against teams from Montreal – the gate had surpassed $10,000, more than the previous three seasons combined.23
Now that they were investors, even Eaton’s started to get excited. James Elliott spent part of one day idly listing possible names for the new rink on a lined sheet of paper. Eatonia Gardens, thankfully, had died an unlamented death, perhaps because Eaton’s already sold a six-ply tire with that name – “guaranteed for 15,000 miles!” Other possibilities that struck Elliott included the Sports Gardens, Maple Leaf Arena, College Gardens, the Midtown Arena, Hub Arena, the Metropolitan, and the Palace. He wrote to contacts in New York and Montreal seeking information on the impact of Madison Square Garden and the Forum on their surrounding neighbourhoods. He even sent someone to count the cars around Arena Gardens during a Saturday night Leaf game to get an idea of the traffic. Total: 2,698.24
Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd. was incorporated February 24.25 Smythe hadn’t been able to recruit enough of Toronto’s aristocracy yet and was still relentlessly pushing stock. “Five shares would make you as enthusiastic a fan as the wealthiest subscriber,” the prospectus promised. “You would assure yourself of a moderate annual dividend and help complete the erection of America’s finest Sports Palace.” Shares also made good gifts or the seed for a trust “for a growing boy or girl.” There were plenty of gags, and appeals to feminine fans. “The Maple Leaf management particularly encourage The Ladies to take up small holdings in the company,” it said, under a cartoon of thoroughly modern female fans casting admiring eyes at Busher and Charlie, while complaining that, “It’s a shame the wonderful team hasn’t a better home.”
Design details promised unobstructed views from everywhere in the rink. “Unlike Madison Square Garden,” Toronto’s would be built by people “who grew up hand-in-hand with the game of hockey.” At Montreal’s Forum or Chicago’s Stadium, “the rooters in the back rows are so far away that they carry opera glasses.” Not in Toronto, where seating would be in two tiers to keep fans close to the action, with an elevated gallery to ensure a clear view even in lower-priced seats.
The board of directors read like an all-star team of Toronto business interests. In addition to Bickell, Bickle, and Alfred Rogers, there were representatives from Eaton’s and Simpson’s, Canada Life, the CNR, the Bank of Commerce, the William Wrigley Co., Algoma Steel, the British-American Oil Co., the Bank of Nova Scotia, and Sun Life. Sun Life would hold the mortgage, though at one point late in the game it got cold feet and tried to back out.26 The Gardens would buy the hockey club, valued at $350,000, for a mix of common and preferred shares. “They will thus own the only Professional Hockey franchise in Toronto and no other organized professional hockey can be played in Toronto without their consent.” It revealed that the OHA had signed a five-year deal to play its games in the new arena, and that “Maple Leaf Gardens have also been fortunate in inducing Mr. W.A. Hewitt, sports editor of the Toronto Star, to become general manager in charge of all other attractions.” So while Foster was calling the action, his father would be booking boxers and lion acts, while continuing to run the OHA on the side.
In April, Hewitt reported that demolition had begun on site but that “radical changes” had been made to the design, eliminating the gallery seats and turning the ice surface to face north and south, with the bulk of seating along the sides. The gallery had to go because the architects concluded they could not provide a clear view of the ice from every seat. But they had made a “close inspection” of other NHL cities and pledged the Gardens “will be the last word in arena construction.”27 The article was accompanied by an illustration depicting the yellow-brick, domed box that would soon become a city landmark.
One last crucial date remained: Thursday, May 28, when tenders would be opened on contractors’ bids for the job.28 The meeting was held across the street from Smythe’s office at 11 King Street West, in the office of Sir John Aird, president of the Bank of Commerce and one of the Gardens’ most important backers.29 Smythe, with his engineering background, had estimated the cost of the job between $500,000 and $800,000. With the price of the Eaton’s lot, architect fees, and other charges he hoped the total would not surpass $1.2 million to $1.3 million, roughly the amount he had raised. But sitting in Sir John’s office as the bids were opened he grew increasingly downcast, as one after another came in far above expectations. The lowest of the ten was from the Toronto firm of Thomson Brothers at $989,297, not including steelwork estimated at $100,000. With other costs – including $25,000 to get out of the Arena Gardens’ contract – the price would reach about $1.6 million,30 maybe $300,000 more than Smythe had or could hope to raise. Aird suggested putting off the whole idea until conditions improved, which was the last thing on earth Smythe wanted to hear.
All the buildings on the Carlton Street site had already been knocked down – Smythe had paid Eaton’s $85,000 to start demolition before the deal formally closed. He even ordered Selke to hire a watchman to keep an eye on things, though Selke joked that “only a lunatic would have tried to make off with the crumpled pile of bricks” that remained.31 Steam shovels were booked to begin digging at midnight Sunday – just three days away. Work would have to continue day and night to make the November 12 opening of the Leafs’ season. Money was so tight Smythe had cut all pay at his sand and gravel company by 10 to 20 per cent, reducing his own salary to twenty-five dollars a week. And with all that in motion, Aird was suggesting he call the whole thing off, possibly triggering a clause in his deal with Eaton’s that would have nullified the sale.
During a break he wandered disconsolately into the hall and slumped down beside Selke, who was waiting to hear the result.
“It’s no go,” he told Selke. “They want to hold off for a year or two.”32
Selke, with six kids to feed, had mortgaged his house to buy $4,500 of Gardens stock.33 Smythe had also borrowed to buy 3,880 shares.34 They pondered the hopelessness of the situation. “We had tapped everybody who had any money, not once but two or three times,” said Smythe.35 “There was no going back to them, and nowhere else to go.”
It was Selke who suggested cutting costs, a proposal Smythe barked at, having pared every cent possible. But Selke had a novel idea: he was still a member of the electricians’ union, and there was a weekly meeting of the Allied Building Trades Council going on nearby. The unions were being crushed by the Depression. Tens of thousands were jobless in Toronto, and the government couldn’t hope to meet the demands for relief. The number of men sleeping in the camp by the Don Valley Brick Works was swelling; Ottawa was preparing to deport more than two thousand British men who had come to Canada with government help in better times.36 Such was the despair that radical talk was spreading, and police had begun laying charges against communist pamphleteers.
It struck Selke, reasonably enough, that construction workers might be happy to have a job at less than their normal pay, rather than joining the swelling army of despair. Hurrying from the bank building, he jogged to the labour hall and asked to address the assembly. He laid out the argument: here was a company willing to press ahead with a major building project in a city where large-scale construction had ground to a halt. Now it was all in danger of being cancelled for lack of funds.
The union bosses were unimpressed. Why should they care if a bunch of businessmen couldn’t put up their building? None of them would go hungry, unlike many of the unions’ members.
Selke worked his little frame into a lather. He pointed out that cancelling the Gardens would have a devastating effect on what was left of the industry. If the richest men in Toronto couldn’t scrape together the wherewithal for a new arena, what hope was there for anyone else? The papers had been full of stories about the plan for months, and people were excited. Amid all the desperation and despair, hockey was something that offered a momentary diversion – Foster Hewitt’s broadcasts were becoming such an attraction that the Star sometimes noted on the front page when he would be calling a game. Take away that hope and Toronto would sink deeper into the quagmire of despondency that was threatening to swallow it.
Selke’s emotional address had its effect, though the practical-minded men in front of him were still wondering what it had to do with them. Then he unveiled his idea: the Gardens project might still go ahead if union members would agree to take four-fifths of their usual pay, with the rest in stock shares. The paper wouldn’t be worth much now, but would likely increase in value as the years passed, and would give the men a stake in the success of the venture. His pitch didn’t go down well – union men, Selke discovered, thought anything to do with stock shares was related to “big business,” and they were opposed to big business on general principles. If the stock was worth having, they assumed, the greedy capitalists would have kept it to themselves.
Only when Selke told them he’d bet his own house on the project did they start to come around. He was making sixty dollars a week as Smythe’s assistant general manager, and still moonlighted as an electrician to pay the bills. He’d borrowed $3,500 and kicked in his savings as well to buy his shares. He couldn’t afford to be making investments of that sort, but he believed enough in the project to take the kind of leap he’d never taken before in his life.37
His plea brought them around enough to offer tentative support, on the condition he present the plan individually to all twenty-four member unions and win the approval of each. It was hardly carte blanche, but it was enough. Selke raced back to the meeting at Aird’s office and shared the news. Smythe could barely believe it. When he passed on the message, it had a profound impact, Aird and the others being as suspicious of wage earners as the unions were of them. If the trade unions were willing to make that sacrifice, Aird said, the Bank of Commerce would pick up whatever difference remained.
Smythe recalled it as both the worst and the best day of his life. “I have always been given the main credit for building Maple Leaf Gardens in the depths of the Depression,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I didn’t even know what a Depression was, so I just kept pushing. But to my mind the final decision, the final laying to rest of the feeling among some people that it was a crazy idea, came when the union men came in and Sir John Aird said, for the Bank of Commerce, ‘We’ll pick up the rest.’ ”38