Boston Garden

• 1. Introduction

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  Boston Garden opened on the 17th of November, 1928. Three days later, 17,000 fans packed inside for the first hockey game the building had ever held. The arena held about fifteen thousand. Windows and doors gave way under the crush of fans storming in without tickets. The game started twenty-five minutes late. The Montreal Canadiens won 1-0.

  The man who built it, Tex Rickard, had spent $10 million on the project. That was more than double what New York's Madison Square Garden had cost three years earlier. Rickard planned to build seven such arenas across the country. He died two months after Boston's opened, from a ruptured appendix, leaving Boston as his last and only one.

  For nearly seven decades, what Rickard left behind was too small, un-air-conditioned, and physically flawed in ways that were never fully solved. One April evening, a show that had sold out drew only 2,000 people. What happened on that stage may have helped keep Boston peaceful while other cities burned. What made this building, despite everything wrong with it, worth fighting over for three decades?

• 2. Built for the Boxer

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  Rickard designed the Garden around a single conviction. Every seat had to be close enough for a spectator to see the sweat on a boxer's brow. He was a boxing promoter by profession, and that belief shaped the building's every dimension.

  The result placed basketball and hockey fans closer to the action than in most arenas of the era. That physical proximity generated acoustic effects comparable to those at Chicago Stadium. The noise the crowd produced was remarkable in its concentration and intensity.

  For the Boston Celtics, that intensity translated into a historic home advantage. During the 1985-86 regular season, the Celtics went 40-1 at home, setting the NBA record for home-court mastery. They also went undefeated at home through the playoffs that year. Combined with the following regular season, their Garden record reached 79-3. The San Antonio Spurs later tied that regular-season mark, thirty years on.

  Visiting NHL teams faced a different kind of challenge. The players' benches sat on opposing sides of the ice, unlike every other arena in the league. The penalty boxes were positioned differently too. The arrangement existed so each team's bench connected directly to its dressing room. Visiting players were frequently thrown off by the unfamiliar setup.

  Late in the Garden's history, the NHL required all rinks to place both benches on the same side of the ice. The Garden complied by moving the penalty boxes to the side the visiting bench had vacated. Visiting players then had to skate across the full width of the ice to reach their rooms.

• 3. Parquet, Ice, and Legend

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  The parquet floor that defines the Celtics' Garden in memory was not built for that arena at all. It was constructed for the Boston Arena, the Bruins' original home, then moved to the Garden in 1952.

  Players said the Celtics knew which way the ball would bounce off every section of the floor. That knowledge of the floor's particular character was cited as one contributing factor in the team's many NBA championships. Over time, the floor became as central to Boston sports mythology as the Green Monster at Fenway Park.

  The Garden's hockey rink measured 58.2 by 25.3 meters. That made it nine feet shorter and two feet narrower than a standard NHL surface. The NHL had no uniform standard for rink dimensions when the building was constructed. The ice simply matched the size of the old Boston Arena, the Bruins' previous home.

  The floor survived the building itself. When the Garden closed, it moved to the FleetCenter and remained in play there until the 22nd of December, 1999.

• 4. Heat, Fog, and Darkness

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  Game 5 of the 1984 NBA Finals was played at 97 degrees Fahrenheit inside the arena. Oxygen tanks were brought to the bench for exhausted Los Angeles Lakers players. The Celtics won the championship that year.

  Condensation gathered into fog over the ice during some Bruins playoff games, drifting across the surface in the middle of competition.

  On the 24th of May, 1988, a 1930s-era 4160-volt switchgear failed during Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The Bruins were facing the Edmonton Oilers. The emergency generator did not start. The game was suspended and replayed in full in Edmonton two days later. On the 15th of May, 1990, the lights went out during an overtime Finals game between the same two teams. The lights were on an automatic timer and could be restored. The Oilers won 3-2 in triple overtime, claiming their fifth Stanley Cup.

  Boston Garden was the first arena in history to host both the Stanley Cup Final and the NBA Finals in the same year. That happened in 1957, and then again in 1958 and 1974.

• 5. The Garden as Stage

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  On the 5th of April, 1968, James Brown took the stage at the Garden the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Mayor Kevin White appeared on stage himself, asking the audience to peacefully honor King's memory. White had urged ticket holders in advance to give up their seats and watch the concert instead on the local public station WGBH-TV. Brown's words and presence were credited with helping keep peace in the city. WGBH rebroadcast the concert twice that night. The performance was later released on DVD as Live at the Boston Garden: the 5th of April 1968.

  The Beatles played the Garden on the 12th of September, 1964. They stayed at the Hotel Madison, which was then connected to the building. Elvis Presley appeared on the 10th of November, 1971, drawing about 16,500 people. Rolling Stone journalist Jon Landau praised the performance. In 1972, two members of the Rolling Stones were detained by Rhode Island police before a Garden show. Mayor White intervened with Rhode Island authorities to secure their release so the band could play.

  In 1975, Led Zeppelin was banned from the building after fans rioted in the lobby while waiting for tickets to go on sale. The fans had been let inside because of sub-freezing temperatures outside. They damaged the seating area, the ice surface, and the refreshment stands. Kiss was banned the following year for refusing to comply with the venue's no-pyrotechnic policy, after fire marshals had watched the band's flamethrowers hit the ceiling at the Orpheum.

  Pink Floyd brought the first stage set costing over $1 million to the Garden, on their 1977 Animals tour. According to drummer Nick Mason's book Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, the band narrowly avoided being banned after using pyrotechnics the venue's owners had not approved. The Grateful Dead performed at the Garden 24 times between 1973 and 1994, more than any other act. Six farewell shows were scheduled for September 1995, with the ticket for the last date referencing the song Samson and Delilah. The shows were canceled when Jerry Garcia died on the 9th of August, 1995.

  The day before the 1960 presidential election, a rally for John F. Kennedy drew 20,000 people inside the Garden. Police estimated that another 100,000 stood in the streets outside. Winston Churchill spoke at the Garden on the 31st of March, 1949, as part of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology convocation. Eamon de Valera, who had served as both Prime Minister and President of Ireland, spoke there on Easter Sunday, the 24th of March, 1948.

  The final New Year's Eve show at the Garden was performed by the Vermont band Phish on the 31st of December, 1994. That night, the band rode a giant hot dog float above the audience. The hot dog is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

• 6. The Long Goodbye

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  By the early 1970s, the building was deteriorating in ways that were becoming hard to overlook. Seats were cramped and decades old. Some were blocked by structural pillars. The building held fewer than 15,000 people, among the smallest capacities in major-league American sports. It had no luxury suites, which had become a necessary revenue source for professional sports teams. Partially because of these conditions, the Boston Celtics did not play a full 41-game home schedule at the Garden during its final 21 seasons. Between the 1974-75 and the 1994-95 seasons, they played some home games at the Hartford Civic Center in Hartford, Connecticut.

  In 1972, Mayor Kevin White proposed an 18,000-seat arena near South Station. The plan collapsed when Storer Broadcasting, which then owned both the Garden and the Bruins, said it could not cover the projected cost. That cost was estimated at $24 to $28 million. Storer sold the Bruins and the Garden to Jeremy Jacobs, owner of Delaware North, in 1975.

  U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas assembled a committee to find a replacement. That group proposed a $56.8 million arena with 16,000 seats, funded by tax-exempt bonds. The naming rights were sold to Sheraton for $2 million before the project was even approved. It died in the legislature. The Bruins separately announced plans to move to a proposed complex in Salem, New Hampshire. The New Hampshire General Court killed that plan.

  On the 8th of May, 1992, Delaware North announced $120 million in financing. The loans came from Bank of Boston, Fleet Bank of Massachusetts, and Shawmut National Corporation. Senate President William M. Bulger killed the enabling bill that December. A revised deal followed: on the 26th of February, 1993, the Legislature passed a new bill allowing construction. Ground broke on the 29th of April, 1993.

  The FleetCenter opened on the 30th of September, 1995. The last official game at Boston Garden had been played on the 14th of May, 1995. The New Jersey Devils beat the Bruins 3-2 in Game 5 of an NHL Eastern Conference quarterfinal, eliminating Boston. The last sporting event of any kind was a preseason Bruins-Canadiens game on the 26th of September, 1995.

  On the 29th of September, 1995, WBZ-TV personality Liz Walker and CBS news anchor Dan Rather hosted a farewell event in the old arena. Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, Larry Bird, and Red Auerbach were among those who attended. The Boston Pops played as thousands of balloons were released into the rafters. The Boston Globe wrote that 'all New England has lost a friend.' The Garden stood empty for three years before it was demolished in 1998. The site is now a commercial development called The Hub on Causeway.

  The Naden/Day Industries overhead scoreboard was electro-mechanical rather than electronic, unlike the digital displays used in newer arenas. After the Garden closed, it was installed in a Boston Garden-themed food court at the Arsenal Mall in Watertown. It hung there until 2018, when the mall began to be renovated.