good read…
Saying goodbye to the Aud Evan Weiner | NHL.com Correspondent Sep 5, 2008, 9:00 AM EDT
Buffalo Memorial Auditorium saw plenty of big names go through its doors, skating with or against the AHL’s Buffalo Bisons before playing host to the Sabres as an NHL franchise from 1970-1996.
Buffalo is slowly saying goodbye to “The Aud.” Officially known as the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, the old building will be finally demolished in October, but clean-up crews are spending the summer preparing for the final event at the facility that not only housed the NHL’s Sabres, but for about three decades, was the home to the American Hockey League’s Buffalo Bisons.
The Bison franchise was very successful, and the NHL took notice. The Buffalo Majors of the American Hockey Association became Buffalo’s first hockey team in 1930 and lasted three years. But Buffalo was a solid hockey city, and the NHL in the late 1960s began to look at the city as a place in which it could do business.
The old and unused Aud in Buffalo is a remnant of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Project Act of the mid-1930s to help get America out of the Great Depression by creating projects which put people back in the labor force. The arena opened in October 1940, and with the building came a new hockey team when Lou Jacobs moved his AHL Syracuse team to Buffalo.
During the next three decades some of hockey’s best-known names – coaches Eddie Shore, Fred Shero and Billy Reay – led the Bisons. There is also a who’s who list of players who played at “The Aud,” including Toe Blake, Doug Harvey, Tom Johnson, Dickie Moore, Jacques Plante and Brad Park as minor leaguers. There is also a strange logo that pre-dates today’s sophisticated marketing techniques. The old Bisons logo was a soda bottle cap with Buffalo scripted in the middle. The Bisons’ owners, the Pastor Brothers, owned the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Buffalo. The AHL approved the logo.
Early on, the AHL ruled against the owners of the Hershey hockey club when they suggested the team should be known as the Hershey Bars because Hershey bars were made in Hershey, Pa. The Bars became the Bears. The AHL saw no problems with the logo as it was not selling a product other than hockey.
That era came to an end in 1970 when the NHL’s expansion Sabres took to the ice in a renovated arena with a much larger capacity. Buffalo officials literally raised the roof for the new NHL franchise and an expansion NBA franchise, the Braves. The Sabres fared rather well in The Aud, although the team didn’t win the Stanley Cup and closed the building in 1996.
http://www.nhl.com/nhl/app/?service=page&page=NewsPage&articleid=381170
i will miss it i got to play soccer there and i ralphed in the away teams bench.