The Last Days of Matthews Arena, Boston’s Overlooked Sports Cathedral

When the Boston Arena, because it was then identified, opened in April 1910, the Titanic was nonetheless below development, the U.S. had solely 46 states and Babe Ruth was a 15-year-old residing in an orphanage in Baltimore. Fenway Park had but to be constructed, so the Red Sox performed a quarter-mile from the sector on the Huntington Avenue Grounds. It ought to come as no shock, then, that Matthews has seen all types of Boston sports activities historical past. 

The enviornment was Boston’s first indoor ice rink and rapidly grew to become town’s hockey epicenter, internet hosting many native faculty and highschool video games, in addition to occasional visits from skilled groups from different cities. On event, Ruth would play hockey with an newbie membership that used the sector. Boston lastly received its personal professional hockey workforce in 1924 when the Bruins grew to become the NHL’s first American franchise and referred to as Boston Arena dwelling. The Bruins left in ’28 when the Boston Garden opened two miles to the north. The Garden grew to become Boston’s premier indoor sports activities venue, however the Arena nonetheless held many faculty hockey video games, determine skating occasions, monitor meets, boxing matches and live shows. When the Basketball Association of America (the precursor to the NBA) was based in ’46, the Celtics performed their first dwelling recreation on the Boston Arena and continued to separate time between the Arena and the Garden till ’55. The third main professional franchise to start its life on the Boston Arena was the WHA’s New England Whalers (now the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes) in ’72. 

The Arena’s location was key to it turning into an integral half of town of Boston. The metropolis’s two main league ballparks, the Museum of Fine Arts, Symphony Hall (dwelling of the famend Boston Pops), the New England Conservatory of Music and the Huntington Avenue Theatre are all situated inside a half-mile radius of the Arena. The neighborhood was a middle for Boston tradition and leisure—and hockey grew to become an more and more widespread pastime for Bostonians. 

The new rink performed a serious position in Boston turning into a hotbed for American hockey. While different North American cities like New York and Montreal constructed their first indoor ice rinks a long time earlier, hockey was an completely outside sport in Boston till Matthews opened in 1910. The capacity to play indoors led to an explosion of the game’s recognition, and at this time the Boston space boasts one of the strongest hockey cultures of anyplace within the U.S. There have been 229 NHL gamers born in Massachusetts, the second most of any state behind solely Minnesota (308). 

“Prior to the Arena, Boston really was not much of anything with hockey,” says Stephen Hardy, an writer and Boston-area native who performed highschool and faculty hockey on the venue. “And that’s because when the first artificial ice rinks came down into America, New York got three of them. There was nothing in Boston. [Hockey] was either on the Charles River frozen or some other pond frozen. Harvard flooded Harvard Stadium [to play hockey]. It was natural ice. Well, what happens in the January thaw? Goodbye, sayonara.”

For a very long time, Boston Arena was one of the one locations within the space the place public faculty college students may play hockey. 

“I’m of the age where other than the colleges and the prep schools, there really were like three rinks,” says Joe Bertagna, 74, a local of Arlington, Mass., who performed goalie at Harvard and later served because the Bruins’ goalie coach and the primary head coach of the Harvard ladies’s workforce. “There was one on the North Shore of Boston in Lynn, Mass. There was one, the Boston Skating Club, that produced some of our best national championship figure skaters. And then there was the Arena.”

Ice time was at such a premium at the moment that the Arena can be double-booked for highschool video games. 

“Massachusetts high school hockey back then brought four teams in at the same time. So you’d have Arlington against Newton. We’d play our first period and then two other schools would play their first period,” Bertagna explains. “Then we’d play our second period and then they’d make ice. And then the other team would come out for their second, our third, and then their third. And that format, which I don’t know anybody else that’s ever done it, carried on all the way into the Boston Garden when you had the state semifinals. You’d have the two semifinal games that would intertwine.”

Boston’s hockey tradition is felt most strongly on the school aspect, although. The metropolis’s 4 Division I hockey faculties (Boston University, Boston College, Harvard and Northeastern) compete within the annual Beanpot match—a contest many sports activities followers outdoors New England may not be conversant in however one so storied that it sells out TD Garden yearly. And the place did this traditional Boston sports activities custom start? At Matthews Arena, of course. The first version of the match was held there in 1952 earlier than shifting to the outdated Boston Garden and later its alternative. Northeastern has gained 5 of the final seven males’s tournaments and every of the previous three ladies’s occasions. 

“I have so many friends who played and have stories about playing hockey in here through the ’40s and the ’50s and the ’60s, or [in their] high school years and then went on to play college,” Madigan says. “So this was the Mecca, this building, of high school hockey. And then it translated to college. At one point, all four [Boston-area] college teams—Northeastern, Harvard, BU, BC—played hockey here in this building.”

Northeastern bought the sector in 1979 and renamed it Matthews Arena three years later, in honor of former college chairman George J. Matthews. Since then, the constructing has hosted the college’s males’s and ladies’s varsity hockey groups and the boys’s basketball workforce, in addition to the boys’s and ladies’s membership hockey groups and membership determine skating workforce. It additionally hosts giant college gatherings, like orientation and commencement occasions, and there may be time put aside free of charge skating for college kids and school. 

Most D-I universities may be categorized as both soccer or basketball faculties. Northeastern, although, is undoubtedly a hockey faculty. The males’s program has produced 34 NHL gamers, together with 17 energetic gamers, whereas the ladies’s program gained six straight Hockey East convention tournaments from 2018 to ’23 and reached three consecutive Frozen Fours from ’21 to ’23. 

All that success has bred rabid assist for the packages. The pupil part is called the DogHouse and is as passionate as any fan group you’ll see on any campus. The college students have coordinated dances for sure songs the pep band performs and canopy the railing of the higher deck with hand-drawn indicators with puns impressed by the names of every participant on the workforce (“The Hunger James” for ahead James Fisher, “Sheriff Lawton” for goalie Lawton Zacher and so forth). 

“What happens when you’re a player in this building and you’re on the bench, because the balcony overhangs—you can see how it cantilevers over almost to the fourth row of the first loge area—it’s really loud,” Madigan says, explaining how the constructing’s development and the followers’ ardour combines to create a hostile setting for guests. “The fans are loud. You look to the DogHouse, they’re already sitting on top of the goaltender there. So there’s a lot of noise coming from there. It’s just loud in here because of the confines of the building. So when our hockey teams, men’s and women’s, get it going, and when men’s basketball gets it going with momentum, it becomes really loud and exciting.”

The determination to tear the constructing down was a troublesome however crucial one. After standing on St. Botolph Street in Boston’s South End for greater than a century, the sector is starting to really feel the results of its superior age. In 2024, giant metal helps had been added to the outside of the southwest aspect to deal with considerations concerning the constructing’s structural integrity. The seats within the higher deck on that aspect of the sector had been roped off, chopping the fabled DogHouse in half. A purpose for concern is the truth that the realm across the enviornment is constructed on what was initially water earlier than centuries of huge land reclamation initiatives all through town of Boston. 

“There were some structural issues and some of the integrity was compromised,” Madigan says of the situations that led the college to determine demolition was probably the most prudent path ahead. “As the university and its facilities group and outside institutions looked at it, it wasn’t feasible to continue to try and invest dollars into a 115-year-old facility that was being somewhat compromised.”

Matthews Arena actually exhibits its age—for higher and for worse. The very first thing you discover if you strategy from the adjoining parking storage is the scaffolding that was put in to increase the constructing’s lifespan. Inside there are different indicators of age like the traditional radiators alongside the partitions (which, judging by how chilly I used to be throughout the Huskies’ ultimate basketball recreation there on Nov. 15, don’t do very a lot) and the truth that a single cramped foyer space serves because the closest factor to a concourse. But there are different methods wherein the indicators of age are extra charming. Watching a recreation there’s a enjoyable alternative to move your self again in time to some extent in historical past that has lengthy since handed. 

Matthews appears to be like unassuming from the outside. The ornate terracotta ornamental arch that when stood on the entryway has since been mostly encased by bricks. (The faculty plans to protect the long-lasting arch as half of the brand new enviornment.) The relaxation of the skin is a mix of uncovered brick and off-white paint, apart from a mural masking the doorways that result in a disused field workplace. The inside, although, is a distinct story. The historical past of the place is instantly evident from the second you stroll via the entrance entryway and into the throwback foyer. Its vaulted ceilings and hanging lighting fixtures are extra reminiscent of an outdated theater than a hockey rink. Step via the doorways into the seating space, although, and it’s pure, old-school hockey. The ice floor is recessed beneath avenue degree and the ceiling is constructed of picket planks, making it simple to see why outdated rinks are generally generally known as barns. 

The foyer additionally options a big window between two of the entrances to the seating space that gives views of the ice from the consolation of the heated foyer. 

“That’s a brilliant design,” Hardy says. “It’s a proto skybox. So the lobby, the foyer, it was technically called the bigger space, was an area where people could look out at the game and stay warm or have whatever they wanted to drink in the foyer. Brilliant, brilliant.”

It’s a surprising function that had spent a long time below wraps. As the sector deteriorated within the years earlier than it was bought and subsequently refurbished by Northeastern, a earlier proprietor had made the questionable determination to cowl the window with plywood and later sheet rock. Madigan was working within the faculty’s services division in 1995 when the college determined to renovate the foyer and expose the window as soon as once more. 

“Northeastern University has been the most important owner of the Boston Arena,” Hardy says. “It’s not even close, not even close. They’re not the oldest, but they have put the time in to carefully bring it back.”

The enviornment is a captivating combine of new and outdated. (But principally outdated.) The locker rooms are tight, as you may anticipate, however removed from antiquated. The similar goes for the load room, which sits between the boys’s and ladies’s hockey locker rooms. The seats within the stands are comfy, and principally supply good sightlines, though followers within the higher balcony seating space may wrestle to see the puck if it goes into the close to nook. (The balcony, added in 1926, wasn’t half of the unique enviornment, which explains why getting from the higher sections to the decrease seating bowl can really feel like navigating a maze.) The enviornment’s most trendy function is an enormous 50-foot scoreboard that hangs above middle ice. Its most antiquated might be the cramped media seating space. Getting to my place within the press part required me to suck my abdomen in and squeeze behind the chairs of my fellow reporters. 

Presumably that gained’t be a problem on the new enviornment that may exchange the departed landmark. The faculty has launched plans for a brand new 310,000-square-foot, multistory enviornment with 4,050 seats for hockey and 5,300 for basketball. It may also function observe and coaching services for different Huskies groups and house for intramural sports activities. 

“[Matthews] is a one-activity building right now where you can play either hockey or basketball, [or] you can have an event on the floor,” Madigan says. “This new facility will allow us to have multiple activities going on at the same time.”

Construction of the brand new facility will power Northeastern’s hockey groups into a brief state of transience. While the boys’s basketball workforce will transfer into the 1,500 seat Cabot Center, the house of the ladies’s basketball program, the hockey groups will play “home” video games everywhere in the Boston space. To end out the 2025–26 season, the boys will play one recreation every on the dwelling rinks of UMass-Lowell, BU and Bentley, in addition to two designated dwelling video games at Harvard’s rink. They also have a “home” recreation in Portland, Maine. The ladies will play three designated dwelling video games at BU and two at Bentley. Both groups are set to observe in Dedham, Mass., about 20 miles from campus, for the period of the development. 

It’s a troublesome state of affairs for the gamers and followers, who will spend the subsequent two seasons doing the hockey equal of sofa browsing whereas they wait for his or her new dwelling to be constructed. A brand new-and-improved dwelling enviornment will make the transient interval of uncertainty value it, however there’ll undoubtedly be some troublesome moments within the interim. 

Before it’s gone, although, Matthews is getting a grand sendoff. The ultimate basketball recreation there on Nov. 15 included a halftime ceremony that includes greater than 50 males’s basketball alumni taking to the court docket one final time. I watched as generations of followers posed for ultimate photographs within the balcony and as they lingered on the court docket for so long as attainable earlier than safety ushered them off so the changeover to the hockey setup may start. On Monday, roughly 50 members of the Boston hockey group met at Matthews for one final skate, organized by Madigan. Bertagna was there along with his 78-year-old brother and 89-year-old father-in-law, all three of whom had performed hockey at Arlington High School below the legendary coach Ed Burns throughout his 50-year run in cost of this system.

“Whether we were assembled in the lobby or the dozen of us who actually skated, [we were] going around saying, ‘Well, in this spot, this happened. I remember getting a goal from this spot. I gave up a goal here,’ ” Bertagna says. “The earliest [I’d been at the arena] would have been probably 13 years old, and yesterday, at age 74, the last time.”

The new constructing can be one thing for the broader Northeastern group to look ahead to—a gleaming, trendy facility that can be extra helpful to a bigger quantity of folks. But Matthews can also be a spot that can be value wanting again on lengthy after it’s gone, and never only for Northeastern followers.

“I guess I’d hope that people will remember the joy that it gave to so many people, whether you were inside as a participant or outside as a spectator, it was a site where so much joy was felt,” Bertagna says. “And obviously, in every game, there’s a winner and a loser and somebody’s not walking out happy. But overall, the big picture of things, it really entertained and gave just great joy to so many generations.”

While the farewell to the Arena has been gradual, from the preliminary demolition request in 2024 to final month’s ultimate basketball recreation, to Monday’s final skate, Saturday’s recreation in opposition to BU will put a interval on the finish of this chapter of Boston historical past. The faculty has plans for a ceremony that includes at the very least two present NHL gamers (the Penguins’ Ryan Shea and the Bruins’ Jordan Harris). After the sport, preparations will start for the tearing down of the construction. The demolition will start in February and is predicted to take two to 3 months. After that, the constructing can be gone however the reminiscences will stay. 

“I would hope that Matthews would be remembered as this iconic building that was much greater than bricks and mortar,” Madigan says. “It was about bringing communities together.”