Ottawa Exhibition Stadium

Lore & Background

The stadium's hockey story is inseparable from Ottawa's identity as a city that lives and dies by the game. When the Senators returned to the NHL in 1992, the choice to play at Lansdowne was a deliberate nod to the city's deep, pre-NHL hockey heritage—the Ottawa Rinks, the Stanley Cup dynasties of the 1920s and 1930s, the long tradition of outdoor winter play on the Rideau Canal. The outdoor setting was not a compromise; it was a statement that this was still Ottawa's game, played in the elements the way it had been for generations.

The stadium was never glamorous. The grandstands were concrete and weathered, the concourses narrow, and the experience of walking through the frost in November or the damp chill of a March night was part of the ritual. Fans bundled in layers, the smell of hot dogs and woodsmoke mingling with the sharp bite of cold air, the sound of skates carving the ice carrying across the open bowl in a way an enclosed dome could never replicate. For a city that prides itself on a certain stubborn, unpretentious character, the stadium was a perfect physical metaphor.

When the Senators departed for the new Canadian Tire Centre in 1999, and when the Rough Riders' final seasons wound down, the stadium entered a slow twilight. Its demolition in 2003 was met with genuine public grief—petitions, vigils, and a sense that Ottawa had lost a piece of its civic soul. The site has since been redeveloped, but for those who remember, the stadium endures as a place where the city gathered under the stars and the ice was real.

In Their Own Story

It was a Tuesday in late November, the kind of Ottawa night where the sky sits low and grey and the temperature hovers just above freezing. The stands were filling slowly, families dragging kids out of the car, the old-timers in the upper deck already arguing about a call from last week. The ice crew had just finished their last pass, and the sheen of fresh water was still beading on the surface, catching the floodlights in long silver streaks. A player from the Senators' line skated a loose loop around the blue line, stick dragging, and the sound—*shhk, shhk, shhk*—rolled out over the open rink and into the concrete bowl, carrying further than it ever would under a dome. Someone in the third row whooped. The wind shifted, and for a moment the whole stadium smelled of cold iron and pine tar. A kid in a too-big Senators jersey pressed his face to the railing, watching the puck sit still on the ice, waiting for the horn.

Reader's Guide

The stadium was a large, open-air concrete bowl set within the Lansdowne Park grounds, with a rectangular ice rink at its centre surrounded by tiered grandstands on all four sides. The outdoor setting meant the ice was exposed to the elements; on cold nights the boards frosted over and the surface took on a hard, glassy quality that made the puck skate differently than in a climate-controlled arena. The concourses were modest—narrow walkways, a handful of concession stands, and the ever-present smell of hot dogs and roasted peanuts.

Fans treated a night at the stadium as a small expedition. You bundled up, walked across the park grounds, and felt the cold hit your face before you even reached the stands. During games, the open-air acoustics meant every slap shot and every goal horn carried with a raw, unfiltered intensity. The crowd noise rose and fell with the wind, and on the coldest nights you could see your own breath as you cheered.

The stadium was never just a hockey venue. The same concrete saw CFL football, summer concerts, and civic gatherings, which gave it a layered, lived-in character. For Ottawa, the stadium was as much a community room as a sports arena, and its loss in 2003 left a gap that no new building has quite filled.

Did You Know?

• By the 1990s, Ottawa Exhibition Stadium was essentially the last outdoor rink in the NHL, a living remnant of the sport's early open-air days.
• The same concrete bowl hosted both NHL hockey and CFL football, meaning the surface was resurfaced and reconfigured between sports seasons.
• The stadium's outdoor setting meant that on the coldest Ottawa nights, the ice could freeze solid and the game's pace, puck speed, and even the sound of the crowd shifted noticeably compared to an enclosed arena.
• The site's long association with the Ottawa Rough Riders meant that generations of Ottawans grew up with the stadium as a multi-sport, multi-season fixture of city life long before the Senators returned to the NHL.