Public transit Stadium–Chinatown Capacity 18,630 Owner Aquilini Investment Group | Broke ground July 13, 1993 Phone +1 604-899-7400 Province British Columbia | |
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Former names General Motors Place (1995–2010)
Canada Hockey Place (February 2010) Location Vancouver, British Columbia Operator Canucks Sports & Entertainment Field size 475,000 square feet (44,100 m) Address 800 Griffiths Way, Vancouver, BC V6B 6G1, Canada Profiles | ||
Rogers Arena is an indoor sports arena located at 800 Griffiths Way in the downtown area of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Opened in 1995, the arena was known as General Motors Place (GM Place) from its opening until July 6, 2010, when General Motors Canada ended its naming rights sponsorship and a new agreement for those rights was reached with Rogers Communications. Rogers Arena was built to replace Pacific Coliseum as Vancouver's primary indoor sports facility and in part due to the National Basketball Association's 1995 expansion into Canada, when Vancouver and Toronto were given expansion teams.
Contents
- Rogers arena and bc place tour
- History
- Entertainment upgrades
- Naming rights
- Proposed expansion
- Notable events
- References
It is home to the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League and hosted the ice hockey events at the 2010 Winter Olympics. The name of the arena temporarily became Canada Hockey Place during the Olympics. It was previously home to the Vancouver Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association from 1995 to 2001.
Rogers arena and bc place tour
History
The arena was completed in 1995 at a cost of C$160 million in private financing to replace the aging Pacific Coliseum as the main venue for events in Vancouver and to serve as the home arena to the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League and the Vancouver Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association. The Grizzlies spent six seasons in Vancouver before relocating to Memphis, Tennessee, for the 2001–02 season.
The arena was briefly home to the Vancouver Ravens of the National Lacrosse League from 2002 to 2004. The operations of the team have since been suspended. Attempts were made to revive the team in 2007 and again in 2008.
The employees of the arena belong to a trade union. In 2007, they chose to change their union affiliation from UNITE HERE – Local 40 to the Christian Labour Association of Canada. After many months of struggle the British Columbia Labour Relations Board declared the employees choice of a new union. The employee group includes hosts, housekeeping, security and various event staff at the venue. UNITE-HERE local 40 still represents food service workers in the arena, employed by Aramark. The stadium's event technical employees are provided through Riggit Services Inc.
Entertainment upgrades
In mid-2006 the arena was upgraded with a ProAd LED ribbon board encircling the upper bowl and shortly thereafter with a $5 million Daktronics ProStar LED scoreboard. The original Mitsubishi Mark IV displays needed to be removed since the worldwide supply of replacement parts was not large enough to keep them operating throughout the 2006–2007 hockey season.
The new LED scoreboard is built around four widescreen video displays that were the largest in the NHL until Bell Centre's upgrades two years later. Measuring 4.13 by 7.3 metres (13.5 by 24.0 ft) they are capable of displaying images in 4.4 trillion colours. Their size combined with their 10 mm pixel spacing gives them an image that is, when viewed from the first row of the upper section at the red line, comparable to watching a 34-inch (860 mm) television at 3.1 metres (10 ft). The corners hold 1.67-by-4.13-metre (5.5 by 13.5 ft) displays with two ring displays each capping the top and bottom. The entire scoreboard weighs 22 tonnes (49,000 lb), 2% less than the one it replaced. The normally three-week assembly period was completed in only one week and as a result there were some minor technical difficulties during the first home game.
The arena received further upgrades in October 2008 but this time it was in the audio department. The 13-year-old Bose sound system was replaced with a newer, more powerful one. As with the original system, the designers used audio modeling software to verify that the design's clarity and power requirements were acceptable.
The system consists of L-Acoustics speakers and amplified controllers and is mixed through a Soundcraft Vi6 digital console. The console and controllers are linked through a redundant fibre network allowing the console to be moved to various places around the building within minutes.
Suspended from the roof are 78 full-range line source cabinets, 12 woofers, 16 subwoofers and 6 full-range cabinets in the scoreboard for additional on-ice coverage. These are driven by 23 LA8 amplifiers providing 165,600 watts of available power at 4 ohms. It is the largest L-Acoustics installation in North America.
The speaker breakdown is as follows.
The system was designed by Canucks Sports & Entertainment in partnership with Sennheiser Canada and was installed by Vancouver-based Rocky Mountain Production Services.
Naming rights
The arena was originally named "General Motors Place" as part of a sponsorship arrangement with General Motors Canada, and was commonly known as "GM Place" or "The Garage". It was temporarily renamed "Canada Hockey Place" for a two-week period during the 2010 Winter Olympics due to Olympics regulations regarding corporate sponsorship of event sites. On July 6, 2010, it was announced that General Motors would relinquish the naming rights for the arena and that Rogers Communications had agreed to terms on a ten-year sponsorship deal. The arena was subsequently rebranded as Rogers Arena.
Rogers Arena is one of three Rogers-branded sporting facilities in Canada, alongside Rogers Centre in Toronto and Rogers Place in Edmonton.
Proposed expansion
In July 2012, Aquilini Investment Group, the owners of Rogers Arena and the narrow strip of surrounding land, received approval to build three new highrise towers around the existing arena. The towers would consist primarily of 614 rental units and would be the largest rental project built in Vancouver during the last 30 years. The 650,000-square-foot project includes 753 parking spaces and 216,000 square feet of commercial space. Aquilini Investment Group had originally planned to build the towers with condo units. The switch to rental units provides the City with much-needed rental space. However, the city lost about $35 million in developer contributions to community facilities in the Northeast False Creek area that would have been collected if the buildings had been condos. As of June 2016, the first tower is completed, with the second tower nearing completion.