“The Aud” Was A Great Place To Watch A Game

It is common to romanticize the past, and when it comes to hockey, fans of my generation in Toronto, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, and New York would tell tales about going to Maple Leaf Gardens, Boston Garden, Chicago Stadium, the Olympia, the Montreal Forum or Madison Square Garden.

For fans in Buffalo, the same can be said about Memorial Auditorium.

“The Aud”, as it was lovingly nicknamed, was built in 1940 and remodeled after the Sabres inaugural season in 1970. It served as the club’s home until this day in 1996, when the last NHL game against the Hartford Whalers was played. The club’s original home had oddities, but that gave it some charm. Unlike modern-day arenas that are required to have a 200 x 85 ice surface, the Aud was one of three NHL arenas that had slightly smaller sheet due to their older construction and smaller size.

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Renovations to the building raised the roof to put an upper deck on it and increased the seating capacity to 16,433. However, unlike the evenly balanced bowl of the Key Bank Center, the Aud was oddly arranged, with one end having a small number of rows because of the suites located there and the other end consisting of over 20 rows.

The upper deck was incredibly steep and hung over the ice, giving fans an incredible view, while others seated in the highest level of the lower bowl — known as the “upper blues” — could not see the scoreboard and had to view the game on TV screens. One of the best features of the old barn is one of the worst features of the Sabres’ current home: the sound.

The low roof and hundreds of sound cones helped trap and evenly distribute the noise in the building, making it an especially great venue for concerts and a raucous hockey crowd, which gave the Sabres a distinct home-ice advantage. There have been very few times over nearly 30 years (and not for a lack of fans trying) that KeyBank Center has echoed as the Aud did on many nights.

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