A Night at the Gardens: Class, Gender, and Respectability in 1930s Toronto

Russell Field's A Night at the Gardens: Class, Gender, and Respectability in 1930s Toronto makes an important contribution to the study of the growth of professional hockey in Toronto that broadens our understanding of how spectator experiences were shaped by class dynamics and gendered notions of “respectability” during the interwar years. Driven to make the Maple Leafs a profitable commodity, Conn Smythe and the Maple Leafs’ Board of Directors recognized that they needed to market a product that appealed to respectability politics within the city's competitive entertainment landscape. Convincingly, Field makes the case that the architects of professional hockey in Toronto built Maple Leaf Gardens, designed the arena's interior spaces with intent, and operated the arena in such a way that appealed to the neighborhood standard of respectable entertainment and consumer culture. However, Field is more interested in writing a history about the people who purchased tickets, eagerly filled the stands, and made Maple Leaf Gardens the place to be when the Maple Leafs took to the ice.Field's central argument is that the new stadium and arena building of the 1920s and 1930s fundamentally changed the spectator experience by altering the appointments of the spaces that surrounded the playing surface while the NHL was expanding to new markets and making rule changes designed to result in higher scoring games that would attract more paying fans. American capital and its brand of commercial hockey were not only luring Canada's best talent to major cities south of the border; they were also generating revenue and investor interest to spearhead new arena-building projects that provided spectators with an improved viewing experience and boosted the game's appeal to a wider net of consumers. Madison Square Garden embodied the modern arena and set the template for NHL arenas in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Toronto. Smythe and the Board of Directors took the careful construction of the arena and its spatial dynamics seriously, and Field brilliantly covers that aspect of this story. However, Field argues that understanding who spectators were and “what meanings their spectating experiences held for them” is the basis for an underappreciated account of how hockey's popularity skyrocketed and how the Maple Leafs became Canada's favorite team in the interwar years (31, 42).A Night at the Gardens relies heavily on archival collections. Field mines sources from the Archives of Ontario, the City of Toronto Archives, the National Archives in Ottawa, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Maple Leafs fans, and likely all hockey fans, will appreciate the fifty illustrations printed in this book—even those from outside the time frame that he studies. Shifting the focus away from the ice to the unique and diverse spectator experiences helps to capture the atmosphere of Maple Leaf Gardens and 1930s Toronto across five chapters and a focused conclusion. Chapter 1, “Historicizing the Hockey Spectator,” sets the stage by placing the development of commercial hockey alongside the emerging consumer entertainment landscape of the 1920s, while creating space for these audiences within a longer historiographical context of sports and sporting spaces. Chapter 2, “Constructing the Preferred Spectator,” looks at the debates surrounding arena construction as they appeared in city newspapers and tabloids. It also provides valuable insights into Conn Smythe's detailed plan to construct a physical space that epitomized Victorian notions of respectability in Toronto's premier cultural venues.Field is perhaps most impressive in the middle chapters. Beginning with chapter 3, “Filling the Stands,” Field weaves together twenty-one interviews with arena spectators and employees alongside a careful reading of the 1933–34 Maple Leaf Gardens subscriber ledgers, an unmined source previously unavailable to scholars. The ledgers, as Field explains, were a list compiled by arena staff of all subscribers to Maple Leafs hockey tickets, complete with name, address, and seat location, which offers a wealth of data on the composition of hockey crowds that season. Field uses that highly informative source in conjunction with the 1934 Might's City of Toronto Directory and the 1931 Seventh Census of Canada to paint a fuller demographic portrait of the potential interwar crowd. Chapter 4, “Community in the Stands,” uses oral history interviews with spectators and employees, examining how interwar sports spectators understood the spectating experience, its deeper and varied meanings, and what they took away from their time in the stands. Although the primary focus is on arena experiences at the intersection of class and gender, Field is attentive to other markers of difference within the arena's spatial hierarchies. While less explicitly articulated than class and gender realities, race is not outside of Field's vision; Field contends that “Maple Leaf Gardens was also a racialized space,” one that was an important part of the longer settler-colonial and imperial Canadian project (67). Chapter 5, “The State of Smythe's Respectability Project,” the book's most theoretical, considers how successful Conn Smythe and the operators of Maple Leaf Gardens’ respectability project were at creating a civilized and gendered social order in the arena. Arguably, Field's sources indicate that the spectator within Maple Leaf Gardens did as much to define the nature of the space as Maple Leaf Gardens did to shape the spectator. Women, especially, appeared to carve out their own meaningful experiences in ways that challenged the arena's gendered organization of space and relations of power.Much more than another armchair hockey book, Field's volume makes several important contributions to the field and fills important gaps in the historiography of entertainment and sports spectators. More importantly, A Night at the Gardens succeeds at foregrounding the lived experiences of spectators at a transformative moment in the history of professional hockey in North America. Aside from a minor organizational criticism concerning chapter 1, Field's intervention is noteworthy. It is undoubtedly an informative read for scholars interested in fields beyond the history of hockey and sports—especially class and gender studies, sociology of sport and culture, Canadian history, urban studies, and the history of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area.

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