A night at the Garden(s): A history of professional hockey spectatorship in the 1920s and 1930s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study inserts the spectator into the socio-historic analysis of commercial sport in the interwar years, specifically in the context of North American ice hockey. It focuses upon two facilities, New York's Madison Square Garden (built in 1925) and Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens (1931), which hosted indoor sports spectating on a scale previously unseen in either city, Maple Leaf Gardens' scale was a direct response to the economic challenge symbolized by Madison Square Garden and this study begins with an examination of hockey spectators in New York. The emphasis then shifts to Maple Leaf Gardens and Conn Smythe, the man most responsible for Toronto's new arena, who was symbolic of interwar sport entrepreneurs who positioned their attractions as respectable alternatives to, for example, a night at the theatre. How should we think about spectatorship at Madison Square Garden and Maple Leaf Gardens? How did these buildings anticipate particular spectators and spectator behaviours? Who were the spectators that attended hockey games in these arenas? And what were the experiences of spectators within them?To make his arena venture successful, Smythe wanted, in his own words, "a place where people can go in evening clothes ... a place that people can be proud to take their wives or girl friends to." The result was a building that anticipated and produced respectable spectators at a particular intersection of class, gender, and ethnic expectations. The spectators who watched hockey games at Maple Leaf Gardens were predominantly men who earned higher incomes and were more commonly occupied in white-collar professions when compared to Toronto's contemporary wage-earning male population. Attending hockey games was a social experience regardless of social standing or gender. There were women who went to hockey games in the company of other women. Spectating has been constructed as a masculine pastime, but in the new spaces of sport in the interwar years, both women and men in Toronto used one of the city's most prominent public buildings as a site for their own socializing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".