The Winterhawks’ True Home: Veterans Memorial Coliseum

Every few years there are rumblings in Portland that the most historic building in the Rose Quarter is going to be razed to the ground and replaced by something like a state-of-the-art ballpark or a state-of-the-art shopping center with a state-of-the-art coffee bar. It never seems to happen, mostly because there’s not enough financial incentive for the city to start from zero on the location and partially because of the architecture and sports history fanatics lobbying for preservation.

I submit, despite my affection for the Rose Garden/Moda Center, that the Veterans Memorial Coliseum is the preferable venue for the Winterhawks and should be their year-round home arena.

Stay with me here, please. I know that Moda is much bigger, much newer, and that means much better to everyone. But the logistics of splitting the home games between the two produces headaches for everyone. Consider this: The Blazers host 44 home games in the Moda Center this year from October through April, and the arena also has fourteen other events during that season. Some of these other events last the weekend, like the usual “Disney on Ice” affair, or an entire week like the upcoming “Walking With Dinosaurs” exhibit.

That’s 58 events spanning around 70 days that all prevent the Winterhawks from playing in the larger arena for their scheduled 36 home games. This means half of the season in a hockey rink and the other half converting Moda into its hockey configuration for the evening and back to basketball afterward, more expensive tickets for the fans on those nights, more security costs, and the embarrassment of having nothing hockey-related in the building. It’s a home game that we play as visitors. And when they do play the Moda, it seems disappointingly empty. Winterhawks fans at a home game regularly exceed 7,500 and make the 9,000-seat VMC seem imposing to the visiting team. That same number looks paltry in the 17,544 capacity of the Moda Center (when it’s set up for hockey).

The VMC is almost exclusively configured for hockey, and for the Winterhawks specifically. The team actually invested $10 million to renovate the arena in 2012, extending the rink to NHL standard length and installing new seats, among other improvements. The organization even owns the newer HD displays and scoreboards that were installed; they are leased to the city of Portland with an option to buy. Not only does this show the team’s loyalty to the older building, it also furthers the honored history of the building’s relationship with the sport.

I don’t want to play the game of “historic landmarks should never be knocked down,” because I do believe that some of them aren’t destined to live forever. But the VMC precedes Portland’s sports scene as we know it now. It’s older than the Portland Trail Blazers or the Timbers, and the Portland Buckaroos played hockey in it. Good grief, the Beatles and Elvis Presley played the VMC. I would argue that the Stanley Cup’s recent visit in Portland would have made more sense in the Coliseum than in the Moda, which was built in 1995.

And even with all this history, the VMC is still maintaining relevance and diversifying. Portland’s “Fright Town” haunted house was a big hit this year, and the Rose City Rollers call the Coliseum home. It still serves the title of “multipurpose facility” that was proposed and acted on in 1959.

Those Winterhawks fans that only appear for Moda Center home games, and especially for those combing the various local websites referring to the VMC as a dump, I get it. The bathrooms remind us all of middle school gym class and need renovation, the building has a kind of subterranean feel to it, and the city has to eat the cost if the site’s revenue doesn’t pick up. In a perfect world, the Winterhawks organization could buy the building to preserve and improve it the way they did two years ago on a regular basis.

But let’s be honest, we don’t need another shopping mall and we don’t need a film production studio that can be rented out maybe once per year if we’re lucky. If those were viable options that could make the city some money, they would have tried it by now. The Rose Quarter is about sports in Portland, and with such a crowded main arena, I think Winterhawks fans in particular should count ourselves lucky that there’s a building so dedicated to our sport and the history of our city’s hockey legacy.