Northeastern University Multipurpose Athletic Facility | 262 St. Botolph Street | Fenway

I don't like the old one or the new one.:D
 
Longfellow said:
There is an argument that NEU let it decay on purpose cause they wanted a new arena. Whether that's true who knows, but it's not exactly an institution known for their scruples.
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If Northeastern had not bought the arena in 1979 it would have been demolished by the MDC.

The building straddled the original Boston shoreline. The western side was settling faster than the eastern side. It would have cost $100,000,000 to prop up the western end, remove the soil, replace it with fill and reset the building. And what you would have is a 115-year-old building that is ugly as spit!

While Northeastern has a lot more money than it once had, it is not Harvard or Yale wealthy.
 
BronsonShore said:
This is a totally irrelevant non-sequitur of a response to what I wrote, especially on a board that exists to discuss the built environment. There are many, many things I cannot pay for that I nonetheless think society should collectively value. And there are many, many things I think society should collectively value despite them not being the most economically efficient use of any given funding source. "Can you personally pay for a connection between the red and blue line?? If not than I guess it's too expensive!"
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This is the original entry. Would you want this restored?

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BronsonShore said:
This is a totally irrelevant non-sequitur of a response to what I wrote, especially on a board that exists to discuss the built environment. There are many, many things I cannot pay for that I nonetheless think society should collectively value. And there are many, many things I think society should collectively value despite them not being the most economically efficient use of any given funding source. "Can you personally pay for a connection between the red and blue line?? If not than I guess it's too expensive!"
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It's actually not. There are so many of you that think it's "so affordable" to just spend money to maintain something that is old and decaying. It's not. Every decision has context and it's not solely money. Northeastern wants to build amore modern facility for their athletic department. If they can't tear down Matthews Arena, they would need to build it elsewhere. It's not easy to buy land to build a new stadium. No one wants to pony up and buy the Matthews Arena from them. The fact that no one wants to means that it is too expensive.

What y'all are calling for is charity but it's so easy to call for charity when it's not coming from your wallet. Y'all aren't the one paying growing maintenence cost year after year to keep a 100+ year old structure standing and y'all aren't paying to attend events or donating money to the arena.
 
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KentXie said:
It's actually not. There are so many of you that think it's "so affordable" to just spend money to maintain something that is old and decaying. It's not. Every decision has context and it's not solely money. Northeastern wants to build amore modern facility for their athletic department. If they can't tear down Matthews Arena, they would need to build it elsewhere. It's not easy to buy land to build a new stadium. No one wants to pony up and buy the Matthews Arena from them. The fact that no one wants to means that it is too expensive.

What y'all are calling for is charity but it's so easy to call for charity when it's not coming from your wallet. Y'all aren't the one paying growing maintenence cost year after year to keep a 100+ year old structure standing and y'all aren't paying to attend events or donating money to the arena.
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I'm not sure what you think you're telling me that I don't already know. I am aware that it would be expensive to rehab Matthews Arena. I am also aware that Northeastern wants to build a shiny modern facility that will also be expensive (at least $350 million being the number I most recently read). What I am lamenting is the fact that our society almost always values the shiny, new mediocre thing instead of preserving the historic and unique thing that provides an experience that will never again exist on this Earth once its gone.

"My wallet" is completely irrelevant. And as for "you're calling for charity," we're talking about a non-profit that needs to raise funds to build the new arena, just as it would have needed to raise funds if it decided to save Matthews. It's "charity" either way.
 
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I mean the experience that we're trying to preserve in Matthews is A) whatever historic aspect it had, so that's intangible but B) the intimacy of the arena, and when colleges enrich themselves at any cost as much as NEU has, and paid for as good a hockey team as they have, they don't want to have that arena, they want the flashiest, ugliest thing money can buy because like any school, it's run by lawyers with bad taste. They are not gonna spend money to rebuild a small arena. They want to be the God of Roxbury. This is their McMansion, their black Chevy Tahoe, their equivalent of naming your kid Hunter and Mason and taking them to Disney world five times a year.
 
KentXie said:
It's actually not. There are so many of you that think it's "so affordable" to just spend money to maintain something that is old and decaying. It's not.

What y'all are calling for is charity but it's so easy to call for charity when it's not coming from your wallet. Y'all aren't the one paying growing maintenence cost year after year …
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Couldn’t you say that about any old building? Who’s paying to maintain the Copley Library or Trinity Church?
 
All these posters lamenting the demolition of Matthews, did you also lament the demolition of the old Boston Garden?
 
TomOfBoston said:
All these posters lamenting the demolition of Matthews, did you also lament the demolition of the old Boston Garden?
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Was the Boston Garden the oldest hockey arena in the world at the time of its demolition?

Well, no, it wouldn’t have been because Matthews predated it by 18 years. :rolleyes:
 
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TomOfBoston said:
All these posters lamenting the demolition of Matthews, did you also lament the demolition of the old Boston Garden?
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Many many people do lament the loss of the old Garden. It was a building with considerable architectural and historical merit, but it was sadly no longer fit for use by a 21st century American professional hockey or basketball team. I think that a lot of the mechanical and ventilation issues could have been resolved, but it was just undersized and it couldn't be expanded. The Matthews Arena on the other hand, is a collapsing wreck without any architectural merit.
 
The Garden had notoriously bad sound and sightlines so it was also unfit for concerts. Both of these arenas are in essentially the same urban place, that takes the sting off. The history still happened in that same place that I can go to watch a game
 
TomOfBoston said:
All these posters lamenting the demolition of Matthews, did you also lament the demolition of the old Boston Garden?
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As great as the Hub on Causeway is, I wish they had kept the shell of the old Garden for some adaptive reuse, like the Montreal Forum or Maple Leaf Gardens - the latter of which is still a hockey arena, with a 3000 seat capacity rink for Ryerson University at the top of the structure, over a supermarket.

And, hey, that would have been a cool idea to get Northeastern a new arena 30 years ago, but that ship has long sailed.
 
Arenacale said:
As great as the Hub on Causeway is, I wish they had kept the shell of the old Garden for some adaptive reuse, like the Montreal Forum or Maple Leaf Gardens - the latter of which is still a hockey arena, with a 3000 seat capacity rink for Ryerson University at the top of the structure, over a supermarket.

And, hey, that would have been a cool idea to get Northeastern a new arena 30 years ago, but that ship has long sailed.
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Ryerson University is now Toronto Metropolitan University. Mr. Ryerson was cancelled for what he did over a hundred years ago.
 
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