The Calgary Flames are getting a new home.
We’ve known that the new arena has been coming for awhile. But we didn’t know its name (Scotia Place) or what it would look like until late July at the groundbreaking. And even then, potentially because the designs were being tweaked during the review process with the planning commission, the full version of the plans weren’t publicly available.
Well, with Scotia Place getting its day at City Hall on Thursday for what’s likely to be its final approval from the planning commission, we finally can get a detailed look. (Check out the plans for yourself here!)
Here’s what we found noteworthy, broken out into the exteriors, the public areas of the arena, and the private areas of the arena.

Exteriors

First off, the project team put a bunch of updated renderings into the submission package: we cherry-picked our two favourites.
Here’s the view from Scotsman’s Hill:
Here’s the view of the southwest entrance – the corner of Stampede Trail and 14th Avenue SE.
Alright, so what stands out?
The street activations are a bit more defined now: four street level patios and two public seating areas.
There are two patio areas on the north side on 12th Avenue – one outside the restaurant (“Wood Fire Grill”) and one in front of the food hall beside the Stephenson & Co. grocery entrance – another one along Stampede Trail on the west side outside the sports bar (“Gathering Place”) down towards the southeast entrance, and one along 14th Avenue on the south side just outside the indoor plaza. There’s some public seating on the 12th Avenue (north) side and some more on the 14th Avenue (south) side that aren’t on patios.
There look to be some slight changes to the public park area on the corner of 14th Avenue and 5A Street (the southeast corner). There don’t seem to be basketball courts or anything not, but rather a big artificial grass patch now aimed towards unstructured play and gatherings. The seating beside it is a bit more defined than in past versions – raised wooden steps at the edge of the park area. On the other side of that space is the “Home Fire” area – a big cauldron with a fire in it, designed to be a space that people gather around.
This image from the submission package is a decent overview of all of the different public spaces.

Public arena areas

General notes
The arena will have a listed capacity of 18,400, with the seating split into two main levels, plus a fairly large suites level and some premium seating in-between.
There are several spaces accessible from the street level: four eateries, the team store, the ticketing office, an indoor plaza, and the community rink.
The four eateries are a two story sports bar (“Gathering Place”) with a rooftop patio (capacity 255), a cocktail lounge (capacity 100), a restaurant (“Wood Fire Grill”; capacity 122) and a food hall (capacity 95). The sports bar seems to be the spiritual successor to Dutton’s, but with a lot more integration into the street level. The other three are entirely new concepts.
Once fans are inside, here are the listed food options:
  • Main concourse: Pizza, Korean Corn Dogs, Lucky Cat Vietnamese Subs, Grab & Go (x4), Burger & Brew (x2), Pocket Dawg (x2), Malt & Mini Donuts (x2), Angry Chicken, and access to the food hall, which has Bowls & Salads, Dumplings & Buns and Tandoor
  • Upper concourse: Pocket Dawg, Grab & Go (x3), Burgers & Brew (x3), Fried Chicken (x2), Korean Corn Dog and Malt & Mini Donuts
  • There are bar areas at the end of either concourse as well, so nobody will go without a beverage.
For you people that love washrooms, great news, there are washrooms. A lot of them. There are eight spaces on the main concourse (four men’s and four women’s, with some men’s room space able to flex when additional capacity is needed) and 16 smaller spaces on the upper concourse (including several flex spaces).
If you think Sportsnet doing their live intermission hits from a folding table is awkward, good news, there’s a dedicated on the upper concourse labelled “Auxiliary Broadcast,” presumably for that purpose.
One thing I hate about the Saddledome is how bottle-necked the end zones of the concourse get during intermissions. In general, I don’t know if the concourse is physically larger in Scotia Place – I don’t have enough information to compare them – but you can kind of tell that they’re trying to address how cramped things are with their design choices.
  • There are more washrooms in Scotia Place, which should reduce lines spilling into the concourse.
  • They’re alternating washrooms and food areas, so that you won’t have two concessions with lines on either side of the concourse, which should make walking around a bit easier – you might not need to wiggle your way around two conflicting lines in a short space.
  • The end zone of the concourses are open, so that you can see into the bowl. Again, I don’t know if the concourse spaces are actually bigger, but they’ll probably feel less cramped.
Here’s the main concourse.
Here’s the upper concourse.
Club seating
For the well-off fans, there are a lot of interesting spaces included.
On the event level, there are three “bunker suites” near the Flames’ locker room and the “Founders Club,” which has private bathrooms and is located behind the two player benches. Based on the plans, it appears that there are windows on either side so the big-wigs there can watch both teams walk out to the ice.
On the club mezzanine, there are two club areas – on the north and south sides – with access to the lower bowl, plus the back-of-house kitchen and food prep space.
On the premium level, there’s the “Legends Club” that spans the entire west end zone, an owners lounge in the southeast corner of the level (with no rink view), and then 52 suites.
Community rink
The community rink has two levels, both below grade. The upper level has the main concourse, where the washrooms, concession stand and 1,000 seat viewing area are accessible. The lower level has the locker rooms – four total – and the ice. The lower level is connected to the main arena’s event areas via hallways (with a few doors), so the Flames, Wranglers, Hitmen or any visiting teams would be able to wander down to practice there on days the main sheet is unavailable. (The Flames’ locker room has the shortest walk to this rink, though.)
Finally, this cross-section shows off the general structure and elevation of Scotia Place’s levels.

Private arena areas

These areas probably won’t be as exciting to fans, but they’ll be things that make the operation of the building better.
Locker rooms and event space
There are separate locker room areas for the Flames, Wranglers and Hitmen. The Flames have own fitness and team areas, while the Wranglers and Hitmen share a few spaces – primarily fitness areas There’s also a locker room that the Roughnecks will share with visiting teams, and a large AHL/WHL visitors locker room space that looks to have a partition so it can be turned into two rooms. In theory, six teams could be comfortably posted up at Scotia Place at the same time.
In addition, there an entirely separate area for concerts with a green room, tour room, and a series of offices and dressing rooms. This is on the entirely separate side of the event level, close to the loading docks, so in theory the teams could be doing their thing on concert days without disruption. That is not the case with the Saddledome, which has necessitated the teams scrambling to find practice ice on those days.
The Flames’ office space is all located on the premium level, tucked above the team store on Stampede Trail and the north side of the building.
Media areas
Without getting into too much inside baseball, the design of the media areas is so much more functional. There’s a dedicated press conference space, a media workroom, and all of the broadcast booths and press seating are on the same side, so there will be no more nerve-wracking catwalk trips required. There are also set-backs within the hallways outside of the two main locker room areas – the Flames’ room and the visitors’ room – to facilitate interview spaces, rather than having everything spill out and block traffic flow in the hallways. (The hope is this building will be busy, so they’re seemingly anticipating operational needs with these design choices.)
Have any questions about the Scotia Place plans that we didn’t answer? Hit up Ryan on social media (RyanNPike on Twitter and BlueSky) or e-mail him at Ryan [at] TheNationNetwork.com!

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