Winklerites got their first peek at what the revitalized Winkler Centennial Arena is going to look like a year from now.
The City last week shared a few concept images of the ice and seating areas of the Park St. rink, which is currently being gutted as part of a $23.75 million renovation project.
“I think when we first announced the project, everybody was excited about it, but until you have a visual to see what it’s going to look like, it’s difficult to know what to get excited about,” observed Mayor Henry Siemens. “So as we’ve shared these images now, it allows people to get a really good feel for what that is.
“And it allows people to get an understanding of one of the key concepts, the key differences that will be there,” he added, “in that you’re going to be walking down to your seat now, rather than up to your seat as you did at the old arena.”
Having people walking down into the seating area was a design choice that comes with a number of benefits, the mayor shared.
“From a safety point of view, from a sight line point of view … and certainly for the look and feel of the hockey experience, we wanted to create a bowl that allows that whole area to be built around the ice surface.”
The renovations will add about 500 seats to the arena, a mix of traditional bench seating at either end of the ice surface and, new to the facility, individual seats along the length of the rink. There will also be significantly more standing room viewing space.
“We worked very closely with the Winkler Flyers and our other user groups to try to get the right size,” Siemens noted. “We’ve had them along for this conversation the entire way.
“Each one of those groups ultimately was comfortable with this configuration because it allowed us, for the vast majority of anything that we’re going to do, to have enough seats, and then the standing room would be able to tackle the rest of it.”
The renos will move the arena’s entrance to the Meridian Exhibition Centre’s southwest corner, build new dressing rooms, and bring the aging building’s mechanical and electrical systems up to modern standards.
Siemens says the project has been moving along nicely since it began earlier this fall.
“One of the things that we’re pleasantly surprised about is the quality of this build in 1967, in terms of what’s there,” he said.
Structural upgrades they believed they’d have tackle have proven to be unnecessary in many cases.
“As we started digging in and started testing the tensile strength of our steel and started looking at the piles underneath and those things where we had thought we would need to add more, we actually haven’t had to add as much as we anticipated,” Siemens said. “We’re finding that the bones of this arena are still really, really good. It speaks to the quality of the construction back then, speaks to the quality of the investment by the council of the day that made sure that the facility they built back then for 50 years is now 56 years old and still in really good shape.
“We have been almost universally pleasantly surprised,” he continued, noting they did find some asbestos that needed to be removed, but that was expected in a building of this age. “At this point in time, now that the demolition piece is done and we’re going to start towards the construction piece, I would say we’re very happy with how everything has gone.”
The plan is to have the work done by the end of 2025. The final result will be a rink that will serve the community for generations, Siemens said.
“We have a really good team who’s been very, very good at finding the efficiencies and finding the benefits that allow us to hopefully build something that the community is going to be very proud of.”
