NCC boss onside with monument
Lemay proposes rink beside statue of Lord Stanley BY DAVE ROGERS, THE OTTAWA CITIZENAPRIL 30, 2010
The idea of an Ottawa hockey monument featuring Lord Stanley and his cup has so captured the imagination of the National Capital Commission's chief executive that she is proposing a national outdoor hockey rink on Chaudière Island beside the statue. Marie Lemay said she was not at first a hockey fan, but now recognized the importance of the game to Canadians. "I have come to realize that it is not just a sport, it is (also) part of our fibre," Lemay told the Citizen's editorial board on Thursday. "When you look at the Olympics and what inspires us, I think hockey is right there. I really do hope we will find a prominent place for the memorial.
"If we ever owned it, Chaudière Island would be a perfect place for the memorial, and I would put beside it an NHL hockey rink outdoors with a park. We could have a wonderful inspiring core to our capital, but for that we would have to own the land first." Lemay said the hockey memorial should be in a special place in the capital, but added she had not spoken to other NCC officials about it. "It is just me and I have never talked to people on staff about it, but can you imagine if it was outdoors and you had different provinces coming and you could build around it with the Stanley Cup memorial?" One of the main questions about the proposed monument to Lord Stanley of Preston and his gift to Canada, the original Stanley Cup, remains where to put it.
Historian Paul Kitchen has proposed a grand, 20-metre statue of the former governor general and his silver bowl anchoring a large plaza in the downtown core.
Kitchen suggested the project last year in an op-ed article in the Citizen. Businessman Bruce Firestone, founding president of the Ottawa Senators, read the article and called Kitchen to offer his services. Firestone now heads the committee's hunt for a site. The committee, calling itself Lord Stanley's Gift (LSG), has had promising talks with the NCC and the City of Ottawa, Kitchen said, but decided to launch its own site-selection competition to see what other possibilities existed. Firestone said building an outdoor hockey rink beside the monument was a wonderful idea and Chaudière Island would be a terrific site. He said the committee was seeking any other site suggestions by May 17.
"This is a symbol that belongs to all Canadians and the world," Firestone said. "It was a gift made by Lord Stanley, our governor general, in 1892. I am 100-per-cent on side with the idea of having active elements associated with it. The final decision on the site will be made by the committee, our advisors and all the stakeholders, including the National Capital Commission and the City of Ottawa." The committee proposing the monument wants a prominent piece of land in downtown Ottawa large enough for the statue and a 500-square-metre plaza for public gatherings. The site would be strictly a pedestrian space and as close as possible to the spot where Lord Stanley originally donated the Cup in 1892 on ground now occupied by the National War Memorial. Ottawa architect Barry Padolsky will advise the committee about the choice of a site for the project. © Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports/boss+onside+with+monument/2968994/story.html
City on track to score Stanley Cup — for keeps
NCC panel, official back plan to erect super-sized monument that celebrates trophy’s origins BY RANDY BOSWELL, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN APRIL 28, 2010 6:20 AM
The original Stanley Cup with a photo of Lord Stanley of Preston in the background in the vault at the Great Hall at the Hockey Hall of Fame on November 9, 2009 in Toronto, Canada. Photograph by: Bruce Bennett, Getty Images
OTTAWA — The Ottawa Senators won’t be hoisting the Stanley Cup this year, but the nation’s capital is a crucial step closer to building a giant tribute to the world’s most storied sports trophy.
An ambitious plan to construct a “colossal” monument celebrating the Cup’s Ottawa origins — possibly as tall as 20 metres — has gained a ringing endorsement from a National Capital Commission historical advisory panel and the federal agency’s top official for national memorials.
“It’s such a fantastic way to celebrate our hockey history,” said Sylvie Tilden, the NCC’s senior manager of commemorations, public art and representation.
“Who in Canada can’t connect, in some fashion, to hockey?” she added. “We have, in a very unofficial sort of way, started to think about sites.”
An NCC advisory group of historians gave “a very positive response” to the idea, said Tilden, summarizing the expert committee’s reaction as: “Wow, this is a real good one.”
That puts the super-sized Cup dream — first proposed last year by Ottawa author and hockey historian Paul Kitchen in a Citizen op-ed article — on a fast track to reality.
The NCC is the government’s principal agent for erecting monuments in the capital and controls vast tracts of real estate around Parliament Hill and throughout downtown.
That includes land near the former hotel site where, in March 1892, it was announced that governor general Lord Stanley of Preston would donate a silver bowl symbolizing Canadian amateur hockey supremacy.
Kitchen’s campaign to create the Cup monument — which last year gained a symbolic nod of approval from the city’s municipal government — has also attracted high-profile support from ex-NHLer and former HockeyCanada president Murray Costello (now a vice-president of the International Ice Hockey Federation), the Senators’ founding owner, Bruce Firestone, and current Senators vice-president Jeff Kyle.
Those three have joined a Kitchen-chaired committee aimed at raising funds and formal government approvals for the project.
In recent weeks, the National Hockey League itself sent the group a letter of endorsement following a presentation on the proposed monument at league headquarters in New York.
Hockey Canada, the sport’s main administrative body in this country, has also given the project its blessing.
“It has got to be a work of breathtaking scale and beauty,” insists Kitchen, who believes the monument should depict both Lord Stanley and the original bowl he commissioned for the “dominion” hockey championship nearly 120 years ago.
“Everybody just seems to be so enthusiastic,” said Kitchen, whose committee has also issued an invitation to downtown businesses to propose potential monument sites.
If fundraising, a formal site-selection process and a national design competition run smoothly in the coming months, the monument could be in place by the end of 2012, Kitchen said.
One NCC-controlled site already discussed publicly as a potential location for the monument is a strip of land along the Rideau Canal next to Lansdowne Park. The Ottawa Silver Seven successfully defended the Cup in 1904 on an ice rink in the Aberdeen Pavilion.
The proximity of that and other potential sites to the Rideau Canal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has additional merit because of the waterway’s notable role in one of the most famous (though possibly apocryphal) stories in Stanley Cup lore: the alleged booting of the trophy into the canal by a member of one of Ottawa’s early championship teams.
The swirl-sided original Cup — a copy of which still sits atop the modern trophy — was famously crafted for $48.67 by a British silversmith, G.R. Collis & Co. and shipped to Canada in time for its inaugural presentation in 1893 to the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association.
In April 2006, a historical marker commemorating the Cup’s creation was placed outside a downtown London jewelry shop occupying the former Collis site where the trophy was made.
However, the roots of the iconic object — the original bowl now kept in a heavily secured vault at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto — can undoubtedly be traced to Ottawa, where Lord Stanley’s sons and daughter learned to play hockey and the viceregal representative himself enjoyed watching the fast-paced winter sport.
During a sports banquet held on March 18, 1892, at the city’s long-gone Russell House Hotel — now a plaza next to the National War Memorial — a message read from Lord Stanley signalled the birth of the national game’s ultimate artifact.
“I have for some time past been thinking that it would be a good thing if there were a challenge cup which should be held from year to year by the champion hockey team in the Dominion,” Lord Stanley stated. “There does not appear to be any such outward and visible sign of championship at present, and, considering the general interest which the matches now elicit, and the importance of having the game played fairly and under rules generally recognized, I am willing to give a cup which shall be held from year to year by the winning team.”
Kitchen, a retired librarian and former president of the Society for International Hockey Research, has authored the definitive book about Ottawa’s early hockey history and championed other commemorative projects in the city, including the erection of a historical marker at an old rink site — along Ottawa’s Gladstone Avenue — where the Silver Seven once won the Cup in hockey’s pre-NHL days.
The original 18.5-cm-high Cup has long since been transformed into a metre-tall, multi-tiered professional prize, awarded annually to the NHL champion and recognized instantly by hockey fans around the world.
It has been 17 years since a Canadian club (the 1992-93 Montreal Canadiens) last won Lord Stanley’s fruit bowl, by far the longest stretch of time between victories by a team from the trophy’s home nation in its 118-year history.
And, with the Senators’ early exit from this year’s NHL playoffs, courtesy of defending Cup champs Sidney Crosby and his Pittsburgh Penguins, just the underdog Canadiens and the Vancouver Canucks — a solid contender for that city’s first modern-era Cup win — are left to challenge for the 2010 title.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
UPDATE: Group seeks real estate for Stanley Cup monument
Jim Donnelly, Ottawa Business Journal
A local not-for-profit wants to create a monument dedicated to the Stanley Cup, and has launched a site competition to locate the most ideal downtown spot for such a project. Topics : Ottawa Senators , Russell House Hotel ,Ottawa , Canada , BordenLadnerGervaisLLP WorldExchangePlaza 100 Queen Street
The group, which calls itself Lord Stanley's Gift, said it envisions the monument as a "national and international landmark for Ottawa and Canada," adding it hopes to find a "prominent" downtown location as close as possible to where the cup was first donated by Lord Stanley.
The group consists of local businessperson and founder of the Ottawa Senators Bruce Firestone, hockey historians Paul Kitchen and Jim McAuley, former Hockey Canada president Murray Costello, George Hunter of Borden Ladner Gervais, Welch LLP's Charles Logue, former Liberal MPP and cabinet minister Richard Patten, Ottawa Senators executive Jeff Kyle and Sylvie Bigras, the press chief officer of the Canadian Olympic team from 2010.
"I'm honoured to be associated with the citizen's committee to erect a grand scale monument to Lord Stanley's cup, given by Lord Stanley on March 18, 1892 to all Canadians, and indeed, to the world," said Mr. Firestone, when reached by OBJ. "It's time to create something really extraordinary that every Canadian can be proud of, and what better place than Ottawa, the birthplace of the Cup."
Lord Stanley of Preston, the sixth governor general of Canada, donated the now-famous cup at the Russell House Hotel in Ottawa – located on the site of today's Confederation Square – way back in 1892.
Since then, the trophy has evolved into a national icon that's been won, drank from, left in a snowbank, stolen and found again, dented and even drop-kicked into the Rideau Canal, though the latter incident occurred more than a century ago.
Historian Paul Kitchen told OBJ that when Lord Stanley arrived in Canada in 1888, he observed a game of shinny for the first time at a Montreal winter carnival.
He liked the furious pace so much, six of his sons and a daughter eventually became involved in the sport.
Stanley's sons often played at an outdoor rink at Rideau Hall, Mr. Kitchen explained. But hockey in Ottawa reached the next level when in 1889 an indoor skating rink opened on the site of the current Faculty of Arts building at the University of Ottawa.
Lord Stanley, Mr. Kitchen explained, was a shareholder in that rink - the Rideau Canal Skating Rink, one of the first indoor rinks in the country. Stanley's sons would then form a competitive hockey team called the Rideau Rebels, who played out of the Rideau facility.
"And all this inspired Stanley to contribute to the growing significance of the game," said Mr. Kitchen, whose recent book Win, Tie or Wrangle: The Inside Story Of The Old Ottawa Senators describes the original era of Ottawa's Senators hockey club, which dates back to 1883.
LSG said that after a site is selected, a national design competition for the monument will be undertaken.
It plans to unveil the finished product, which is expected to consist of a monument 10 to 20 metres tall, in 2012.