>It's all gone now.

Finished.

The New Haven Veteran's Memorial Coliseum.

Just a few blocks from the ancient green in this Connecticut city.

In complete, eaten by rust, corroded by salt.

The Coliseum brooded for a generation over downtown New Haven's southern gateway.

As if retrieved against it's will from antiquity.

Many imagine its state of rough decay reflected their awesome gods of pop culture who performed there.

Rock starts, hockey players, pro wrestlers, legends, divas.

In January 2007, thousands blissfully gathered to witness the final spectacle of the building's implosion.

But the festive mood darkened when the cloud kindled by the collapse dispersed, revealing the end of something else altogether.

Washington in the early 1960s when ambitions to reshape urban America and the public treasure to pay for it converged.

On a flight from Washington to Connecticut, New Haven mayor Richard C. Lee met architect Kevin Roche.

In less than a decade in office, Lee had converted New Haven from a gritty industrial town to what his admirers called, a model city.

But he had more work to do.

Roche's future likewise looked promising.

He inherited the practice of architect Eero Saarinen when he died and pursued a bold vision of modern design.

Amid the tumultuous 1960s, Lee assigned the architect to design the dramatic capstone to the reformation of New Haven.

A building the mayor portrayed as “this great Coliseum designed by a great architect for a great city ”.

>>Dick had a great energy and great drive.

He had a winning personality as the old story goes, he got more money out of Washington than any other mayor in the country did, and I could believe that, I could believe that that was true because he was very persuasive and very engaging - and extraordinary personality.

>Although steeped in Irish-American working class culture, Lee reflected New Haven's puritan obsession with order.

The 17th century founders of the town arranged commercial and community life on nine squares, centered on a church and a public green.

The plan endured even as New Haven grew and residents shed traditions of self-denial, to watch touring entertainment shows and local sports in the late 19th century.

Yale college football captured the attention of thousands on fields to the west of the nine squares.

When winter deepened and ponds froze, the school's hockey team attracted a following of its own.

In the extraordinary year of 1914, new venues opened for football and hockey, changing New Haven sports and entertainment history.

For football, the college finished the Yale Bowl, the largest amphitheatre built since the Roman Coliseum.

To the northeast of the green, the Arena Centerfreze Company erected New Haven's first indoor hockey rink next to it's artificial ice plant.

Three times larger than any public hall in New Haven, the Centerfreze Arena sat 3,000 spectators and offered standing room for 2,000 more.

While the Yale Bowl reflected the football team's national prominence, the Arena surprisingly revealed New Haven to be a hockey town at heart.

Gazing in wonder at the two buildings, the Yale class of 1914 historian wrote “The Gods on Olympus will sigh with envy ”" On January 28, 1914, more than 2,000 people watched indoor hockey in New Haven for the first time.

A local sports writer said, “Hockey is gonna go here.

” The envious gods, however, let the Yale Bowl be and focused their wrath on the indoor arena.

Yale lost to Princeton and it's immortal player, Hobie Baker in the opening game.

Ten years later, fire destroyed the arena.

Then, construction on a new arena stalled when the owner died.

Endangering the future of Yale hockey.

It took a Russian immigrant named Abraham Podoloff who had Yale connections and real estate interests to step in and finish it.

Podoloff asked his sons, Maurice, Jacob and Nathan, a civil engineer, for help.

>>The one problem that he faced other than finishing the design and putting up the building was the commitment to Yale which said that the building would be ready for occupancy for the Yale-Harvard hockey game of that year, which gave him four months to put up the building.

>The façade reflected the colligate gothic veneer of Yale's campus.

Tablets depicting a hockey player and a boxer flanking Lady Victory lorded over the arena entrance, drawing comparisons to a house of worship.

Inside, 3,600 seats and dasher boards topped by steel meshing encircled the ice rink.

With Yale secured as a prime attraction, the Podoloff's created the New Haven Eagles pro hockey team and joined the Canadian/American League.

On January 17th 1927, the Eagles opened the New Haven Arena with a loss to Springfield.

The following night, Yale dropped it's opening game at the new building, just as it had at the first arena 13 years earlier.

Yale's collegiate hockey games feature fast end to end skating and stick handling.

The New Haven Eagles played a rowdier style that appealed to working class fans.

To keep the building humming, Nathan Podoloff assembled an empire of ice and entertainment after his father Abraham died in 1929.

>>Many of the first shows were started by individual skaters or performers or arena managers who went out looking for talent and then put together an attraction which then became an attraction in the building which they sold to the public in the form of entertainment.

>With hockey out of season and the ice removed, the arena welcomed automobile shows, the circus, and boxing matches.

Even though built for hockey, the arena struggled to sell enough tickets during the long pro hockey season to support a team.

The original New Haven Eagles become a founder member of the American Hockey League in 1936, yet were disbanded a decade later.

In 1946, the National Hockey League's New York Rangers, organized The Haven Ramblers as the top American Hockey League affiliate.

To introduce the sport to a new generation at the arena, Rambler's coach Lyn Patrick created Pee Wee hockey shortly after arriving.

Children from 9 to 14 played, instituting a Saturday family ritual.

It wasn't enough, the Ramblers folded in 1950, leading a parade of pro teams that failed in the early '50s.

In 1954, a new team, christened The New Haven Blades joined the Eastern Hockey League the same year Richard C. Lee became mayor of the city.

Hockey fans growing up in the New Haven area would come to view the Blades as inseparable from the city as the titlist green itself.

And like them, the team would be swept up and eventually swept away by cultural upheaval and monumental changes to come under the new mayor.

A former newspaper reporter and Yale publicist, Richard C. Lee promised to revitalize the city, shedding jobs and residents at an alarming rate.

>>He thought that if you could cure up the specific ills of those neighborhoods, the city of New Haven would return to the same kind of prosperity it had enjoyed before the Great Depression.

>Urban planner Maurice Rotival greeted mayor Lee with plans he first proposed a decade earlier.

Refashioned, New Haven's colonial grid for the 20th century.

Lee leveled an aging neighborhood south of downtown and convinced Connecticut highway officials to build the Oak Street Connector, an expressway that plunged into Old New Haven from the Connecticut Turnpike, skirting the city's harbor.

Later, the mayor cleared downtown New Haven's unruly thicket of tenements, billboards and traffic south of the green to create destinations for suburban motorists.

The Chapel Square Mall and an office tower rose above the green.

New Haven's venerable Malley Department store and Macy's of New York, filled in the gap between the mall and the connector.

A parking garage that simultaneously referenced an ancient Roman aqueduct and reflected the triumph of contemporary suburban life, unfolded behind the stores.

Yet, this invitation to an easy on, easy off city, did little to reverse New Haven's slide.

In notes scribbled in the late 1950's, the planner Rotival asserted that a cultural upheaval triggered by growing suburban families, free time and television needed to be channeled into a new multi-sports palace for New Haven to survive.

By the mid 1960's, Lee would retrieve Rotival's idea for a palace to save his city.

Alan Freed's Rock 'n Roll Party and here he is in person - Alan Freed!

Hi everybody, how are you all?

Well to our Rock and Roll jubilee of stars and here we go rocking with Benny Mitchell and the Rock and Roll Boogie!

♪ ♪ [sings "Rock and Roll Boogie] The convergence of new highways, television and transistorized life, animated the underlying cultural tensions that urban planner Rotival detected.

Unlike the mayor, arena owner Podoloff welcomed the change.

He had little choice.

In 1958, Yale hockey left the arena for it's new Ingalls Rink.

Podoloff worked with promoters to fill open dates with acts playing the music the teens craved - Rock and Roll.

Mayor Lee objected.

He ordered police to ban disc jockey, Alan Freed's Rock show in 1958.

Six years later, Yale likewise keep Rock and Roll at bay when it refused to allow the Beatles to perform at the Yale Bowl after a benefactor threatened to withhold donations if the concert took place.

With land on which to build running out, Mayor Lee reveled a two part plan to revive New Haven in 1965.

In April he announced that the Knights of Columbus planned to build a new headquarters next to the connector and hired architect Kevin Roche to design it.

When hearing the news, Yale secretary Rubin Holden claimed, "New Haven will certainly be the Athens of the 20th century."

Six months later, Mayor Lee presented this new Athens with a temple to the gods of the 20th century - a Coliseum.

He appointed Roche to design the sports and entertainment arena in unison with the Knights of Columbus building, to form a signature gateway to New Haven.

Both would rise on the last empty lot between the connector and the Green.

Out of a veneer of fill that laminated what was once the city's waterfront.

>>When they started the excavation for the Knights of Columbus building, they came up with pier pilings from the days when the New Haven Harbor came right up virtually to that corner.

>Meanwhile a car accident in New Haven landed a Korean War veteran from New York named Tom McCormack in a local hospital.

He met a nurse named Marilyn, decided to stay and found work as a sports writer assigned to cover the New Haven Blades.

The Dublin born Roche moved to Connecticut from Michigan after his mentor, Eero Saarinen died in 1961.

He wanted to be close to the booming design business for suburban corporate headquarters.

Roche had already secured notice with his own work including the Oakland Museum in California where he integrated indoor and outdoor spaces.

Roche's design for the high school project he landed after meeting Mayor Lee on a flight from Washington, pointed to the impact of new highways rippling through urban America.

Planted Southwest of the connector and swaddled in concrete, the school resembled the contour and material of the interstate system, it was later named for Mayor Lee.

Roche refined his ideas to meet the interstates incomprehensible scale and sense of urgency in his Knights of Columbus building.

The cluster of towers pinned next to the Oak Street Connector, ascended above the expressway and defined approaches to New Haven from nearby interstates 95 and 91.

The Coliseum required a similar muscular profile and materials.

With an enormous design and engineering constraints.

Apart from that challenge, Roche identified an unwelcome consequence, so foreboding, that he stopped work on the design.

With a limited number of hockey games, concerts and events to go around, the Coliseum would be dark a third of the year.

He suggest the project include a symphony hall, theatre and a restaurant to sustain vitality in the neighborhood.

Mayor Lee declined and asked Roche to return to his drawing table.

Roche and his chief engineer, John Dinkeloo had to squeeze a 10,000 seat arena, a 38,000 square foot exhibition hall and parking for 2,400 cars on just eight and a half acres.

>>We did a lot of research and visited 15 or 20 other similar facilities and developed a program and realized that we had to have 2400 cars for a viable proposition and accommodating 2400 cars would have taken not only the site, but four other lots adjacent to that.

So the issue of what to do with the cars became one of the primary problems in developing the design for the Coliseum itself.

>Roche sketched four possible configurations for the garage.

On his tour of arenas to inform his design, Roche studied Cobo Hall in Detroit, where cars parked on the roof.

>>It was a very radical idea and we had to think a lot about it and how to do it, how to get the cars up.

How to do the structure and all that.

But that became the most logical from a planning point of view to do.

>Roche's concept focused on a ground level arena, he wrapped offices, locker rooms and other spaces around it.

Instead of encircling the floor, seats climbed in four tiered boxes - the exhibition hall platform stretched across the street.

18 concrete piers each rising 70 feet, straddled the complex.

The Coliseum's roof sat on the piers and doubled as the first parking level.

Nine thirty foot tall trusess held the parking levels above the roof in place.

Two larger trusses carried the garage over the arena floor, eliminating obstructions.

Roche finished with two ramps called helixes to get cars in and out of the garage.

To convey spectators from their cars in the garage to the arena below, Roche attached long escalators connected the concourse above the street.

For pedestrians, concrete stairs met the streets to the north and south entrances to the concourse level.

Inside, Roche camouflaged the concrete of the parking garage and the massive duct work with a drop ceiling and panels.

Outside, he applied tiles to unify the exterior of the Coliseum with the Knights of Columbus building.

Roche softened the Coliseum's massive visual presence by wrapping the exhibition hall, escalators and entrance in glass.

He attached translucent panels to the garage so it would appear to float above the mass below it, particularly at night when spotted from nearby highways.

The unique design met fierce criticism from the start, leaves chief city engineer, Al Landino urge Roche to reconsider.

Would spectators think it would be safe to be sitting under thousands of cars filled with gasoline, Landino asked?

Mayor Lee dismissed such concerns and confronted instead a more pressing issue - money.

Bids to construct the Coliseum all exceed the 19.5 million dollar budget, forcing a dramatic reassessment of the plan.

In response, Roche edited the project.

He deleted the glass enclosed exhibition hall, removed the translucent panels for the garage, stripped tiling from the helixes and left the concrete roof and ductwork as is.

>>It was never finished.

It was three quarters of the way done and just abandoned and I think that may be the reason why it was not received by some in the community because it had an unfinished look to it.

>Ominously, a hard rain forced the ground breaking indoors on May 21st 1969.

Outside, the cultural reckoning Rotival had predicted, had already detonated.

In August 1967, riots erupted near Roche's new high school in the Hill neighborhood.

Lee imposed a curfew that lasted three nights.

The model city was falling apart.

The venerable New Haven railroad slipped into bankrupsy, it's trains battered and pockmarked with broken windows.

The escalating war in Vietnam drained money from domestic programs.

Yale smoldered with protest.

Such generational turbulence seemed unavoidable, by mid 1960s, almost half of the population of the United States was under 25.

Rock concerts at the New Haven Arena reflected the gathering forces of the baby boom generation, a loose coalition born after the second World War, that coiled around rock music.

In December 1967, police, unfamiliar with the backstage loitering's of rock stars, arrested singer Jim Morrison of the Doors on stage at the Arena.

The incident seemed to signal the intensified clashes between the old and the new that roiled New Haven over the next three years.

In August 1969, the upstart Super Bowl football champions, the New York Jets, and the old line New York Giants, played for the first time at the Yale Bowl.

Joe Namath combined the revolutionary swagger of the '60s with the self absorption of the decade to come.

He led the Jets to victory.

In Spring 1970, New Haven braced for May Day demonstrations in support of Bobby Seal, the leader of the Black Panthers, on trial for murder.

Businesses closed, plywood covered windows on the first floor of Lee's new Chapel Square Mall.

Police and the Connecticut National Guard established a command post.

Troops stood uncomfortably as pedestrians walked by until ordered away from downtown.

>>The Black Panthers at the time came to New Haven, the military, National Guard, was activated, our site became a military base.

Nobody knew what was going to happen.

It was a scary time.

>On May 1st, 15,000 demonstrators massed on the green to listen to speeches and demand freedom for Seal and his co-defendants.

Three months later, 40,000 rock fans converged on the Powder Ridge Ski Area 20 miles north of New Haven.

Anticipating a sequel to the Woodstock Festival, that drew half a million people to New York a year earlier, they camped out.

And partied on the slopes awaiting concerts by Sly and the Family Stone among others.

Instead, amid concerns over the safety of the town and concert goers, a Connecticut judge shut it down.

The first wave of the baby boom generation slouched home.

The long '60s ended with an exodus.

In October 1969, as his final day in office that December approached, Mayor Lee appeared at a rally protesting the Vietnam War.

He addressed the generation who's cultural adventures he had rejected a decade earlier, and who now prepared to shift from protest to pleasure at a building under construction just blocks away, next to the Knights of Columbus headquarters.

For three years, beginning in 1969, the Coliseum rose unevenly next to the completed Knights of Columbus tower.

Motorists speeding by on the Oak Street Connector could hardly imagine the behind the scenes problems that engineers and project managers confronted in executing Roche's complex design.

All served as prelude to the Coliseum's perilous history.

When Richard C. Lee's successor as mayor, Bartholomew Guida installed the ceremonial first steel beam in March of 1970.

Arguments were already raging over steel mats required to hold the concrete parking decks in place.

The debate occurred amid an alarming discovery by engineers who found that interstate highway bridges were falling apart in the snow belt.

>>When the interstate highway system was constructed, the high speeds and greater numbers of cars on the road led us to try to keep our roads bare in the winter time and the use of salts and de-icers was critical to that end to keep the traffic flowing.

And so as the use of salt increased more and more salt was brought into the buildings.

The effects of salt in terms of its permeation into the concrete and the effect of causing corrosion and deterioration of the structures, was really not recognized until the salt had been out there, had gone into popular use and had sufficient time to saturate into the concrete and begin to cause damage to the structures.

>Project engineers preferred thin composite steel matting to reinforce the concrete slabs about to be poured for each of the four parking decks high above the Coliseum floor.

Bethlehem Steel representatives argued that conditions in the snow belt required a thicker gauge to withstand New England weather and ice treatments.

Chief Enginene Dinkeloo staggered reinforced steel bars in the decking to strengthen the matting to satisfy concerns.

In early 1971, fears resurfaced when inspectors spotted hairline cracks in the concrete.

Nevertheless, the work continued.

Weeks later, on Memorial Day, Mayor Guida dedicated the building and officially named it, The New Haven Veteran's Memorial Coliseum.

The city raced to complete the building as it was hardly alone in the public arena business.

Already Springfield, Massachusetts and Hartford were either building or planning to construct new arenas to compete with New Haven for the sports and entertainment market.

As work on the Coliseum lurched forward, Nathan Podoloff continued to tend to his doomed arena.

The city planned to purchase and demolish the venerable home of the New Haven Blades once the new building opened and had no interest in moving the fabled ice hockey team there.

Up until the arena closed, the Harlem Globe Trotters and the circus continued to make their rounds in New Haven.

Fairfield University played host to big time college basketball teams.

And public skating and skating clubs endured.

Chief among the attractions at the arena, the Blades of the Eastern Hockey League played on Wednesday and Sunday nights amid the smoky comforts of working class entertainment.

>>When I first came to New Haven and went to hockey matches there and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, it was loud and full of beer, violent hockey and people just loved it.

>The Blades won the city's first and only pro hockey title in 1956 under player coach Don Perry who left six years later for the Long Island Ducks.

The team faltered afterward.

From his perch on the Blades beat in the '60s, sports writer Tom McCormack urged Podoloff to invite Perry back.

He agreed and returned to New Haven in 1967.

The Blades exemplified Perry's unyielding fidelity to old time hockey.

Perry, attracted like-minded players such as Blake Ball, a rugged defenseman.

And Kevin Morrison, the last of the heroic Blades worshiped by fans for his relentless play in front of the net.

The Arena's organic intimacy encouraged players and fans to bond on and off the ice.

>>When you went to a Blades game, between periods, you could stand right outside their locker-room door and when the guys left the locker-room to come back out on the ice or left the ice to come back in the locker-room, you were right there patting the guy on the back.

Telling Kevin Morrison who to go after and stuff.

So there was a real closeness to the players, you kind of felt like you knew them because you could get so close to them.

Chicken wire, guys didn't wear helmets.

So you saw them and you knew what they looked like.

You just got closer to them, I think.

>The Blades earned little more than laborers, they mingled with the residents in the diners and small stores that dotted the remains of Old New Haven.

Despite epic playoff series in their final seasons, the team and Perry could not will another pro championship for the town that loved them.

The Blades vanished at the end of the 1972 season, becoming another lost pro hockey team from New Haven.

Fans mourned.

After 45 years, New Haven Arena closed on September 29th, 1972 with a rollicking concert by Elton John.

The audience would soon look to the Coliseum for their rock gods, whether city leaders wanted rock gods in their building or not.

Before he left office, Mayor Lee asked a group assembled by local business men and former Arena rink rat, Greg McCoy, to start an American Hockey League franchise.

>>We started to talk to the fans and asked them if they wanted American Hockey League back here and if there were 2300 people in the arena or 2200 so I had no problem getting an idea of what the people wanted.

>McCoy asked Tom McCormack and other local personalities to sift through thousands of the name the team entries.

In February 1971, they picked the name, Nighthawks, New Haven's first American Hockey League team since the Ramblers.

The team hired former NHL player Parker MacDonald as its coach and worked to find an NHL affiliate to contribute players.

On his first tour of the Coliseum, MacDonald found the Nighthawks needed more than just skaters.

>>There was a lot of things that they didn't have, they didn't have penalty boxes.

They didn't have a timer's bench.

They only had one row of seats that was supposedly going to be the player's bench.

And I said, well, players could sit there, but no one else could come near them.

So I remembered the gentleman asked me, “Well, couldn't you sit up in the crowd and coach from up there?

” >A shaken Mayor Guida asked Alderman to approve 3.5 million dollars to fully outfit the Coliseum.

They agreed.

Meanwhile, the New York Islanders and the Minnesota North Stars decided to send prospects and aging veterans to the Nighthawks.

With opening night approaching, a 5'3 ” usher named Andy Paris signed on to work at the Coliseum after 40 years at the New Haven Arena.

He urged a colleague, Howard Finkle to move there with him.

>>And at the time, they were soliciting people to apply for jobs at the Coliseum in all aspects and Andy and I both agreed that we will give it a try as ushers.

>Coliseum officials scheduled the Nighthawks to open the building on September 27th 1972.

Yet, even after seven years of planning and construction, workers struggled to prepare the building up until game time.

>>The scoreboard that hung above the actual arena was on the floor, we weren't quite sure we were going to get it off the floor for the first event that night.

I think an hour before the game it was still sitting there.

We were fortunate to be able to get that up and get it in place.

By the time people started coming into the event, it was there.

It was a pretty impressive scoreboard hanging up above the ice and nobody ever knew that we were running around like crazy fools trying to figure out how we were going to get it up there.

>Finally the doors opened and a Connecticut indoor record crowd of 8,111 including Mayor Guida watched as the Nighthawks play the Minnesota Northstars of the National Hockey League.

Unlike Yale at the Centerfreze Rink in 1914, or the Eagles 13 years later at the New Haven Arena, the Nighthawks did not lose their first home game, they tied one to one.

The game heralded the Coliseum as the place for middle-class suburban entertainment.

Promoters quickly booked acts to meet demand prompted in no small measure by curious spectators who wanted to see the odd looking building that seemed dropped in New Haven from parts unknown.

>>It looked Jurassic.

I mean, it looked like something out of all proportion to the human scale of those mixed use neighborhoods around it.

>Tom McCormack later observed that it presents a face that only a steel worker could love.

A letter to the editor of the New Haven Register called the Coliseum a "modern relic".

While a critic of architecture deciphered it's form as an "elegant tangle of iron".

Once past the shock of the exterior, spectators carefully navigated the ramps to reach the parking garage in the sky.

>>The actual area that you had to drive was very narrow, so back in the early '70s, a lot of the cars were very wide and you had to be very conscious of scrapping the sides of your car on that cement on either side of the entranceway.

And what you had to do, you had to keep the wheel of your car literally tilted the right the entire way up because your car would just continue to ascend as if you were moving up a corkscrew.

>To McCormack, the big cars twisting on the tight spiral ramps, it sounded almost agonizing like collective cries of pain.

People, frightened by the experience going up, begged for help when leaving.

>>The Coliseum Authority would have to have people at the tops of the ramps so when a show got out, people who had been up to drive up there, looked at driving down and go scared and they would have to have someone drive them down.

>The alpine escalators, originally designed to run inside the exhibition hall, but left outside by budget cuts, created another sense of danger, sometimes justifiably so.

>>The escalators stopped.

They got stuck, maybe because of the weight or whatever, and people started booing and swearing and ba, ba, ba and so they started walking up the escalators.

We were walking away and all of a sudden we heard a noise and the escalators jerked backwards or forwards or something and everybody on the escalator started falling backwards like dominoes.

>Few understood that the rust stains on the concrete piers represented what was already killing the building from within.

The writer, Frank DeFord observed in 1969 that modern sports palaces served the same historical function as the church of colonial times.

The Coliseum would be a communal gathering place with irresistible force of the baby boomers.

Rock stars witnessed only as figures printed on album covers, emerged on the Coliseum stage in real life for performances New Haven area fans designated as hometown shows.

>>I grew up about a half an hour away from New Haven in Bridgeport, Trumbull where I went to high school and it was a place to go.

Hartford was too far away, New York was an adventure that you would go for special occasions, New Haven was the place.

>Even though rock concerts by Neil Young and a handful of others took place, household names such as Lawrence Welk and family shows dominated bookings as Coliseum officials originally intended.

The puritan authority that keep Alan Freed and the Beatles from town, and contributed to the arrest of Jim Morrison continued to stand watch at the Coliseum gates.

Promoter Jim Koplik who, with business partner Shelly Finkel, became synonymous with Coliseum rock concerts, clashed with city officials when he tried to book shows.

>>They were scared out of their wits, they did not want rock concerts.

It was very political, it was back - you know, it wasn't that far after the Black Panthers in New Haven and the city of New Haven was very scared of the word “rock ”.

>Even though police arrested dozens of fans from time to time at Coliseum rock shows, Boomers had traded revolution for self-expression and exchanged the Woodstock mud for cushioned seats indoors.

>>The decade of the '70s, there were some memorable shows there.

And it was probably the golden age of concerts it seems.

>Vendors imprinted the root of the golden age on T-shirts that read like railroad timetables.

Hartford, Springfield, Providence, New York and New Haven.

>>The Coliseum was very much a part of that generation, that era that put New Haven on the map.

Major performers would come through this city that we would never see if we didn't have that Coliseum.

>>Fans spent nights cocooned in sleeping bags outside the Coliseum box office to buy the best seats.

That created a bond among concert goers who later saw each other inside at the shows.

>>It was just fun to sleep out for concerts there and play Frisbee at night in line for tickets, make friends, go out for a bite to eat at 4:00 in the morning if you could get it, it was just a great overall time.

>It was fun, it was a lot of camaraderie.

You would get bracelets to tell who was in line first.

So that way if you had to leave for some reason to get food or use the facilities you didn't have to worry about losing your place and you would make friends with people so that way you wouldn't have to worry about your stuff.

>>New Haven rock station, WPLR and other FM broadcasters, transmitted the soundtrack of the boomers and became part of the concert experience itself.

>For example, you are going in for a Jethro Tull show in the '70s.

Uh, they would be playing them, you would hear the music, you would see the show, you would hear them play there and then they would do the same thing - talk about the show and people would call in and talk about the show that night.

Play more music.

So it kept - the show didn't last for just two hours, it seemed like it was more of an event, it went an hour beforehand, an hour after hand for the drive in and home.

>>Once inside, fans settled in their seats, some after preparing weeks to see their favorite band.

>That was during the day and time too when you got dressed up to go to shows.

So people looked very nice, people were very appreciative of the fact that you could go into this place and see this type of show.

>>Even with the formidable array of rock stars, the sonic weight of baby boomers failed to entirely displace generations who came of age in the 1940s and '50s.

In the span of just under 90 days in 1975, two legends from that past appeared in New Haven.

In May, Frank Sinatra performed amid 11,000 of his fans, dressed in their finest eveningwear.

Tom McCormack described it as one of the finest nights I ever spent in the place.

The great Sinatra performed to sell out crowds into the 1980's.

>So we come into the Coliseum and it's all packed.

The whole place was packed because this was a big deal and he was right in the center.

So anyway, he sings his songs and the last song he sang was “My Way ” which was a biggie.

I was just so overwhelmed.

I stood on my chair, here I am, middle-aged woman, I stood on my chair and I was yelling and screaming and I felt just like a kid.

>In July 1975, Elvis Presley sold out two shows.

>>I got the word, they knew the music was coming to an end, the show was coming to an end.

He came back and he just gave me the sign, he goes, open the door.

So I opened the door and out comes this gentleman into this limousine and there he went and that is my experience of finding out that Elvis had left the building.

>>Just four months after Presley's show, in 1975, Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue barreled into New Haven for two concerts in one day.

Backstage, emerging rock star, Bruce Springsteen, just weeks removed from Time and Newsweek covers, met Dylan for the first time.

Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue assembled on stage an eclectic assortment of musicians and artists.

>It was comprised of who's who of rock and roll during that period of time - Joanie Mitchell, obviously Dylan, Joan Baez, it was the first time Baez and Dylan played together in about eight years.

Roger Mcguinn of the Byrds was there.

Sam Shepard the playwrite was there on stage.

It was a pretty excting show.

>>Shepard studied the Rolling Thunder crowd from the stage and later wrote in his diary, “A concert audience has a face.

It looks worked upon, wild-eyed, stimulated from some distant source like a laboratory experiment.

As though the stage event, the action being watched and heard is only a mirror image of some unseen phenomenon.

” And the Coliseum audience happily enlisted in Shepard's phenomenon of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

>Because the design of the building was so high that you could see the cloud of smoke build as the show went on, that was interesting too.

So the folks up on the top rows would probably be in a fog most of the night.

>>As music cleaved into many forms throughout the '70s, two genres attracted strong measures of devotion in New Haven.

>New Haven loved English rock.

Something about English rock and southern rock.

That is what New Haven was about and PLR just played it up.

PLR played the musus more and more.

>>Concerts by Elvin Bishop and others reviled a corridor of southern rock centered on the Coliseum.

The Marshall Tucker Band, with lead singer Doug Gray and the Allman Brothers joined groups such as the Outlaws and colonizing Yankee New Haven.

>It was just something different that people that didn't want to listen to Springsteen, punk rock or the corporate rock of Styx or whatever, you got Charlie Daniels and Marshall Tucker singing just good melodies and good tunes.

>British rock leaned heavily on theatrics.

Exemplified by Queen with singer Freddie Mercury, whose commandidi presence filled the massive Coliseum.

>>At the end of the show, we rushed the stage and were literally front row, right in front of Freddie Mercury and he's wearing this white, tight, leotard and he's got this microphone that if anyone's ever seen Queen, it's like a baton.

And his stuff is wrapped around that baton and my head is at his nether region level.

And we are just young and dumb and yeah!

This is the king of rock and roll to us, yeah!

And our mouths are open wide and I swear Freddie Mercury made strong eye contact and was very happy to see my friend Bobby and I looking at him that way.

It was a great moment.

We just stayed there, smiling with his buckteeth, it was an awesome moment.

They rocked and we had no idea what was going on.

>Yes, with keyboardist Rick Wakeman.

And Emerson, Lake and Palmer liberally applied pyrotechnics to their shows.

Meanwhile other artists such as Robin Trower and Dave Mason, relied more on hypnotic guitar solos than theatrics.

Jethro Tull combined everything.

Lyrical oddity, sturdy guitar rips and flute solos by Ian Anderson.

Above all, The Kinks established the tightest kinship with New Haven fans.

Captivated by witty lyrics of decay and social isolation.

>Any baby boomer that loved music, loved the Kinks.

They were hugely influential on anyone making music or listening to music and they played New Haven Coliseum several times, I saw them a bunch there and just - they sort of turned it into a cabaret act, it was great.

Ray Davies was like this carnival leader and they rocked, but yet they had these songs that was just could rip your heart apart and it was so great because the prime point - give the people what they want, 1981, just a great record and to see 'em there was just an awesome experience.

>American Soul and Funk Bands such as Earth, Wind and Fire studded the Coliseum schedule with theatrical presentations that defined the period.

>>I remember very distinctly with the Earth, Wind and Fire show, that was when they were into this whole pyramid thinking, eye, center eye, all of that.

And one of the things they did on the stage was they had everybody, I guess on wires.

And they were aerodynamic, just all over the place.

And then they brought them all into one huge glass pyramid.

And then it collapsed and they weren't there anymore and the place went nuts.

It was fantastic.

>>Two rock stars drawing from a pool of working class and suburban dreams, dashed and foiled, earned immense loyalty from New Haven audiences.

Billy Joel from Long Island compared the Coliseum to a bus station but played some of his best shows there.

>His history was a lot of people's history in New Haven.

So when he started singing his songs about playing in a bar or eating at an Italian restaurant, people had to respond to that, I mean, they've done that, they know what he's talking about.

>Billy Joel's 1978 Coliseum show inscribed his name in local rock lore.

>>He had a song called “Zanzibar ”.

The song has the line “Rose he knows, he's such a credit to the game, but the Yankees grabbed the headlines every time.

” The crowd went nuts.

I mean, there is a lot of Yankee fans out here, the crowd went nuts because that was when the Yankees, the same week they caught the Red Sox in the summer of '78 after being so far behind.

So it was a great show, he was running around all over stage during the song “Big Shot ”, he wound up in back of the small keyboard and went right into “Just the Way you Are ”.

>Bruce Springsteen electrified the New Haven audience with three hour concerts that left audiences exhausted begging for more.

Only the fierce tribal bond between the Grateful Dead and their New Haven followers rivaled local affection for Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen.

>They were great because they were a hometown show, went with a lot of friends.

It was in the days when you could buy multiple groups of tickets.

Unlike today when there are ticket limitations.

So we would buy out a whole row at least and go together.

>The Coliseum welcomed singers with a softer touch such as Linda Ronstat and Jackson Brown.

The building even worked for Disco as performed by the Bee Gees and Andy Gibb.

Still, rock ruled the Coliseum.

Heart, The Doobie Brothers and Boston tore through set lists compiled from their bestselling albums of the time.

The appetite for pop culture went beyond music.

Fresh off his late night television appearances, comedian Steve Martin attracted 10,000 fans to the New Haven Coliseum in October of 1978.

>It was strange because it was such a big venue for a comedy show, but he was really good and um, he had - this was in the days that he had the white suit on and he had all his props, his banjo, the arrow through the head and it was very funny.

It was different.

A lot of different than concerts obviously - different crowds, different atmosphere.

>Amid lingering uncertainty and the whiff of self destruction that marked the start of the '70s, the Coliseum's golden decade closed on December 15th, 1979 with a concert by The Who.

Appearing just days after 11 spectators were killed in a stampede during a concert in Cincinnati, singer Roger Daltry and guitarist Pete Townsend dedicated the New Haven show to the victims.

The golden age faded at a moment when bands such as Van Halen bubbled up from the carpeted ooze of suburban basements of the 1970's.

>You know, even if you didn't like the music, it was just the people and the audience were just the weirdest blotto, crazy, people you would never see anywhere else.

You wouldn't see them in the mall going, Van Halen!

You only see 'em at the New Haven Coliseum.

>>In June 1979, New Haven Coliseum officials threatened to ban Ted Nugent after his rowdy fans tried to push a Greyhound bus parked next door through the building.

The puritan backlash came too late, metal ruled the decade ahead in harmony with the decay of the building itself.

In 1973, Dave Schneider and family traveled 20 miles north from Bridgeport in their Lincoln Continental to watch the Nighthawks.

Schneider thought, some day I will play here.

>At the time, my older brother - you know, the Beatles were everything.

Paul, John, Ringo and to me, these guys, these players, they were my Beatles - Billy Plager, Chris Ahrens, Tom Colley, all these guys, I would just drool at the glass waiting for an autograph, just - these were my heroes.

My first exposure to any celebrity was the New Haven Nighthawks.

>The Coliseums' ice and bright lights immediately enchanted Kevin Tennyson of suburban North Haven when he walked through the doors.

>>First experience was back in 1974, basically my father told me I was going for a haircut and we would up at this big building, driving up this big spiral ramp and to make a long story short, went to the ticket window and then went to the first set of doors through the metal set of doors to a hockey rink.

>>At the same time as rock concerts, pro hockey basked in a golden age of its own in the 1970's.

>Friday night game at the New Haven Coliseum was something to behold.

It's usually between 3-5,000 people there on a regular basis.

They got into the game, they were very responsive, they liked to get on the other players on the other team, the referees and um, it was an event.

>In that first season that opened in 1972, the Nighthawks averaged 5,000 fans a game, even though they won just 16 times home and away.

The new fans adopted customs rooted in the New Haven Arena's raucous history of Zoos and other legendary sections.

>>One of the things about being up high, we had the cinder block wall behind us, we hung our banners up and I can't remember off the top of my head all of them, but thererwere a lot.

We were famous for that.

We would chant, scream, holler, cheer on.

There wasn't a lot of - we really focused on cheering for the Nighthawks although we did get on the other team occasionally, but we did cheers for the Nighthawks.

>The game, however, differed sharply from the way it was played in the old Arena.

Unlike the Blades, the Nighthawks featured players competing for promotion to the NHL, not living paycheck to paycheck.

Enforcers never the less dotted American Hockey League rosters, a delight to old fans accustomed to bare-knuckle fighting and new ones who wanted to see it for the first time.

And fans often created mayhem themselves.

>Somebody had discovered that to get the arm rest off, all you had to do was hit it from behind, and pop it up like this.

And then you had that and what happened that night, somebody started it and everybody just followed along.

People were knocking them off and flinging them onto the ice and the ice was littered with arm rests.

>With intermittent rumbles, enough to hold both the old and the new fans, the Nighthawks held to their designated role - train NHL prospects.

The team's first goal tender, Chico Resch, later starred with the New York Islanders after a year on Coliseum ice.

Nighthawks fans expressed lasting affection for Bob Nystom, after his one year in New Haven, eight years before he earned fame for a goal that gave The New York Islanders their first of four Stanley Cups in the 1980's.

>Bobby Nystrom was - came in here at 19 and he was hurt at one time and he was homesick and my four year old daughter used to sit up with him during the games, way up on top and he would talk to her about hockey and how it was at home on the ice.

That they skated outside.

>>The first black player in the National Hockey League, Willie O'Ree, also skated for the original Nighthawks, guiding younger players with veteran leadership.

Behind Steve West, who scored 50 goals and added 60 assists, the Nighthawks qualified for the playoffs in just their second season with a satisfying blend of skill and muscle.

The Nighthawks quickly settled in as a playoff contender, making it all the way to the American Hockey League finals in 1975 for the first time.

They lost to the Springfield Indians.

Except for that year, McDonald coached throughout the first decade, providing stability as players shuttled between New Haven and it's NHL parent team, at first the North Stars, and then beginning in 1976, the New York Rangers.

And the Los Angeles Kings, five years later.

Roy Malacher joined the front office in 1978 as a publicist and like MacDonald, added a strong measure of cocoistency to a team who's natural state was anything but that.

A player from nearby Hamden, John Glynne, learned hockey as a New Haven Arena rink rat and stick boy for the original Nighthawks.

He played on one of the best teams to skate in New Haven - the 1977-78 Nighthawks.

>We had a great team that year, a team that I think would be competitive in today's NHL.

We had a lot of former NHL greats on the team, one of whom was Ken Hodge, we had Doug Soutar as a goalie.

We had Tom Colley who was a long time Nighthawk star.

>Hodge won the Stanley Cup in 1970 and 1972 with the Boston Bruins.

Colley was the greatest Nighthawk.

In eight years with the team, he played more than 500 games and scored 204 goals.

Former Montreal Canadian Bobby Sheehan joined Hodge and Colley on the team that met the Maine Mariners in the finals.

Despite an abundance of young talent and proven veterans, the Nighthawks lost that series and could only drape a division banner over Coliseum ice.

A year later, Maine once again crushed the Nighthawks in the finals.

Denying New Haven the championship that had eluded the city since the Blades won the EHL in 1956.

Perhaps more troubling than losses, McDonald saw attendance thin gradually between his first year in 1972 and his last in 1980.

>>It's hard, I mean, there is a lot of other activities here.

You can go to New York, it's a very quick trip to New York to see the National Hockey League or what have you.

And to Hartford.

So there is a lot of presssse on the area to house hockey teams or any other kind of pro sport.

>In contrast to the intimacy of the New Haven Arena, the Coliseum kept players and fans at a distance.

>>There was no intimacy in the building.

You could sit in the tenth row and still feel like you were a mile away from the game.

It just had a big vast, wide open feel to it.

again, the ceilings were 40, 50, 60 feet high and it was just a vast, enormous building and even if you had several thousand people in it, you still felt like thee building was empty.

>The minor league Nighthawks also faced competition 40 miles to the north when the big league New England Whalers moved to Hartford in 1974 from Boston, and joining the National Hockey League four years later.

With the team in distress, local developer Joel Schiavone bought the Nighthawks in 1979 and presented hockey as central to New Haven night life.

The Rangers sent all time great Rod Gilbert to coach the Nighthawks in 1980.

He had little impact on or off the ice.

Coliseum and team officials tried everything to boost attendance.

They even cloaked a curtain above the tiers of seats in 1981 to recreate the Arena's smaller capacity.

With losses mounting, Schiavone sold the Nighthawks to their new NHL parent team, the Los Angeles Kings in 1981.

He retained his management role.

The Kings assigned New Haven hockey legend Don Perry to coach the Nighthawks, sparking local hopes for a revival.

The Perry magic did not work at the Coliseum and the Kings promoted him to Los Angeles anyway, at mid-season.

Even amid off-ice distractions, the Nighthawks carved their place in New Haven hockey history in the 1980s.

In April 1982, Warren Holmes' goal at 1:30 in the morning, lifted the Nighthawks to a four overtime victory over Rochester, ending the longest game in Coliseum history.

Phil Sykes scored the 100,000th American Hockey League goal on December 11th, 1983.

Along with rock concerts and hockey, professional wrestling completed the Coliseum's enduring trinity of middle-class spectacle in the mid 1970's.

And it became that way because of usher Howard Finkel.

Finkel especially liked professional wrestling but Coliseum director, Loris Smith, could not lure bouts to New Haven.

Promoter Vince McMann was uncertain the Coliseum could attract crowds without local TV stations airing his Saturday morning wrestling program.

>We talked a little bit and he said, so you watched our show on channel 55 on Long Island?

I said, yeah, I did and that's prompted me to talk to Mr. Smith and see if we can get you back here.

Well, here we are and they had a very good crowd that night.

We didn't sell the building out, but we had a very healthy crowd.

>>Finkel soon joined McMann's company, announcing cards throughout the United States including back home in New Haven.

>This wasn't the usher anymore, this was a ring announcer.

This wasn't the guy that worked section seven, this was the guy that looked around the entire 24 sections, from the very first ringside row, all the way up to the 41st row of the Coliseum, that's how many rows I believe there were.

And just beam with pride.

>Thanks to Finkel, the Coliseum emerged as a mainstay for World Wrestling Entertainment events for 25 years.

The Coliseum booked an extensive variety of events beyond concerts, hockey and wrestling, as Maurice Rotival predicted it would, when he first proposed a sports palace two decades earlier.

High school basketball and hockey teams played there.

Indoor professional tennis matches featuring top stars drew thousands.

In 1978, Welterweight champion and Olympic medalist, Sugar Ray Leonard won a nationally televised Coliseum bout.

Rodeos.

Monster Truck rallies and shows for children filled the house.

>>It was a huge thing for families to bring their kid.

I mean, real little kids and babibi to the Coliseum to have their first - so they were having their first experience of a Coliseum experience, as an infant or as a toddler.

>The circus annually assembled it's three rings and featured many popular acts.

Elephants died in the corridors where the great rock stars also roamed.

Even so, the Coliseum bounced from crisis to crisis - it showed.

>>It didn't get new coats of paint very often.

It had the circus there every year of course and the thing about having the circus in your building is you don't get the smell of elephant out of there, that was the true of the Coliseumums well.

It's just - and then years of that adds up, so it's not the kind of place you would go and just have a picnic.

>When the Hartford Civic Center roof collapsed after a snowstorm in 1978, promoters shifted University of Connecticut's men's basketball games and concerts south to the Coliseum.

In spite of the new bookings, the collapse turned out to be bad news for New Haven.

The Civic Center reopened three years later to a larger capacity that lured rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen, from the smaller Coliseum.

>There were bands that said, hey, I can sell 2,500 more seats, I would rather go up to Hartford.

Then the roof caves in, in Hartford and they rebuild it to 16,000 seats and that was the beginning of the end of the Coliseum, when all of a sudden a 10,000 seat building has to compete against a 16,000 seat building.

>Cable television further complicated matters for Coliseum promoters.

Threading its way through southern New England since the 1970's, cable offered a vast selection of sports, such as NHL games, and entertainment programs that could glue America to its remotes forever.

Music television sent it's first video spiraling through cable on August 1st 1981.

And initially energized the concert business by promoting new visually sophisticated singers and bands.

Arriving in New Haven with Grammy awards and girl power anthem packaged in appealing videos, Pat Benatar stood among the first of many MTV generation stars to play the Coliseum.

In June 1985, the artist who exemplified the propulsive force on MTV landed in New Haven.

Her name - Madonna.

11,000 fans reflecting Madonna's stylistic exuberance, pounced on the Coliseum to see the spectacle unfold on stage.

Part dancer and singer and all sexual swagger, Madonna transformed music and lyrics into an irrepressible optical liturgy.

For fans, mesmerized by the video age.

Huey Lewis and the News relied on traditional rock beats powered visually by heavy rotation of their energetic videos to sell out the Coliseum.

The J. Giles Band fronted by singer Peter Wolf, once displayed the rough house look of a group hardened by bar shows when they played New Haven in the '70s.

By the 1980's, the band cleaned up with their video star turn.

Whitney Houston proved that solo acts could still carry a show as long as the set list included material familiar to the audience from videos and movies.

Even with videos now required for success, the Coliseum stage still represented the pinnacle for rock bands.

A club named Toad's Place served an off-Broadway function for bands on their way up.

ThThIrish band U2 first played Toad's Place in December 1980.

Seven years later, the band retraced it's roots, snuck into New Haven Coliseum show between stadium gigs .

>I was lucky enough to see them at Toad's Place and see them at Woolsey Hall at Yale.

And that was fantastic.

And then they blew up.

They blew out of the world.

The world got to know U2 and they played New Haven Coliseum.

So a friend of mine makes a banner that says, “U2 Rocks!

” and there is Bono on the stage and he sort of reaches up and he goes off the stage and he tears my friend's banner down that said “U2 Rocks!

” and said, “This is no time for banners, no time for statements.

” It was like, what are you doing?

It just says, “U2 Rocks!

”.

>Local connections to the Coliseum stage abounded.

Guitarist G.E.

Smith traveled the New Haven club circuit with the scratch band.

He attended many Coliseum concerts and later performed there with Hall and Oates.

>>When I got up in that league and was playing in arenas, I got to play in New Haven, which was a real thrill to come back to New Haven and be on a professional level.

I played there with Darryl Hall and John Oates and by then, having been around the country and around the world a little bit, we knew that the New Haven Coliseum had the reputation as the worst sounding place in the world.

>Joey Melotti reunited with fellow New Haven native Michael Bolton for a Coliseum gig.

>>Me and Michael, I remember sitting that night we did the show and Michael and I just sitting in the dressing room and we were like the local New Haven guys.

Michael used to come out to the Foundry to see me, I used to see him at all the haunts, around Audubon Street.

Bobby Lucadello's place on which street - I forget the name of it.

There was one on Whalley Avenue, where Michael used to play.

You know, we had that little family of musicians and everybody used to support each other and we sat there and just looked at each other and said, “This is it.

” I was like, “Michael, this is it, this is so fantastic.

I'm so proud of you.

” He was like, “This is so great, happy day, you know have me with him.

” Rock ballet-deers who made it to the big stage notwithstanding, heavy metal with its sonic punch of power cords ricochetininof the Coliseum's concrete pillars, triumphed as the building's signature force in the '80s and beyond.

>>Essentially it was a big concrete building and it was common for arenas.

It wasn't made for acoustics.

And so it was a very loud building and I think that's how rock bands liked it and I think that's how the fans liked it.

They just wanted to hear that sound reverberating and they certainly did.

>In August in '86, Van Halen proclaimed New Haven as New Halen, filming two concerts, edited into a movie “Live Without a Net ”.

Other metal bands soon followed over the next decade.

Def Leppard, the Scorpions, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, the band that bundled all that New Haven rock fans wanted - British rock, theatrics and metal.

In the spring of 1989, metal and hockey suddenly converged at the Coliseum under the direction of a raucous chorus lodged in section 14.

>>It was not right behind the visitors bench, 15 was right behind the visitor's bench.

14 would be just the right.

But if you were in like the first - if you were in row 3-6, in either seat 9-12 in any of those rows, you could talk right through the glass to these guys and a lot of stuff would go back and forth and unfortunately sometimes a cup of soda or a cup of beer did find its way over the glass.

A couple times the other team came over the glass to fight the fans.

>>Thought the greatest enforcer in Nighthawks history, Ken Baumgartner served as the Jungle's inspiration.

>The whole crowd seemed to like the tough guys, the fighters.

And section 14 would probably take more of a liking to the fighters than anyone else.

>>But neither Baumgartner nor a riveting early round playoff series against the Binghamton Whalers at the end of the 1987 season, guaranteed thehe Nighthawks survival in New Haven.

The parent organization, the Los Angeles Kings, threatened to move the Nighthawks unless the team sold 1500 season tickets.

Team executive Joel Shavoni vowed to live in a Coliseum rooftop shack until he met the terms to keep the Nighthawks in town.

The stunt worked, the Nighthawks lived to play on, setting up that last epic run towards a pro hockey championship for New Haven.

>>The great thing about these fans is they are so well behaved.

>They had the whole Welcome to the Jungle thing and that is when the Coliseum really took on a personality.

They played the Guns and Roses song, “Welcome to the Jungle ” and I believe that New Haven led the American Hockey League in home attendance that year at about 6700.

I remember the curtains opening, sitting in the press box and seeing people behind you.

It had been a long time since it was that full and people were behind me.

>>The mosh pit intensity of section 14 commanded the Coliseum in the spring of 1989.

And redeemed, at least briefly, New Haven's birthright as a hockey town.

At the opening round of the American Hockey League playoffs, New Haven trailed the Canadians two to one when the thunder of section 14 struck.

Down by a goal with three seconds left, the referee whistled Sharook for dislodging the net from it's boring and awarded a penalty shot to the Nighthawks.

After sizing up his chances, alone at center ice, Dave Pasin swept toward the net and scored to tie the game.

>>The place went nuts, the Nighthawks came out in overtime within the first minute, went down the ice and a bad shot off somebody's skate, went in and they won that game and won the series in six games.

>>With the area rocking to hockey for the first time in a decade, the Nighthawks eased past Monkton in the semi-finals and made their fourth bid in 17 years for the Calder Cup - emblematic of the American Hockey League championship, they would meet the Adirondack Redwings, who took game one.

As a crowd of 8,000 watched game two, the Nighthawks behind goalie Rollie Melanson, and section 14, tied the finals with a ringing victory heard throughout the old nine squares and up the connector.

The glorious run ended at that point as the Nighthawks lost three straight and the series.

>They went to the finals and played Adirondack and lost very quickly as I remember, the finals weren't very competitive, but it was the last great New Haven Nighthawks team as we know it and it was an excellent two months in the history of New Haven hockey.

>Shortly after the season ended, New Haven's puritan ghosts turned against section 14.

Fans, outraged at obscenities and menacing behavior, complained to the local newspaper.

A radio commentator compared the scene to the fall of the Roman empire.

>>They used to get the crowd really going, they used to get the other team really upset, but on the other hand because of the profanity later on, some fans didn't like section 14 and blamed section 14 for the reason why the crowds weren't there, which I think is ludicrous, but that is - section 14 was kind of a lightening rod there, some people loved it and some people hated it.

>One letter from a local man who attended the circus instead of hockey that spring, pointed to an issue more lethal than rowdy fans.

He wrote, “The Coliseum is a mess and it's getting worse.

” Four months after the last great season of pro hockey at the Coliseum ended, Nathan Podoloff died at his farm just north of New Haven.

In 1927, Podoloff helped his father save the Arena and local hockey and for 45 years after that, he ruled an empire of ice and entertainment.

In 1980, the Coliseum director, Anthony Tavares walked on South Orange Street under the vast deck, when a piece of concrete plummeted from the garage and grazed his shoulder.

The Coliseum was falling apart less than a decade after opening.

As some had feared, during construction, rust weakened the steel matting which could no longer hold the concrete in place.

As a result, the city closed most of the Coliseum's garage.

Workers installed nets to keep pedestrians safe from free falling concrete.

After learning the extent of the trouble, the city sued Coliseum designer Kevin Roche for architectural malpractice.

The city lost.

Over the next decade, the Coliseum continued to deteriorate as city officials and the public argued over what to do with the building.

First attacked by budget cuts that left it unfinished and later marooned by failure to maintain it, the Coliseum also fell victim to ignorance and accident.

Cars, spinning up the helixes during the winter, carried a toxic mix of road salt and ice, collected on interstate highways and the connector feeding into New Haven enroute to the Coliseum.

>That salt contaminated water.

Could leak through the slab and get direct access to that sheet of steel that was on the end of the concrete slab.

Ultimately what happened at the cracks in the slab, was corrosion began at that point and cut through the deck and actually completely perforated the deck.

What that meant was, that primary structural system that was supporting those slabs was lost due to the corrosion of the metal deck on the other side of the slab itself.

>>Just ten years after the Coliseum opened, Tom McCormack observed, “You have surely gotten used to the white elephant by now.

” Drawn by what he interpreted as an aesthetic ruin, photography student Michael Kolster documented the building and the people who drifted around it, in 1989.

>The Coliseum was occupying an area that wasn't trafficked very regularly by people goioi about sort of their daily business through that space.

It's almost in some ways the area was a bit of a - like an eddy in a river.

It was a place where things weren't necessarily happening directly, but they were happening indirectly.

Things were a little bit sort of off the beaten path.

>Kolster found the parking deck cast a perpetual shadow, deadening a neighborhood already pinned claustrophobically against the Oak Street Connector to the south and the bus terminal north.

He noticed that the scale of sheer walls dwarfed pedestrians rushing to escape the Coliseum's forbidding intensity.

And he observed that only police officers and outcasts, lingered.

Amid others who may have lost their way.

Kolster peered inside the Coliseum just once during his photographic sorties.

He witnessed an extraordinary contrast with the lifeless streets outside.

>>I came to the top of it and looked down and watched for a little bit and there was a pool of water - either an inflatable pool or something and people were doing mass baptisms.

>The Jehovah Witnesses baptized new members in radiant ceremonies attended by thousands.

>>We were told, you know, hold your nose and they just sort of dunked us.

So it was probably two of us at a time in the pool.

And then I remember coming up out of the water, so the idea is that you are dying to your former way of life and you are being reborn to your now commitment to Jehovah and to his son and so you come up and have 10,000 people clapping.

>The Jehovah's Witnesses scrubbed the Coliseum interior at the end of their meeting, outside the sad palette of ruin, abandonment and violence that architect Roche feared when he first started work on the Coliseum, persisted.

From the top parking level, snowballs and beer bottles rained on the streets below in drunken pre and post concert sprees.

In 1987, a man was stabbed to death during a fight outside the Coliseum.

A year later, a 17 year old Danbury youth was killed when he fell from the top parking deck after a concert.

In April 1990, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee suffered a concussion when aerial rigging failed during a stunt and he crashed.

>>This is when he was elevated to the top of the arena and spinning.

And he's drumming.

Well, he's a showman.

Now the climax part of show is when he comes back down the floor on a bungee cord that someone had not measured correctly and it was a little long from where it was tied to the floor, so he came down and hit his head on the floor.

Well, that was the end of the show.

>As problems multiplied in the 1980's the Coliseum became the target of Mayor Biagio DiLieto, who coveted the site for a mall.

Ironically, in 1982, architect Kevin Roche received the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigous honor for his body of work, including the building mayor DiLeito now wanted to plow under.

>I think his mission at the time was to preserve Malley's, Macys and Chapel Square Mall, which Mayor Lee had built in the 1960s, the core of the retail center of the city.

And Mayor DeLieto was driven by the idea of one way to accomplish preserving what was in New Haven was by expanding it and so he saw the Coliseum site as an opportunity to expand the retail core of New Haven.

>The news appalled McCormack.

They wanted to take New Haven and turn it into Bridgeport.

They want to take this town and reduce it in significance.

He asserted.

McCormack's support for the Coliseum echoed thousands of letters pouring into WPLR and City Hall.

DiLieto eventually dropped the fight and left the Coliseum file to the next mayor, John Daniels.

Daniels convinced the state government to spend 23 million dollars to fix the Coliseum's garage.

The amount approached the original construction cost.

Amid optimism for a return to the golden age of 1991, the Coliseum closed for three months to repair the parking garage.

The job was never finished, the money ran out.

Two years after that, former DilLieto aide, John DeStefano succeeded Daniels as mayor.

Like his predecessors, Mayor DeStefano confronted the Coliseum's perpetual adversity until the day came when he would determine its fate.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the Coliseum, pro wrestling thrived.

Unlike local hockey games that competed with the NHL on cable, wrestling's TV presence enhanced the live spectacle.

>Every time we ran a card in the New Haven Coliseum, every time we ran a television taping in the New Haven Coliseum, we gave the fans something that they wanted.

They came out because they wanted to see a great night of sports and entertainment.

>>At the same time, the concert schedule slowed but did not evaporate.

Rock elders such as Aerosmith, still found a welcoming audience in New Haven.

Puff Daddy lead the next generation o ostars to appear on the Coliseum stage as rap, grunge and Indy rock joined metal as local favorites in the 1990's.

Busta Rhymes, the Stone Temple Pilots, the Goo Goo Dolls, No Doubt with Gwen Stefani and the Dave Mathews Band represented the exquisite diversity evident on the Coliseum stage as the century moved to a close.

All along, hockey staggered d live NHL games on cable kept more fans home.

After 19 years of play, the New Haven Nighthawks appeared finished until a corporate executive named Peter Shipman bought the team from the Los Angeles Kings in 1991.

>Things weren't run the way fans expected them to be run, the product on the ice wasn't quite the same and the interest began to dwindle.

It was great in the mid eighties and the early eighties and as we got closer to the 1990's, things began to turn in the other direction and it was just a matter of time.

>>After one year without an NHL affiliate, Shipman signed an agreement with the Ottawa Senators to provide players.

The Senators extracted a steep price.

New Haven had to present the identity of the parent NHL team, name and all.

>I know that a lot of people didn't like the name change because New Haven Nighthawks is not only a cool name, but you have been used to it for 20 years, so now you are looking at - you know, Senators is not - when I think of Senators, you think of Senators in politics or the Washington Senators baseball team possibly, not necessarily a hockey team.

>The name Nighthawks represented New Haven pro hockey for longer than even the cherished Blades.

Fans stayed home.

On April 9th, 1993, the Senators played their last game, with the Nighthawks logo sharing center ice.

With the end of the Senators, New Haven fans faced a winter without hockey for the first time since the second World War.

Three years after the last pro hockey season, Coliseum officials named the press box after Tom McCormack of the New Haven Register, who started covering hockey with the Blades 30 years earlier.

It turned out to be a mystical gesture.

Within the months, the Hartford Whalers left for North Carolina, renaming themselves the Carolina Hurricanes and squeezed an American Hockey League team known as the Monarchs from the Greensborough Coliseum.

The Monarchs in turn moved north to become the Beast of New Haven.

With the McCormack press box filled, 8,000 welcomed pro hockey back on October 24th 1997.

That initial burst of enthusiasm for the return of pro hockey however, melded into indifference.

Not even an exciting playoff that first year stoked lasting interest.

The Beast folded after their second season.

Dave Schneider dreamed of playing at the Coliseum when he first saw the Nighthawks in 1973.

Before the Beast perished, Schneider's moment finally arrived - his band, the Zamboni's, performed after a game amid the joy of a public skating session.

>It was just amazing, it was the high moment for me and the band.

Just playing on the ice that my heroes as a kid played on, it was really a dream come true.

♪ Every day growing up, we would dream about this stuff.

We want to be rock stars or play in the NHL.

Sticks and skates and a local pond, guitar in hand, your friends around, you argue about the name of the band before you even learn a song.

♪ Juniors, semi-pro, that's as far as you go.

But you still like to play your rock and roll or punk rock or hockey rock.

We write the songs that make the whole rink sing.

We write the songs that make the whole rink sing.

We write the songs that make the whole rink sing.

♪ We are the Zambonis...♪ The New Haven Knights of the United Hockey League replaced The Beast as the 21st century arrived.

The Knights never took hold.

The long history of professional hockey in New Haven that began at the Arena in 1927 ended in Spring 2002 when the Knights disbanded.

>>You had a long tradition where it got passed down from generation to generation like that.

For example my father brought me and I have friends where their father brought him, but his grandfather brought the father.

So I don't have children but if I did, I can't give them that because it's not here and the line has been broken.

The circle is broken, you can't replace that.

>>With hockey lost and it's hopeless garage in the sky, looming as a sullen reminder that It's time had passed, the Coliseum hosted indoor football among other events to survive.

At the same time, city officials pressed a private arena management company to find a way to save it.

It couldn't be done.

The Coliseum would be both too costly to fix and too costly to keep open.

Beyond the fatal decay within, the Coliseum faced attacks from plush concert venues in Hartford and Wallingford.

A new arena just 20 miles south of New Haven in Bridgeport and another at a casino in eastern Connecticut opened to pull even more boomers and their children away from the building that once stood as the vocal point of their cultural experiences.

In Spring 2002, Mayor DeStefano and Connecticut Governor John Rowland certified the obvious.

After 30 years of persistent uncertainty about its future, the Coliseum would close that summer.

>>It's time had come.

It was a patient that we gave a lot of life support to and it was just time to pull the plug on it.

>With its fate sealed, the Coliseum held a victory lap of events that featured two of the three pillars on which it's reputation stood.

Rock and wrestling.

The last hockey game played earlier that spring.

Tool performed the final concert.

Followed by the last event ever in the building.

Fittingly, a pro wrestling match.

On August 26th 2002, thousands assembled to watch the World Wrestling Entertainment favorites perform at the Coliseum.

Howard Finkel, who worked at the Arena and the Coliseum as an usher before a Hall of Fame career with the WWE, could not attend, , t his thoughts focused on the squared circle and the building he loved.

>>My head was in New York and my heart was in New Haven that night.

It meant so much to me.

And then one of the things that we do as our producers have to fill in a report from our events just so everybody knows how everything went - good, bad or indifferent and I will never forget it, at the end of his report, Jack Landis said, “Howard, this one was for you.

” >Coliseum officials gave people a chance to pay last respects.

Auctioning or giving away artifacts linked to 30 years of memories that constituted the soul of the building itself.

Fans detached the sign for the infamous section 14, which had served as a rough Greek chorus to the New Haven Nighthawks' last run at a championship.

Six months after the capstone to his reformation of New Haven closed, former Mayor, Richard C. Lee, died at the age of 82.

He never regretted his ambitions to save the city.

For three years, the Coliseum stood largely abandoned as city and state officials argued over how to pay for it's demolition.

In 2005, after the two sides settled the issue, Mayor DeStefano started the process of dismantling the New Haven Veteran Memorial Coliseum.

For 18 months, workers removed the walls and seats.

>With that goes a lot of concerts there, a lot of hockey games, my daughter was a baby, we took her to the circus there.

That - I think once you see in rubble, really hits you then and you realize that those days are gone forever.

>>Seat by seat, row by row, section by section, the Coliseum vanished.

Baby boomers visited to review the site of their generation's site of personal history.

First date, first concert, first game, first ice show.

The first circus with their kids.

>The Coliseum was absolutely one of the worst places possible to see a show and just in general - the sound and the parking and things like that - but we loved it.

It was our home.

>>Tom McCormack's valedictory column on the Coliseum shortly after the building closed in 2002, noted that “Memories of the Coliseum in the minds of many like myself, are sometimes like the building itself.

Slightly off center, not quite what you think it should be.

” >When you walked into New Haven Coliseum, you feel the great bands that played there.

I still maintain to this day and I do a lot of concerts at the Hartford Civic Center and I try not to at the Civic Center, you walk into the Civic Center and your memories of other shows don't come to mind so fast.

But at the Coliseum they always did.

>>On January 19th 2007, workers embedded the final charges for the implosion scheduled for the next morning just after sunrise.

Earlier that day, Tom McCormack died.

He covered the Blades at the old Arena, saw Sinatra and noted the rise and fall of the building who's press box honored his name.

On the morning of January 20th, thousands took to the interstates and the Oak Street Connector to watch the Coliseum's finale.

Many of them huddled against the cold in Temple Street Garage.

Built as the symbol of New Haven's attempt at the easy on, easy off culture of suburbia, it now served as a grandstand to the explosive end of that dream.

>The vision of perfection may have been flawed, but you can't deny the great energy that went into it and the humanist desire to do that.

I mean, they weren't just sitting on their backsides doing nothing.

At 7:30 am, spectators faced the rising sun and fidgeted in the cold as the annihilation of the Coliseum approached.

>>For all the things or all of the hype that went with this place when it first opened, I think a lot of people still held onto that.

That feeling.

And so when it was about to close, I think everybody who genuinely remembered it opening felt like they were losing a part of themselves.

>The warning siren finally wailed through the streets of Old New Haven at 7:48 am.

>It is not the first time in history that a vision failed.

There are many ruins all over the world - grandiose visions which never came to pass.

Never survived very long.

That is the nature of history, the nature of the architecture, the nature of culture, the nature of evolving civilizations.

>>It was very intense and emotional to see basically an old friend get knocked down.

>I cried when the building went down.

I did.

You felt bad because you knew, even when it was sitting empty, it was still there even though there was no events there.

>>I don't think there is a lot of joy that I felt about the demolition of the Coliseum, we had all grown up with it.

Whether you agreed with the aesthetics of what it looked like or could have looked like, it was part of our hometown and to see it come down was sad.

>So when that building went down in a clump just like that, what was a reality up until then became a memory.

>With the Coliseum in rubble, New Haven area hockey circled back to its origins as a college sport.

Yale, in its 6th decade at Ingalls' Rink, and Quinnipiac University in an arena overlooking its Mt.

Carmel campus that opened a week after the implosion.

Back at the southern edge of the nine squares of Old New Haven, the Coliseum site reverted to dirt.

For the first time in decades the sun illuminated the ground where pop idols once emerged for a few hours a night.

Before vanishing in front of all who bore witness to a time and place, generations to follow can only imagine.

♪ Get on the train, takes me away, not gonna see you for a while.

Why?

It's an away game.

It's an away game.

I'm coming home soon.

♪ Get on the train that takes me away, not gonna see you for a while.

Get on the train, it takes me away, I'm coming back to you in style.

It's an away game, it's an away game.

It's an away game, another away game.

I'm coming home soon.

♪ But don't you worry, it will be alright, because we've got four home games in a row, starting Thursday night.

Together again.

Just me and you.

No more away games.

Just us two, just us two, just us two, just us two.

♪