McMahon Stadium

McMahon Stadium was raised in a hundred days, and that speed still shapes how people talk about it: a stopgap that turned into a fixture. Frank and George McMahon put up the money, and the ground kept their name even after General Motors bought the right to slap "GMC Stadium" on the tickets — locals never adopted it.

The building has spent most of its life being made bigger. It opened holding a little over twenty thousand and has been pushed upward in stages ever since, through the seventies and again ahead of 1988, when Calgary hosted the Winter Olympics and the stadium carried the opening and closing ceremonies in front of sixty thousand people — still the largest crowd it has ever held, well past anything a football fixture here has drawn.

For football itself, the ceiling sits lower: the record gate came at the 97th Grey Cup in 2009, with just over 46,000 through the gates, one of five Grey Cup finals the stadium has staged. The NHL came calling too, for the 2011 Heritage Classic, played outdoors on a McMahon pitch that has been synthetic since 1975 — AstroTurf first, FieldTurf since 2006, relaid again as recently as last year.

Away from sport, the stadium's guest list runs from Billy Graham's crusade in 1981 to Queen Elizabeth II's visit in 1990, and on the music side from the Festival Express tour in 1970 through three separate Lilith Fair stops. It is that mix — Olympic ceremony, Grey Cup nights, an outdoor NHL game, a royal visit — that gives McMahon its character: not one signature event but a stadium that Calgary has kept finding new reasons to fill.