The WHL Arena Guide - Regina Exhibition Stadium, Regina Pats

Regina’s Queen City Gardens opened in 1919, the same year that Canada's oldest junior team, the Regina Pats, were founded. The arena and the Pats were linked for the next sixty years. Exhibition Stadium, as it was later renamed, was located on the Regina Exhibition Grounds, a short walk from their current home, the Agridome. It was used as an agricultural pavilion as well as a hockey arena, and it remained open long after the Pats left in 1977, for fairground and agricultural uses as well as minor hockey. The Pats continued to play occasional games here when the Agridome was otherwise booked, and the Regina Leader-Post notes that the last time was in March of 1990.

The Exhibition Stadium was noted as being a time capsule near the end of its life as one of the last remaining arenas built prior to the first arena boom in Canada in the 1920's. From pictures, the arena had support columns right behind the arena glass and wooden bench seats in a U-shape, wooden rink boards, an organ loft, and other trappings of a bygone age. The arena ice wasn’t even converted from natural to artificial until the late 1930’s.

Exhibition Stadium’s last season with ice was 2009-10, but it was still used as an agricultural pavilion until November 2016 when the building finally closed for good. From pictures and contemporary reports, the arena was in poor condition, with crumbling concrete everywhere, and was on the verge of being structurally unsafe. The arena was finally demolished in 2017.