The Auditorium for a Verdunite

Marc Daoust: Oh, my God! What the Auditorium represents for me? The Auditorium, it’s somehow, for a little kid, because I love to know that inside me, there is a little kid from Verdun, and I think all youngsters who come from Verdun think a bit like that, because it’s a rather particular environment from a community point of view. So, the Auditorium, for me, and I think for many youngsters, is a kind of multifaceted creature. It was at a very young age, a mythical place, because the Habs used to practice there. In those days, they were quite present in Verdun, because there were all the Juniors, all the energy of the Verdun Juniors who were very close, at the time, to the development of the players who would later play for the National Hockey League.

It represents a loitering place, a lot with buddies. We used to come here to meet friends, female friends who skated or male friends who played hockey. We came here to have fun, to spend time. It was also at the Auditorium, in fact, the Annexe that we called at the time, before that was called Denis-Savard, the second skating rink was called the Annex, and in summer, that space was available for youngsters to come play basketball, Mississippi, ping-pong. So it was a playground.

So, mythical, games, and it then became for me, a working space, I mean, a training space where I worked under management. In fact, Yvon Turcot was the arena’s manager at the time, and… It also corresponds to a very busy time for corporate events that were held at the Auditorium. So, it became a huge training space for me. And what I learned here is still very, very, very useful to me today in my work. The way this job was presented to me, I mean, with confidence, by always approaching work as a space for seeking solutions, seeking personal and collective satisfaction, an incredible team work space.

So, all these elements contributed for me to making what the Auditorium has become, I mean as I said, a kind of multifaceted creature. And even more you know, because this is for me a location, but in the Verdun space, it’s also a kind of living monument because it’s always in transition. And then, it’s also good to know that the Auditorium will have a new life in an intention of historical revival, which in fact is quite interesting. And I also think we wish to go back to corporate events, and to a kind of space that will thrill the community.