Built to Land an NHL Team
The Pacific Coliseum opened on January 8, 1968 with a touring Ice Capades show, replacing the older 5,000-seat Forum as Vancouver's major arena. W.K. Noppe of Phillips, Barratt, Hillier, Jones and Partners designed the circular building, and the city raised it specifically to attract an NHL franchise. The bet paid off: the Vancouver Canucks played their first NHL game there on October 9, 1970.
From Canucks Barn to Touring Stage
The Canucks called the Coliseum home from 1970 to 1995, with Stanley Cup Finals runs in 1982 and 1994, before moving downtown to what is now Rogers Arena. The WHL's Vancouver Giants then filled the building from 2001 to 2016. It hosted figure skating and short-track speed skating at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and as of the 2025 to 2026 season it is the primary home rink for the PWHL's Vancouver Goldeneyes.
A Configurable Bowl
For concerts the bowl scales from an intimate 4,200-seat mini-stage setup up to 17,000 in the round, with a published total of 17,500 (15,713 permanent seats plus roughly 1,600 temporary floor seats). The arena floor runs about 56,825 square feet under a ceiling roughly 68 feet to the beams, leaving touring productions plenty of height for rigging. Masking the upper bowl can make the same room read very differently from the floor.
Five Decades of Marquee Shows
The Coliseum has logged a who's-who of touring acts, among them Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones (whose June 3, 1972 date opened the band's North American tour), and David Bowie, who launched his 1976 Isolar tour here. Its record crowd is often cited above 19,000, though sources split on whether that belongs to a 1972 Neil Young show or Led Zeppelin's March 1970 concert. Periodic upgrades have kept the half-century-old room in the touring rotation.