Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:32:00

Nirvana, roller derby, Stanley Cup-era hockey and a wartime chapter the city still reckons with have all passed under one Art Deco roof at Hastings Park. The PNE Forum at 2901 East Hastings Street, on the Pacific National Exhibition grounds in East Vancouver, is a 45,000-square-foot exhibition and concert hall built in 1931 and owned by the City of Vancouver. Architect H. H. Simmons designed the building - originally the Automotive and Ice Rink Building - in cast-in-place concrete with Art Deco relief panels; a letter A survives over the south entry. Its arched roof collapsed under a record 43-centimetre snowfall in January 1935 without injury and was rebuilt to McCarter and Nairne designs the same year. When the 10,500-seat Denman Arena burned in 1936 the Forum became Vancouver's premier indoor sports venue, seating 5,050 for hockey and box lacrosse. The Pacific Coast and Western Hockey League Canucks played here from 1945 until the Pacific Coliseum opened next door in 1968; the Vancouver Burrards lacrosse club held the floor through the 1940s. The building's darkest service came in 1942, when it was filled with 1,212 bunk beds as a detention dormitory for Japanese Canadian men and boys during the internment - a history documented by the Hastings Park 1942 project and marked on the site today. Entertainment history runs deep: Jimmy Durante played the hall in the 1930s, Bing Crosby staged his radio show for 9,000 people in 1948, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention recorded their 25 August 1968 show here, released decades later as Road Tapes, Venue 1. After an early-1980s refurbishment stripped the hockey fittings, the Forum settled into its current role as a concert and trade-show floor. The modern configuration offers 44,579 square feet of column-light floor, divisible in two, holding over 3,900 in concert mode with 40-foot ceilings - the mid-size workhorse of the PNE grounds alongside the Coliseum and the amphitheatre.