Queen Street Auditorium

The Queen Street Auditorium was an indoor arena located in Kitchener, Ontario, which was known as Berlin, Ontario when the arena opened in 1904.

History
The current Kitchener Memorial Auditorium Complex replaced an earlier facility, the Queen Street Auditorium, at the corner of Charles St., built for $55,000 in 1904. Use of that building ended after a major fire in 1948.

In its early days, the natural ice surface of the old Aud supported hockey, with the first game seeing Berlin trounce Brantford 7-3, in front of an audience of 2,000. Artificial ice was installed in 1927 and this was the home of the Waterloo Siskins, a team formed in 1937. The Kraut Line also played at this facility. "It was home to me and it was a palace, as far as I was concerned," Milt Schmidt recalled in 2016. By the time of the Second World War however, when most young men were overseas, so the building was used primarily as a Big band era dance hall. Another factor in this change was that Silverwood Dairies, which had provided the refrigeration for the ice surface, moved to another location in 1938, ending the availability of inexpensive artificial ice. Afterwards, the city was without a large indoor ice surface until the new Aud was built in 1951.