End of an Era: Edmonton Says Goodbye to the Coliseum, Bats and All
By 2025, Northlands Coliseum known to most Edmontonians as Rexall Place will be gone.
The building has been on borrowed time since the Oilers played their final game there in 2016. The Canadian Finals Rodeo followed a year later, then the lights mostly went out. After nearly a decade of limbo and over a million dollars a year just to keep it standing, Edmonton City Council has finally pulled the trigger.
But don't expect a Vegas-style implosion. Too risky. The building is riddled with asbestos and mold, there's a colony of bats living inside, and it sits right next to the LRT tracks. So instead of a dramatic collapse, crews will take it down piece by piece like disassembling a memory.
The Building That Built a City
If you grew up in Edmonton, you've got a Coliseum story.
Maybe it was watching Gretzky lift the Cup. Maybe it was your first concert Metallica, or the Backstreet Boys, no judgment. Maybe your parents took you to the rodeo or you screamed yourself hoarse at a monster truck rally. Whatever your thing was, the Coliseum probably hosted it.
For nearly 40 years, that building pulled in everyone. Hockey diehards. Country fans. Grandparents dragging grandkids to the circus. It wasn't flashy and it wasn't perfect, but it showed up. It gave Edmonton a place to gather when we needed one.
Then Rogers Place opened downtown in 2016, and the Coliseum's purpose evaporated almost overnight. The heart of north Edmonton became a ghost town.
Rot, Mold, and a Million-Dollar Babysitting Bill
The city tried to find a second life for the place. Rec centre proposals. Shelter conversions. Concert venue revivals. Every idea slammed into the same wall: the building is old, it's falling apart, and the price tag to fix it up made no financial sense.
In the end, tearing it down costs less than keeping it on life support.
Still, it stings. You can bulldoze concrete and rip out seats, but you can't bulldoze what the place meant to people. That part doesn't come down easy.
What Rises From the Rubble
The land won't sit empty for long. City plans call for a new LRT station, mixed residential development, and an urban plaza. Denser housing, better transit, shiny public space the usual redevelopment pitch.
Whether any of it captures even a sliver of the Coliseum's spirit is another question. Buildings like that weren't just infrastructure. They held emotion. That doesn't show up on blueprints.
And then there are the bats.
Before demolition begins, crews will need to relocate a colony of little brown bats that have made the rafters their home. It's a weirdly fitting final chapter these tiny stowaways clinging to a building nobody wanted anymore, holding on until the bitter end.
No Farewell Tour
There won't be a send-off event. No ceremony. No lights dimming one last time. Just demolition fencing and the slow grind of machinery pulling it all apart.
That feels both sad and appropriate. The Coliseum served its time. It didn't need a dramatic exit.
What it gave this city the noise, the grit, the shared moments doesn't vanish just because the walls come down. That stuff sticks around. Quietly. In the bones of the city.
