5 Things We Miss About Memorial Auditorium — And One Thing We Don't

Buffalo Memorial Auditorium opened on October 14, 1940, and stood for 69 years before its demolition was completed in 2009.^[1] For most of that time it was the beating heart of downtown Buffalo sports — home to the Sabres for their first 26 seasons and, for eight years in the 1970s, to an NBA franchise that genuinely contended.^[4] When the wrecking crews finally finished their work that July, the Buffalo Business First ran the headline simply: "Aud razed to rubble."^[3]

The site was later redeveloped as part of the Canalside project, and the location of center ice was memorialized on the canal itself — a gesture that speaks to how deeply the building had lodged itself in the city's identity.^[5] Here is what longtime fans say they can't stop thinking about.

1. The Smell of the Concourse

This is the one that hits people first when you ask them. Sabres fans who attended games in that era consistently describe it the same way: popcorn, Zamboni exhaust, hot dogs, decades of cigarette smoke baked into the concrete, and underneath all of it something cold and clean that was just ice. You could smell the ice before you could see it.

The concourse was tight and low-ceilinged, which meant the noise and the smells didn't dissipate the way they do in a modern arena with its atriums and food courts and fifty-foot ceilings. Everything hit you all at once when you came through the gate. Before you'd found your seat, before you'd even gotten your program, you knew where you were. There was no other place in Buffalo that smelled like that. There's no place anywhere that smells like that now.

2. Seats So Close You Could Hear the Skates

The Aud held approximately 15,860 for hockey after post-opening renovations — KeyBank Center holds over 19,000.^[1] You'd think bigger would mean better. It doesn't. Not for hockey.

In the Aud, even from the upper bowl, fans were close to the ice in a way that modern arenas simply can't replicate. The sightlines were steep and direct. Longtime attendees recall being able to hear skates cut across the ice and players talking during stoppages if the crowd went quiet for a moment — which it rarely did. On a big night at the Aud, the sound bounced off that old concrete and came right back at you. Historians of the building describe the atmosphere as among the most intense in the league during its prime years. It felt like the building itself was alive.

Sabres fans who held glass-level seats in that era describe the experience in vivid terms: the puck hitting the boards a few feet away, the sound almost physical, regular-season games feeling like events. That's what the building did even on an ordinary Thursday night in February.

3. The Buffalo Braves, Before They Were Gone

Younger Buffalonians don't always know this, but the Aud was also an NBA arena. According to Wikipedia, the Buffalo Braves played in that building from their founding in 1970 through the 1977–78 season — and for a brief shining moment in the mid-1970s they were genuinely good.^[2] Bob McAdoo won back-to-back NBA scoring titles in 1974 and 1975 while wearing a Braves uniform, and the team made the playoffs three straight years.^[2]

That building held two professional sports franchises at the same time, sharing the same ice, the same organ, the same concession stands. The Braves relocated to San Diego in 1978 and eventually became the Los Angeles Clippers. Buffalo has not had an NBA team since.^[2] The Aud held both of those things — Sabres hockey and Braves basketball — and the loss of both at different times in that same building gives the place a kind of doubled sadness in retrospect.

4. Walking to the Game When Downtown Still Had Life

The Aud sat at Main and Terrace, right at the edge of downtown. In the 1970s and into the early 1980s, walking to the game meant walking through a downtown that was still a functioning place. Main Place Mall was open. The restaurants near Lafayette Square were doing real business. Delaware Avenue still had its grand old buildings occupied and lit up.

WNY residents who lived through that period describe the pre-game walk as part of the event itself — something to move through, a city with density and energy around the arena that made attending a game feel like an urban occasion, not just a sports outing. By the time the Aud closed in 1996, that version of downtown had largely faded. The walk to KeyBank Center through the parking lots and empty blocks never felt the same, because it wasn't.

5. Bob Dill and the Crowd That Knew Every Song

Bob Dill served as the Sabres' organist for much of the team's history at the Aud, and he became one of the most beloved figures in the building's long life. According to oral histories of the Sabres preserved by fans and local media, he had a gift for reading the crowd and the moment — a slow build for a power play, a triumphant riff after a goal, the right amount of menace for an opposing penalty. The Aud's organ didn't just fill silence. It conducted the crowd.^[4]

And the crowd knew it. When Dill started a familiar riff, the regulars responded before the notes were even finished. It was call-and-response. The building was an instrument and Dill was playing it, and thousands of people were in on the performance. That kind of shared knowledge takes years of the same people showing up to the same place with the same organist until the whole thing locks into place. Fans who experienced it say it simply doesn't exist in sports arenas the same way anymore.

The One Thing We Don't Miss: The Men's Bathrooms

Any honest accounting of Memorial Auditorium has to include this.

The men's bathrooms at the Aud were, by virtually universal account, an experience that no amount of nostalgia can rehabilitate. Trough-style fixtures, perpetually wet floors, lighting that suggested the building's electrical system had made a considered decision to disengage from that particular room sometime around 1965. The smell during intermission was — well. The Zamboni exhaust in the concourse suddenly seemed very appealing by comparison.

Every man who ever attended a Sabres game at the Aud has described the same strategic calculus: you timed your trips, you made decisions based on game flow, you held it if the score was close. When KeyBank Center opened with its clean, tiled, actually-functional restrooms, a small but real part of the collective Sabres fan experience improved measurably. The Aud deserves to be remembered with love. The bathrooms deserved what happened to them.

If you've still got Aud memorabilia — programs, pennants, old ticket stubs from the Braves or Sabres years — they may be worth more than you think. Check out our piece on sports collectibles and what they're worth today — the principles apply directly to arena memorabilia from torn-down buildings. The scarcity factor is real, and it only grows over time.