Olympic Stadium

The first Canadian city to host the Summer Olympic Games, Montreal began building the ill-fated Le Stade Olympique to be the centerpiece of their 1976 event. Alas, despite the city’s intention of building the arena for the global games, the “Stade,” as it is known to locals, was incomplete by the time of its unveiling at the Summer Olympics. It took ten more years for it to be fully completed. It has since been used for baseball games, soccer matches, football games and Grey Cups (Canada’s Superbowl), auto shows, a Pope rally and countless rock concerts. It is even believed that Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters was inspired to write the band’s epic album, The Wall after playing the stadium in 1977. Designed by French architect Roger Taillibert, the building certainly is an innovative piece of work for its time. Due to the prolonged construction budget, which eventually topped out at over one billion dollars Canadian, the city of Montreal only finished paying for the stadium 30 years after the Olympics for which it was built.