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. Renovations In 2008, Kitchener Rangers president Steve Bienkowski stated that the Rangers had begun the process of researching the possibility of building a new arena with larger capacity. The Rangers had sold out almost every game for the previous 3 years, and the waiting list for season tickets had been well over the cap of 4,750. Mr. Bienkowski stated the Rangers would like a building with at least 10,000 seats. Bienkowski presented the City of Kitchener council a report on expanding the Aud. The expansion would have included another level of seating as well as an expanded concourse. The expansion proposed to add 3,500 seats to the facility to make total seating capacity around 10,500. The estimated cost was $44 million. This expansion option was the favoured route for the team, as it was estimated that a new arena with a larger seating capacity (about 10,000) would cost $150 million. City council made it clear they would not finance such a large project unless private companies were adding money to it but had been very favourable at the idea of expanding the city-owned building. The plan includes raising the roof on the building, a process which had been done before with the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium in the early 1970s. Bienkowski and the city came an agreement involving the Aud being expanded by 1,000 seats with a concourse on the third level. The expected cost for this expansion was roughly $9 million, with the Kitchener Rangers Hockey Club paying for it, via a loan from the City of Kitchener. Work began in February 2012 and was completed by the end