The posting for today is a fine 1958 aerial view of the still-under-construction Green Bay Veterans Memorial Arena — later to be known as the Brown County Arena. In the background is Green Bay City Stadium, which only opened the previous year. As we have seen in previous photos, most of the land way out where the new Packers’ stadium was built was still pretty much farmland at the time. A few houses here and there have sprung up around the stadium where today there are solid residential neighborhoods.
Across the street at City Stadium (later Lambeau Field), we see that there is only the one building at the south end (the team would not move their headquarters to the stadium until 1963), which housed the locker rooms for both teams. Also apparent is the lower “bowl” area which is actually below ground level. At this time, the upper grandstand seats are only along each sideline. There would not be a demand to enclose the stadium seating at both ends until the team started to win in 1960.
The Veterans Memorial Arena is still in use, although not as much since the new Resch Center was opened a few years ago. It was and is used for trade shows, concerts, local basketball/hockey games, and a few Packer stockholders meetings. The Green Bay Packer Hall of Fame was started with a few exhibits in the Arena concourse, and later grew to its own building to the right of the square building. Once the Lambeau Field reconstruction was completed, of course, the Packer Hall of Fame moved across the street into the lower level of the Atrium.
