A look inside Rogers Stadium, the 50,000-person concert venue built in nine months | Canada Voices

When the K-Pop band Stray Kids hit the stage at Toronto’s Rogers Stadium on Sunday, it will be a minor miracle: The 50,000-person concert venue was built from scratch in less than a year, and promoter Live Nation Canada was still working on cosmetic touches Thursday afternoon.

The nine-month construction timeline shocked music fans when it was announced just last September, but the finish line is in sight. Construction workers were still milling in the rain and final wayfinding signage was still being prepared as Nathalie Burri, Live Nation Canada’s vice-president of venues and operations, stood on the stage and pointed to a grassy embankment surrounding much of the outdoor stadium.

It’s artificial, she said, built from all the soil they dug up to lay concrete for the massive bleachers surrounding her, some shooting up 54 rows high. “The biggest piece of construction was really reinforcing the ground so that we could get stability for the structure to be built,” she said.

Sitting atop the runway of the former Downsview Airport in north Toronto, the new purpose-built stadium marks a multi-million-dollar investment by Live Nation Canada to capture the ever-growing market for stadium tours in North America. Opening this Sunday, it will feature 14 concerts over the summer from seven artists, including Coldplay, Oasis and Blackpink.

The structure is temporary. Live Nation hopes to use it for at least five years, in partnership with Public Sector Pension Investment Board’s Northcrest Developments, which is leading the decades-long redevelopment of 370 acres within Downsview into mixed-use land.

The partnership allows Northcrest to find a use for roughly 55 acres as it gradually builds out the rest of the site, while also solving a problem Live Nation identified in the Toronto concert market.

Many stadium tours are geared toward NFL stadiums, where games are played once a week for a late-in-the-year season, said Wayne Zronik, Live Nation Canada’s president of business operations. Though Torontonians have access to the downtown Rogers Centre baseball stadium, it hosts 81 Blue Jays games a year, making it harder to route some of the summer’s biggest concert tours there.

Coldplay is in the midst of what Billboard has called one of the best-selling rock tours of all time, and Live Nation staff birthed the idea for the temporary stadium last year when they hoped to bring the band to the city.

Working with BaAM Productions, which specializes in temporary structures for live events, Live Nation Canada set up a team of hundreds, Mr. Zronik said, to aggressively design and build the stadium. (He declined to share the full cost of the investment, but said it was worth millions of dollars, and that it would take about three years of operations to justify its costs.)

The stadium will have its own stage but will be able to accommodate custom stages for artist tours that require them, including for Coldplay’s four July performances. The floor will accommodate up to 18,000 people, sitting or standing, while the bleachers will fit up to 32,000, Ms. Burri said.

These are what required the significant digging of the soil around the runway’s edge, she added, in order to pour enough concrete to safely hold the scaffolding for the grandstands. Though the scaffolding is expected to remain up year-round, she said her team will likely dismantle the seating to shield it from the harsh Canadian winters.

Much of the rest of the infrastructure is modular and will be taken down at the end of each summer concert season. While some of it can be stored outdoors on the stadium floor in wintertime, she said that pieces could be stored in nearby hangars – yet another relic of the site’s airfaring past.

The grounds have hosted concerts for decades, including festivals such as Veld and Riot Fest. It was also the site of the 2012 stage collapse that killed Radiohead drum technician Scott Johnson. It is perhaps best known as the home of the 2003 Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto concert, also known as SARSstock, headlined by the Rolling Stones.

In an interview in a backstage office, Mr. Zronick pointed to a framed aerial photo of that concert, which drew hundreds of thousands of people. “It just speaks to the history of live music on the site,” he said.

Visitors for Rogers Stadium concerts will at least have slightly more permanent amenities than the temporary setups of previous music events. That includes 600 bathrooms with flushing toilets, and a plaza near the main entrance filled with food and beverage providers, a large merch tent, and a small stage for showcasing Canadian artists before the main show.

“The idea is to get the ingress staggered,” Ms. Burri said, so “you don’t gave an onslaught of 50,000 people coming all at one time.”

Parking and traffic are expected to draw significant concern. There will be no dedicated parking, Ms. Burri warned, but there are three nearby subway stations, including Downsview Park Station about a 15-minute walk away. But she added that there are a cumulative 11,000 parking spots available in commuter lots a short subway trip from the site. The Toronto Transit Commission will offer free rides to commuters leaving the stadium’s concerts.

And staff are working with their colleagues at the similarly named Rogers Centre baseball stadium downtown, to make sure its staff can turn around fans who might actually go to the wrong venue on concert nights. They’re also making sure to remind fans of the Rogers Stadium’s location as much as possible.

“It is becoming comical – not really – but we certainly don’t want people to end up at Rogers Centre,” Ms. Burri said.