The new Garden will soon bloom for Boston : Traditionalists may protest, but venerable old arena is on way out.

It opened on Nov. 17, 1928. It’s the place where John F. Kennedy was cheered by 20,000 people inside and another 80,000 outside on the eve of his election to the presidency, where Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt had spoken before him.

It’s an arena that virtually created ice shows, helped elevate hockey to boffo box office and has attracted crowds for acts as diverse as Aimee Semple McPherson, Benny Goodman, Roy Rogers and Trigger, Hulk Hogan and the Grateful Dead.

There’s nothing, traditionalists say, like the venerable Boston Garden. But soon, the old Garden may be gone.

In its place will rise a new $160-million Garden, home to hockey’s Bruins and basketball’s Celtics. Construction is set to begin sometime next spring.

How this city--at the hub of economically depressed New England--has been able to pull off such a project is a bit of a story in itself.

It took an unprecedented agreement among three major New England banks--Shawmut, Fleet and Bank of Boston--to share equally in financing the deal. No public monies are involved, and there are no foreign investors, although until last spring Delaware North Cos. of Buffalo, N.Y.--the conglomerate that owns the Garden--was negotiating with Japanese banks.

Final financing negotiations are expected to be completed shortly.

Why is a new Garden happening now?

Maybe, says Larry Moulter, president of the New Garden Corp., “what I call the tribal politics of Boston came together” because of the persistent recession. “The politics of recovery, in a way, demand the politics of collaboration.”

The industries that drove the so-called Massachusetts miracle, such as commercial real estate and high technology, are reeling. Economic impetus into the 21st Century will come from other sources, and Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld in particular cites the importance of tourism.

A new Garden, says Moulter, “is essential to that belief.”

Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn, a Democrat, and Weld, a Republican, both say this is a great thing for the city known, at least to partisans, as “the hub of the universe.”

At last spring’s press conference announcing the deal to guarantee $120 million in loans, Flynn, who was a ball boy for the first National Basketball Assn. All-Star game ever played at the Garden, called it “a three-point shot and a hat trick for Boston,” noting that fans had been “waiting 30 years” for a new Garden, the grand opening of which is expected in September of 1995.

“The old jokes had actually come true,” John Powers wrote in the Boston Globe.

“There was a Polish Pope before there was a new Garden. The Soviet Union did break up. The Berlin Wall did come down.”

So what if there’s no air conditioning? Boston fans can sweat it out. Who cares if the Los Angeles Lakers call it a sauna?

So what if a transformer blew up during Game 4 of hockey’s 1988 Stanley Cup finals, plunging the Garden into darkness?

So what if you can’t see from some of the seats? Even obstructed views are hot tickets in this town where the Bruins’ season ticket waiting list numbers about 4,000, and the Celtics a thousand more than that.

So what if there have been no NBA All-Star games here since 1964? No hopes of a national political convention?

The new building will have 104 executive suites, boosting the Garden’s seating capacity by about 3,000 seats or more, depending on the event.

For more than $1 million ($211,000 a year for a five-year lease), a box holder gets an 18-leather-seat center location suite with the requisite wet bar, telephones and TVs, two parking spaces in the underground garage and access to the private restaurant with its two-story glass window looking down on the action.

It will also have 2,156 “club seats,” comfortable armchairs with “in-seat food and beverage service,” for $8,100 to $9,100 per year per seat, depending on location. The old Garden has 34 suites and no club seating.

About 70% of the luxury seating already has been sold, said Gail Edwards, vice president and treasurer of Delaware North. It’s a crucial new source of revenue that the old building lacks.

Edwards, a Canadian who engineered the financing plan for Toronto’s Skydome, is given much of the credit for pulling the Garden plan together.

The south wall of the new Garden will be built inches away from the north wall of the old, which sits above North Station, a commuter rail terminal, and across the street from the elevated Green Line tracks (part of Boston’s subway is above ground here). The area is already busy with construction of a five-level garage behind today’s Garden. The new Garden will be build on a specially reinforced platform above this garage.

And what of the Garden that made history--and will keep making it when fans surround the fabled parquet floor (which will be moved into the new Garden) to bid an official farewell to Larry Bird early next year?

“Our plan at the moment is to tear it down,” says Moulter. It’s a requirement under the banking deal. Delaware North hopes to sell the parcel to a developer.