It looks like all-skate to me

/ December 17, 2014

The famous 30 Rock isn’t the only downtown outdoor center that’s got it going on.

I thought I might find a deserted core Saturday in the heart of Syracuse, N.Y., when I had my dear wife Karen stop the car off on our way to a holiday party so I could see if there was indeed somthing I could write about for my weekly community blog for Syracuse public media site waer.org.

Score at Clinton Square.

Ice skating on 12/13/14 in Syracuse, N.Y.

Ice skating on 12/13/14 in Syracuse, N.Y.

You can click the link below to read my column.

http://waer.org/post/clinton-square-ice-rink-still-appears-wed-central-new-yorkers-and-fun

Snow of the week be damned. On this last sequential day for the next 89 years, the people of Central New York — a couple hundred of them, anyway — were going to skate among holiday lights before night officially fell.

Take a picture of skaters taking pictures of skaters.

Take a picture of skaters taking pictures of skaters.

Now if only I could skate, I’d be tempted to join them for the fun and exercise.

Postcard setting.

Postcard setting.

Is there an outdoor rink where you live? Have you ever skated outdoors? Would you be tempted to learn how to ice skate now?

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52 thoughts on “It looks like all-skate to me”

  3. OMG, I LOVE ice skating! I’ve never even seen an outdoor rink but that looks like so much fun! Is there a lake under there, or was is made specifically for skating? That tree is HUGE! Any idea how tall it is? My town only gets a temporary indoor ice rink 2 weeks a year in January. The closest permanent ice rink we have in in St. Pete, a little more than an hour away. 😦

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    • The rink is built over the reflecting pond fountain part of the square in the summer, Rachel, so it’s on concrete, really. There’s a rubber carpet in the middle of the rink, a long strip that everybody as to skate around. That covers the machinery that spouts up the water in the shallow fountain in the warm months!

      I don’t know how tall the tree is this year. Very!

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      • Oh, that sounds like fun! I probably would skate on a lake, at least once to say that I did, but I’d also probably be terrified to do so. (I’ve had a lifelong fear of being trapped enclosed in something under water… could be a car, could be a submarine… and could be trapped under ice. Though I have no actual fear of water or being underwater itself, sans the enclosure, of course.)

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      • OUCH! Now I have to check out Netflix and see if they’ve got that! I saw an Unsolved Mysteries once where a guy believed he was reincarnated from a soldier who was killed aboard of submarine that was hit in WW2, and they showed the reenactment of how he was trapped when it filled with water…That spooked me forever!

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  5. We have indoor rinks pretty much unless you live up near the mountain ski resorts. That is where you will find outdoor rinks. There is a small one outdoors near a local restaurant mall. You could probably get good enough to skate around the rink. I have been on ice skates many years ago. Ice hockey is popular with the boys but they use indoor rinks and it can be a very expensive sport with the skates and all the gear. And ice hockey practice is usually at inconvenient hours like the crack of dawn. My son did roller blade hockey instead.

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  6. Mark, I would probably make a really good ice skater, since I could dance across the ice like a ballerina. I make those moves frequently here at home just before each fall, so on skates I might be able to avert the actual fall and dance my way around the rink. At least I can dream about it. I’ve never hurt myself in my dreams. We have an ice rink here, but I have what I consider a healthy fear of ice, so I have never tried it. I have roller skated as a kid, using the sidewalk skates that required the key to keep them on, but I had no nerve endings back then. I also jumped from swings that I pumped high enough to loop over the top. The nuns were not amused, but we had fun scaring them. I love your Syracuse rink. Saw it on the weather news a few days ago in fact. Beautiful.

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    • I remember roller skates that needed keys back in the day, Angie, and I couldn’t do that, either. Yes, the rink here is really beautiful. You must have been something scaring the nuns when you were a kid.

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      • We all had fun scaring them. Really didn’t take much to scare some of them, and swinging so high the swing did loops over the top was fun, but jumping from the top was even better. I could skate with the sidewalk skates, just couldn’t do it on ice. MS hit me when I was 14 or 15, so a few things changed, but I still was a dare devil when I wanted to be, wa ha ha ha.

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      • I was not much of a daredevil, Angie. I do remember pumping the swings to go as high as we could when I was a kid, though. We’d dare each other to try to go all the way around, make a complete loop! Nobody ever could, of course. We’d have to settle for leaping off at the apex and jumping as far out into the sand pit as we could. At least we had a sand pit!

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  9. No outside rink where I am. And though I wouldn’t be tempted to skate I do have a lovely lady who I’ve met who’s parents in the early 1900’s built a lodge and they had a pond and she told of their skating parties. I do wish there were some old fashioned skating parties to attend. And I mean old fashioned. I wouldn’t skate. But I would go. ANd be happy to be there. 🙂

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      • It sounds just lovely! I am sure you and your lady, in your splendor and top hats and such will be waving at me and my gallant but also non skating husband as we lean upon the fence at the edge of the pond cheering on all of the skaters. And then gather around the fire with hot beverages when the skaters come off of the ice. Pink cheeks and sparkly eyes. 🙂

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      • No you and your husband will be joining us for I am sharing my secret. You, as is my lady, will be sitting on a chair, which we two men will be pushing along the ice! That’s how they teach the tykes to skate around these parts here. The put folding chairs on the ice, let them steady themselves as they push them along the ice. Genius. I watched my Elisabeth learn to skate like a pro that way when she was 4.

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  13. My Kentuckian parents were so excited about snow and skating when they moved to Michigan that I had my first pair of skates at 3. There was an outdoor rink where all us kids went every Friday night to skate all through the winter. Occasionally I got to skate on a pond on somebody’s farm. One winter my dad turned our back yard into a rink and all the neighbor kids came to skate. But most of my memories are the public rink, with music playing and hot chocolate at the snack bar. When my mother and I visit Flint each year and drive down that road I can’t even figure out where the rink used to be… Haven’t skated or owned a pair of skates in YEARS. Doubt I could stay up any more.

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  14. Love this Mark. I haven’t skated since I was 12 and I never was really good at it. I have thought about taking it up many times recently. I should just do it! Wouldn’t it be fun if we could do it together and laugh at each other???
    Diana xo

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  15. would be happy to ice skate if it wasn’t so blasted cold out there. And when it warms up, the ice turns to slush. What to do? There is probably a middle-of-the-road cold temperature we never experience in Minnesota.

    Your pictures are great, Mark. Wish you had been out there skating 🙂 Next time. Dear Wife Karen will hold you up.

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  16. I’ve never seen a tree so big–well, not since the redwoods in the 1980s, and I barely recall that. You would scoff at the “ice rink” they put up last weekend at an outside holiday event in a nearby town. It was about 12′ by 12′ and three inches thick of ice that the children were supposed to turn into snowballs, but the sun melted it all into the grass until the entire field was a muddy mess. NEXT weekend, however, the schmancy mall will truck in tons of snow to at least a foot thick so the kids can have a snowball fight. No ice, though.

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    • A snowball fight in Austin is schmancy indeed, laying it on thick for the mall people. I hop the kids have fun, Kerbey. Snowball fights should be. That is a big tree somebody cut down off their property to delight Clinton Square goers in Syracuse, I surely agree with you.

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  19. I used to go to the Catskills with my folks twice a year and stay at a resort hotel called the Concord. Don’t know if it’s still there, I imagine it wouldn’t be too far from your neck of the woods. Anyway, there was a skating rink in the hotel. All I can say is, yes, I could stay upright and afterwards my ankles would hurt like hell. I must have been doing something wrong.

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