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Beaming Hayden Paige, 11, after winning “Overall Most Artistic Award,” with Coach Crystalrose Guerra
Closing Day, bursting with happy/sad people, especially families, particularly post-toddlers 2½ to 3 feet tall, many of them shlepping cameras, asking relatives or strangers to shoot memorable photos for them – so they can display proof they were at the beloved 52-year-old Culver City Ice Arena on Sunday, the day it was scheduled to fade into history.
Not only was the beautiful ice flooded with skaters of 50 different sizes in mid-afternoon during the public skate, outside on a blustery mid-winter day, the line to enter was around the corner to the side of the building. Most unusual, regulars said.
After last week’s stunning document discovery about the use variance from 1960 – holding that the land only may be used as a rink – the future of the arena is as much in doubt this morning as it was clear before what skating families are calling The Miracle.
On this day, families are mourning the loss of their favorite sheet of ice until lawyers, the landlord, the new lessee and potential new lessees reach accord, which likely will be months from now, if not longer.
Upstairs, as a visitor strode in, John Jackson, owner of the ice rink but not the land, was leaning on the white stone facade, engaged in conversation with a most upset mom, Mindy Paige, a deputy district attorney.
For Ms. Paige and her daughter Hayden, spending Closing Day at the Ice Arena, among friends and familiar surroundings, marked one of the milestones of their intertwined lives.
She only could get several words out, “My daughter’s been coming…” before choking up and pausing. “We skate here six days a week.”
She apologized for the interruption.
Now That’s a History
Hayden Paige is 11 years old, and she has been skating here five years – that is more than 1,500 mother-and-daughter trips to the now-shuttered Culver City Ice Arena.
“Hayden is a competitive figure skater,” Ms. Paige explained.
Their entrenched daily routine is being uprooted, like a gigantic oak tree in a hurricane.
“With this rink closing, she is going to end up skating at four to five different ice rinks a week just to get ice time,” Hayden’s mother said. The nearest rink to their West L.A. residence is the Toyota Center. “The problem will be getting ice time there. Her school gets out at 3 o’clock, and their ice time, Monday through Friday, ends at 5.
“And so, it would take an hour to get her there from her school. She could only skate from 4 to 5, and then it would take another hour to get home. It is not necessarily worth it to drive for two hours to skate for one hour.”
Another View
For a few minutes yesterday, lawyer and community activist Marcus Tiggs, owner of one of the community’s more familiar faces, revisited the days of his youth.
Friends at City Hall should have seen Mr. Tiggs fairly gliding across the ice, successfully navigating fluid turns that he executed as impressively as he did a couple decades ago.
“For nostalgia reasons,” Mr. Tiggs said, “I wanted to make sure I was on the ice one last time.”
These days, he only makes an annual visit to the rink. “When I was younger,” he said, “it was like six days a week.”
Encouragingly to patrons, and the 15,000 who have signed a petition, attorney Tiggs told the newspaper he feels “ecstatic” about last week’s discovery of the use variance document that is putting the schedule of the Ice Arena on hold.
“It gives us a little bit of extra hope,” he said with a smile.
