One month to the day and the hour that the storied Culver City Ice Arena closed, preparatory to changing tenants, owner Michael Karagozian made a stunning announcement late last evening through attorney Nadine Lewis:
“It is with a heavy heart that the Karagozian family has decided to decommission the rink that it has owned for the past 52 years.”
Indisputably, this will be heartbreaking news for thousands of loyal daily and weekly skaters and their families.
“Quite frankly,” Ms. Lewis said, “I don’t blame him. It was the only decision to make. I think it has been the agenda of City Hall all along to decommission the rink. Why? I can’t tell you. I do not know.”
It is outrageous, Ms. Lewis said, how city legal and administrative authorities have conducted themselves about this patch of private property.
Covering Up?
She believes many of City Hall’s decisions during the past month to hide documents, to refuse to turn them over to rink officials, were “attempts to cover up the city’s own ineptness.” Why else, Ms. Lewis asked, wouldn’t City Hall release such supposedly mundane data as Fire Marshal Michael Bowden’s inspection results in recent years, down to the present? “This was a show of police power,” Ms. Lewis said.
Well before the city, she believes with careful planning, posted its No Entry notice on the Ice Arena at 9 o’clock on a Saturday morning on a holiday weekend — when legal respites were conveniently unavailable for days – Mr. Karagozian “had prepared checks” to cover the supposed problem areas.
The city was so informed.
That, said Ms. Lewis, did not seem to matter to the city.
Ms. Lewis said she feels pain for the economic losses sure to be suffered by surrounding small businesses whose revenue has been spiked by a steady flow of business from skaters and their parents.
Does this mean that skating and hockey at the arena, which drew almost 5,000 participants a week until Feb. 2, is over in Culver City?
Following four weeks of virtually hour-to-hour – equal parts bitter and mysterious – combat with an unprecedentedly aggressive City Hall, Mr. Karagozian’s verdict means the arena is closed indefinitely, if not permanently.
The daunting move by the landlord was driven by a loudly bannered City Hall charge that Mr. Karagozian was operating a public hazard that must be remediated instantly. “Instantly,” so far, has lasted for weeks. Furiously, the city has been scrambling ever since to validate its unsubstantiated claim.
The ice will be melted, and the extensive machinery, so viciously, controversially and publicly debated, will be wound down.
Not Through Yet
Ms. Lewis said that Mr. Karagozian still is obligated to submit to the city a plan for downsizing the arena and other details, estimated to cost $45,000.
Ms. Lewis said that James D. Wright, the Fullerton engineering expert who exposed the faulty analysis by the firm that City Hall said proved its still dangling charges, “agrees 100 percent with Mr. Karagozian that the city wants to take over the arena.
“There is no contamination in the ice,” she said. “It is salt water. If there were brine in the ice, it would not freeze.
“The city has been playing a sick game,” Ms. Lewis said, “and today it is devastating for so many employees and their families, so many skaters and their families.”
