Fourth in a series
Re “Somebody Call the Mortician – The Rink’s Ice Melting Fast”
Without a doubt in his mind, property owner Michael Karagozian said the City Council’s mid-summer decision to designate the Culver Ice Arena as a “Significant” historical building, the middle choice, was an unsubtle attempt to slide the Stanley Cup champion Kings into the rink that closed seven months ago.
“Remember 95 percent of the people at the Council meeting were ‘Save the Rink’ people,” Mr. Karagozian said. “There was nobody there who cared about the historical or cultural significance of the building.
“Am I right or wrong?,” he asked, employing a favorite rhetorical gadget.
“It was all of those ‘Save the Rink’ people because they know by getting this thing named ‘Significant,’ it’s going to make it real burdensome to develop the property for other than a skating rink.”
Mr. Karagozian is standing by earlier pledges that the Kings will not inhabit the storied ice rink that his family has owned more than half a century.
He said the Kings underbid competing potential tenants by more than 50 percent.
A shrewd businessman-attorney, the Fresno-based Mr. Karagozian has declined to publicly disclose his intentions for the Sepulveda Boulevard property that probably has drawn more newspaper ink in the last 7½ months than any time since the early 1960s.
