Keep Berkeley Iceland Open

[jazzpants]

Hi, guys!!!

As you may already know, my weekend ice rink, Berkeley Iceland (http://www.berkeleyiceland.com), may be closing soon and we're setting up a petition for the Berkeley City Council to keep this rink open! They're threatening to shut down and tear down this rink. The current owners are selling the rink (http://www.gordoncommercial.com/details.asp?id=22&tblName=tbl_forSale&from=site) now b/c of all the repairs that's needed to conform to fire codes of... the City of Berkeley!!! (http://eastbay.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2006/02/27/daily16.html) (Interesting how politics works, huh?) :P

It's an Olympic sized rink... and LOTS of skaters do travel by to practice and skate at this rink. (You'll see that in the petition signatures comments that you read.) And lots of kids stay out of trouble by skating at this rink!

Please sign this online petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/icerink9/petition.html) to show the Berkeley City Council that Berkeley Iceland is a historic landmark that is worth saving! The last thing we figure skaters need is another ice rink closed!!! :cry:

Thanks much for reading and signing!!! (And if you happened to have won the lottery and have an extra 6.5 million to spend, may I convince you to buy an ice rink and upgrade the cooling system to code? ;) )

[Terri C]

I signed the petition, but have one question.
What is the St. Moritz FSC going to do if the rink closes? Have they talked to City Council?

[jazzpants]

I signed the petition, but have one question.
What is the St. Moritz FSC going to do if the rink closes? Have they talked to City Council?To be honest, I don't know. They do have two other rinks (Oakland and Dublin) that they have test sessions on, but Oakland is quite congested in parking (not to mention not that nice of an neighborhood, as all of us guys who have been at AN when it was held at Oakland or at the more recent Pacific Coast Sectionals can attest...) and Dublin is 45-50 minutes away from both Oakland and Berkeley. Their physical office is at Berkeley though.

The issue goes well beyond just the St. Moritz Skating club, since as someone may like to remind me that "hockey is what brings in the $$$ to a skating rink." This is a matter of the hockey teams, beginning skaters and just plain having someplace where kids can go to have birthday parties and just be a kid, rather than to resort to breaking in cars and doing drugs or whatever. Heck, there's a UC Berkeley has ties to it too. I think UC Berkeley has some sort of team or skating club or something too.

My gut tells me that the City of Berkeley would want to close the rink down and tear down the rink in place of modern and $$$-making condo. And we already had something like that happened at my old childhood rink at 48th Ave. The neighborhood is, well, quite dumpy now that the rink is gone. There's not much for kids to do in that area besides the beach...

[skaternum]

jazzpants, does it do any good for non-residents to sign the petition? Are they allowed to sign?

[jazzpants]

jazzpants, does it do any good for non-residents to sign the petition? Are they allowed to sign?There are a lot of non-residents that signed it. I'm not a resident of Berkeley myself (I live clear across the other end of the Bay Bridge and my home rink is still Yerba Buena in San Francisco.) Frankly, this rink is the only reason why I would ever drive 40-45 minutes to Berkeley in the first place!!!

There are a slew of other skaters out there in the siguatures that are also non-residents of Berkeley too! I see at least one signature that drives like 3-4 hours from Reno and Sacramento occasionally to skate at Berkeley. There are a lot of skaters that skated at Berkeley as kids and are now out of town and no longer skate there, but it's still part of their childhood and they want to save that part of their childhood.

And for those figure skating historians out there, Berkeley Iceland has been home to quite a few US Nationals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Figure_Skating_Championships) championships. (Carol Heiss Jenkins, Dick Button and Peggy Fleming comes to mind right off the bat!!!)

If nothing else, this rink is more than just an ice rink -- it's a historical landmark (been around since at least the 1940's) -- and ANYONE can sign to save a historical landmark! :D