Our frozen assets
Other cities may have grander rinks (hello, Ottawa) but with 50 outdoor artificial sheets, few other big cities can match the magic of winter skating in Toronto
To my mind, the skating rink in Nathan Phillips Square is one of the most perfect, symbolic public spaces in the city. There, framed by our civic headquarters of the landmark city hall building, and next to the bustle of Queen and Bay Sts., right at the symbolic heart of our government and commercial and financial cores, you find tourists and office workers and school groups taking a break to skate, in the middle of the afternoon, or the middle of the night, at all times of day.
I find it perfect not just because skating outdoors is such a quintessentially Canadian pastime — built into the origin stories of our hockey heroes like Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky and P.K. Subban (who learned to skate as a child on the same Nathan Phillips Square rink) and mythologized in literature (“our real home was the skating rink,” The Hockey Sweater reads) but because such rinks are Toronto’s one great annual concession to — and celebration of — winter.
In a city where the roads and transit system are hobbled by the shock of snow every time it comes (and comes and comes), where restaurants tend not to have coat racks and office workers shun boots, where we often seem to pretend we don’t acknowledge the reality of an extended sub-zero season, public skating rinks are the treasured, universal public resource that winter brings. We have more than 50 of them across the city, artificially frozen beginning in November and maintained and Zambo-nied and staffed and open free to the public until March. They seem like a small thing — mostly neighbourhood parks tucked away — but they are a glorious civic resource.
Other cities have more scenic public skating options, especially the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, which becomes a kind of sunken ice expressway in the nation’s capital every winter. But few other big cities maintain the same number of high-quality artificial rinks available for shinny players and pleasure skaters that we do. The network of ice rinks is an underappreciated civic treasure.
I grew up skating with classmates and family in the downtown excitement at city hall or, for an exotic change, around the giant boulders that grow up out of the ice surface at Ryerson.
But these days I’ve come to appreciate the pleasures of the local rink, surrounded in boards, at a neighbourhood park.
After my children were born, I rediscovered the joy of playing hockey by sneaking out after their bedtime to Campbell Park in the west end, where under the lights in the cold night you can always find a game just by showing up and throwing your stick in the middle.
Teenagers and lawyers and local parent-child teammates play there all the time with no goalies, no referees, no cares in the world — just a community of neighbours out to have fun. Now I’m on the ice outdoors at High Park three nights a week or more, coaching my children through hockey practices or, just as often, racing them through laps of the pleasure skating ice pad.
We also like heading to Rennie Park in Swansea, where for half a century locals have maintained an outdoor children’s hockey league, though the attraction for us is the more natural-feeling pleasure track beside it.
We take car trips every year to other rinks in the city: while many people rave about the DJ-accompanied rockin’ skates at Harbourfront, our favourite place in the city to skate is Colonel Sam Smith Park in Etobicoke, where a long path of ice carves a figure eight through the tall grasses and trees, adding an element of adventure to the ritual glide. We’re looking forward to a trip to Greenwood Park, where recent renovations have added a similar skating path next to the city’s first covered outdoor hockey rink.
There are rinks all over the city, though a quirk of history means that the former city of Scarborough focused its construction on indoor arenas, and only has one open-air artificial surface. Still, a trip there to the Scarborough Civic Centre last year with extended family offered an unaccustomed view of the underappreciated architecture hidden away between the Scarborough Town Centre and the civic centre.
And in addition to the official rinks, the city allows local park groups to flood their own natural ice surfaces in some places, as long as they agree to maintain them. A group of parent volunteers at our tiny neighbourhood playground are turning the basketball court into a rink this year — I imagine we’ll be spending a lot of time there on the ice. Even more time.
You hear a lot of complaints about the cost of ice time and hockey registration these days, and how the price is making a national pastime more exclusive; out of reach for most of us. But it feels as though Toronto’s outdoor rinks stand in defiance of any such trend: they are open for free use to anyone who brings a pair of skates (and, increasingly, a helmet). There, in the frigid air you hear the sound of blades crunching on ice and laughter echoing off it, you see couples on dates, people of all ages stumbling around uncertainly learning the ropes, children racing and playing games. You see communities maintaining and building their own traditions alongside the rinks, hosting pizza cookouts and sharing hot chocolate.
It is a proud Toronto pastime, but strangely unsung. In a city where winter often seems like something to be endured, it is a pleasure particular to the season, one where the cold is not a source of hardship but of pure joy, available to anyone who shows up. All of the city’s rinks are now open for the season — let’s put them to use. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire