Future on ice

Reigning National Figure Skating Champion and 2010 Winter Olympics hopeful Mirai Nagasu first set foot on ice 10 years ago at the Pasadena Ice Skating Center, following in the footsteps of past local Olympic figure skating greats Peggy Fleming and Sasha Cohen and former Olympic speed skater Bill Disney.

But by the time the 15-year-old Arcadia High School student would find herself going for gold in Vancouver, the rink’s storied past will more than likely have come to an end. As part of an ongoing $150-million effort to expand and spruce up the Pasadena Convention Center, the aging facility will soon be converted back into its original state as a 25,000 square-foot ballroom, which it was until a group of Pasadena entrepreneurs opened the rink in 1976 after another had closed.

Because it soon won’t be around, repairs have been kept to a minimum. In winter, buckets dot the surface of the ice to catch water dripping down from the leaky roof, and water-damaged wood barriers along the ice are falling apart. There are also some plumbing problems and the lone ice re-surfacing Zamboni sometimes breaks down in the middle of the ice.

Despite these inconveniences, this is a hopeful time for local skating enthusiasts and serious athletes such as Nagasu, who in February placed third at the World Junior Figure Skating Championships in Bulgaria. In closing down the rink, the city has promised to build a bigger and better rink, a stand-alone facility along Orange Grove Boulevard not far from where it meets Sierra Madre Villa Avenue in East Pasadena.

Plans for this new facility, however, slowed down earlier this year after City Council members learned the project’s cost had jumped more than $5.5 million over the expected $16.2 million budget. On March 10, the council voted to reject all developers’ bids for construction of the rink — “go back to the drawing board,” as Councilman Sid Tyler put it at the time — so that the city could draw up a less expensive design and reassess project funding.

City officials are expected to unveil new plans sometime next month with the hope of quickly sending the project out for bids from developers and having it completed before the end of 2010, said Director of Public Works Martin Pastucha.

But keeping construction costs down is only part of the challenge. For the new facility to serve the needs of the skating community and pay for itself in the long run, it will have to be big enough to host regional ice skating and hockey events and accommodate the needs of serious athletes like champion skater Nagasu.

Although it’s still a fun place to skate, the outdated Pasadena Ice Skating Center’s small size has forced Nagasu, whose parents operate Restaurant Kiyosuzu in Arcadia, to take her practices to a rink at the Pickwick Gardens in Burbank, a facility that meets competitive skating size requirements. The additional travel time has been costing her an hour on the ice each morning.

“As you get older, you outgrow the rink,” she said. Having a regulation-sized rink in Pasadena “would let me train a little bit more, because a lot of skaters train for four hours, but I only get to skate for two. It would be nice to skate at the rink where your club is because from the beginning you would be able to do your program full-out. Skaters’ parents wouldn’t have to drive them to another rink before the competition to get them used to the bigger ice.”

The ice at the Pasadena Ice Skating Center measures 150 by 80 feet. Official competitive events call for a 200- by 80-foot rink.

“We’ve lost a large amount of business because of the size of the rink,” said Fred Culick, who along with his wife, Old Town Music Co. President Fritzie Culick, and two partners opened it about a decade after the closure of Pasadena’s Winter Gardens facility (where Fleming and Disney trained early on) and have operated it ever since. 

Over the past several years, Culick has taken issue with delays of the new ice rink project and was unsuccessful in trying to get City Hall talking with experts he recommended.

“The city staff never had any sense of urgency. You have to do things in a timely way to save money. If you take your time, costs are going to rise,” he said.

Meanwhile, seeing young skaters grow out of the Pasadena rink was always a challenge for Joan Hovath, who served as president of the Pasadena Figure Skating Club when Nagasu first joined in 1998. “My whole job was to build up the club while saying ‘No … the rink’s not big enough, we can’t do this, we can’t do that,’” Hovath told council members in March. “Let the next club president not have to say ‘no,’ and let [Nagasu] go to the Olympics from our Pasadena rink.”

Dimensions of the existing rink have also affected members of the Pasadena Hockey Association, organizers of the Pasadena Maple Leafs hockey teams for kids ages 5 through 16. Older players can’t have home games in Pasadena because the rink is too small (and the danger of flying pucks too great), and teams split practice time between Pasadena and a larger facility.

“There are kids coming to play here from all over the San Gabriel Valley, but the program can’t grow [without a larger facility],” complained Pasadena Hockey Association President Lilly Lieu.

Back in March, Pasadena City Councilman Steve Madison had these problems — and the opportunity to solve them all — in mind when he cautioned against scaling down the new skating facility. 

“We have to be careful not to snip away at the corners and look back five years from now and realize, ‘Gosh, we could have gotten a national skating event or a national hockey tournament but we don’t have the criteria they look for,” Madison told fellow council members, arguing that the city should not only plan for a regulation size rink but also design appropriate seating, lockers and concessions.

Madison is also on the board of the Pasadena Center Operating Co., which currently owns the Pasadena Ice Skating Center and leases it to the city for the Culicks and their partners to run.
Revenue from the new rink, which will be owned by the city and initially operated by the Culicks, would go to pay for the costs of building it.

Though the redesign for the new ice rink isn’t finished, Pastucha is optimistic about how those plans, which still call for a 200-foot rink, are coming along.

Schematics currently being drawn up make better use of available space, he said, by changing the design of the roof and moving support beams to allow more room for spectators. “Part of the redesign is to expand the seating possibility by putting up to 460 seats in now, as opposed to 325 in the previous plan. The space is going to lay out the same way, but the integration of structural walls [with interior functions] saves $1.1 million,” Pastucha said.

That’s music to the ears of local figure skating coach Sandy Gollihugh. If done right, “The new rink will make Pasadena skaters more competitive. It will bring skaters from all around who are used to skating on big ice, and we’ll be able to host larger events,” she said.

For Olympic hopeful Nagasu, “The new rink would be a base for letting dreams come true.”

Deputy Editor Joe Piasecki contributed to this story. For more information about Marai Nagasu, visit
figureskatersonline.com/mirainagasu