The William Street rink is empty, uneven and unloved. Time to skate away and try something else?
If you build it, they will come.
This adage may hold true for baseball diamonds cut into Iowa cornfields, but maybe not so much for synthetic skating rink in the ByWard Market.
I wish this were not the case. When the ByWard Market District Authority announced plans last October to purchase and erect a synthetic rink on William Street, and opened it in late November, I thought it might be an excellent idea.
As Zachary Dayler, executive director of the BMDA, accurately noted at the time, skating on the Rideau Canal had lately become an iffy proposition: It was only open for public skating 10 days last winter, and none the winter before. Given that uncertainty, offering the public an alternative experience, similar to smaller skating rinks like those at city hall and Lansdowne Park, could only be a good thing.
Additionally, the city’s renewal plan for the ByWard Market calls for increased activities and attractions, so why not try a rink, right? If you build it, they at least might come.
“The larger idea of the rink,” Dayler said in October, “is to see what can we do to be a consistent offering, 300 or 340 days a year, because we’re the capital in a G7 country and this is the centre where it started. So we’ve got to really start amping up our offerings and up our game.”
The William Street rink, however, is not an amped-up offering or an upped game. I can’t think of a country, G7 or otherwise, that would view this as anything but an embarrassment.
First, there’s the rink’s size. To be fair, we knew from the beginning that it would be small, but when you see it in action (or inaction), you realize just how small. The size that was bandied about last fall was 20 ft. x 90 ft. I’m not sure it’s even that wide, but let’s not quibble. It is large enough to introduce youngsters and newcomers to skating — a purpose touted by Dayler — but then wouldn’t one expect that to be a feature of the rink’s programming, instead of the single hour per week (Mondays, 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.) devoted to “Tot Hour”?
Evening Update
The fact that the rink isn’t level doesn’t help. You know how roads are built slightly slanted so that rainwater flows off them? Well, the rink was simply plunked down on that necessarily uneven street, and thus bears the same slope. According to Dayler, this is a “minor issue” that doesn’t impact the experience.
Perhaps not — I confess I haven’t skated on it. But the rink’s maintenance and the public engagement surrounding it are abysmal. On the three occasions I recently visited, the synthetic surface was pocked here and there with patches and pieces of real ice that would make skating on it awkward at the least, and perhaps even dangerous. When I asked Dayler about this, he said the surface is cleared off every morning. Based on the conditions I saw on two consecutive days, that’s either not the case, or staff are doing an extremely poor job.
Meanwhile, I spoke with a shop teacher’s handful (that is, four) of business owners in the area, none of whom would speak on the record because either: a) they have to deal with the BMDA; and/or b) they don’t want to add their names to the list of people criticizing the Market. Each was upset by the rink’s disuse and management, calling it a “flop” and suggesting that its presence benefits no one: not the visitors who don’t use it, not the shoppers who are now more inclined to steer clear of William Street, and certainly not the William Street shopkeepers who are left looking out their front windows and seeing a whole lot of nothing going on in the street and on the sidewalks.
They didn’t see eye-to-eye on whether the pedestrianization of William Street — a component of the ByWard Market Public Realm Plan that Ottawa Council approved in 2021 — will help the Market (a discussion for another column), but all agreed that closing the block of William Street between George and York streets during the winter with nothing to actually draw visitors was a terrible idea.
One business owner told me of a family that had come to try out the rink. The mother and kids were in the store while the dad went to check out the rink. He returned, announcing “There’s no point. Let’s go find the Rink of Dreams.” An “attraction” that elicits that sort of response is not an attraction; it’s a detraction. A “rink of broken dreams,” perhaps. Or, as the Public Realm Plan states in a “what we heard” portion, “Don’t create empty gathering spaces that aren’t needed.”
Where are the rink’s staff?
But back to my visits for a moment. The booth adjacent to the rink, where visitors are supposed to sign a waiver, was unmanned (unpersoned?) each time I visited, a posted QR code instead sending would-be skaters to the required form online. Another structure — one of those small unattractive metal ones that look like small shipping containers — where I believe skates could be sharpened and/or rented, was similarly shuttered.
“There was a challenge with the operator,” Dayler explained. “We’ve since been able to adjust that where staff will be staffing it.” Yet his response when I mentioned that there was no one staffing the rink on the three occasions I visited this week was not particularly reassuring.
“I’ll have to double-check with the team to see where they’re staffing it in terms of on cold days,” he said. “I mean, yesterday it was -20, it could be within the info desk (inside the Market building). But that’s a minor fix that we can adjust and work with.”
Indeed, it was cold on the days I visited, -11 or -12, with a wind chill putting it at or near -20, but does that justify keeping staff out of sight, without any signage informing the public where to find them? It’s just as well, perhaps, that on Wednesday morning, when the rink was hosting its weekly Skate & Create skating-and-crafts hour, no one showed up to take part. After all, how would they know that staff were inside?
What would have greeted eager crafters were about a dozen green safety pylons on the rink, used, according to BMDA communications manager Victoria Williston, to “close” the rink between 6 p.m. and 10 a.m. I don’t know what their placement on the rink when it’s open signifies, but they certainly don’t make it any more welcoming.
Dayler, meanwhile, stands by the rink (well, maybe not literally), both this year — it will remain at least until the Family Day weekend — and in the future.
“It’s important to realize we’re coming into Winterlude, a period of time where there’s increased programming. There’s still time for increasing the visitation through and on it, and we’re going to see that with the programming.
“The future of William Street and the pedestrianization doesn’t call for a rink down the middle of it,” he notes. “The location of this will change throughout the years as we try it out in different spots. William Street is really meant to be that space and a gateway … so we have to continue to try things, and we’ll continue to be flexible, and we continue to invite people down to explore the area.”
All excellent talking points, and perhaps the rink might have found more traction with the public if the canal hadn’t opened this year. And let’s not let the rink’s failure to-date be a reason to stop lobbing out ideas to enliven the Market.
At some point, though, you have to think that if you build it and they don’t come, then perhaps they don’t want what you’ve built, and it’s time to skate away and build something else.
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