BYRON DE ARAKAL -- Between the Lines

Sometimes the stars line up just right.

In recent days, some pretty bad news has been waxing through the ranks

(not rinks) of ice skating junkies who populate our fair county. After a

27-year run, the Ice Chalet in Costa Mesa’s Mesa Verde Center is expected

to shut its doors at the end of the month.

While Ice Chalet brass have been tight-lipped over the rink’s imminent

doom, Paul Freeman, spokesman for C.J. Segerstrom & Sons -- owners of the

property on which the Chalet rests -- indicated to the Daily Pilot that

the once-popular ice rink is having a tough go these days generating

sufficient coin to make the thing profitable.

The headline is indeed too bad for the folks who have spent many days

and years wobbling and scratch spinning their way around the Chalet’s

aging ice. Some Chalet patrons are so grief-stricken that they’ve

scurried to harvest signatures for a petition to save the venerable ice

hall.

I appreciate both their disappointment and the energy they’ve invested

to secure a stay-of-execution for their beloved rink. But the Ice

Chalet’s decision is strictly a private business matter and not one to be

meddled with by the city or any other concern.

My own thinking is that this is a blessing in disguise, but not

because I’m not enamored with ice skating. To the contrary. My wife and I

rarely miss an opportunity to watch our nation’s amateurs in a national

or world competition on television. Their athletic skill is truly worth

the appreciation of us clubfooted dorks. And on more than a few occasions

we’ve taken our four children to skate at the Chalet.

Nevertheless, the demise of the Ice Chalet is a cosmic opportunity for

Costa Mesa and some savvy business players to bust a sweet move on a

long-standing problem plaguing our city. Here’s my thinking:

For the last 10 years, the Costa Mesa City Council and Planning

Commission have been setting new standards for contortionism in a

tortured attempt to build a public skateboard park for our city’s youth.

If you’ve followed this saga, you know that the persistent and thorny

barrier standing between our kids -- with their Front-foot Impossibles

and Kick-Flip McTwists -- and a skate park has been the inability of the

City Council to find a spot to build the thing. Either nearby residents

have torpedoed the park’s location as a threat to their peace, or the

open-space folks have scuttled it for fear it would consume too much

greenery. It wasn’t until last year that former Councilman Joe Erickson

proffered the idea of building the park on a scruffy little dirt lot at

the intersection of Charle and Hamilton streets on the Westside.

Now, I deeply admire Erickson as a man of immense fairness and common

sense. But when he began pushing for -- and convinced a majority of his

council colleagues of -- the suitability of the Charle and Hamilton

tundra for the city’s skate park, I’m thinking that it wasn’t the trophy

idea of his council tenure.

The site is a dive. It’s ringed by a chain-link and barbed-wire fence,

apartment and single-family home neighborhoods, and the racetrack that is

Harbor Boulevard. There are no sidewalks and no restroom facilities. It’s

hardly the ideal site, it seems to me, where dozens of kids can safely

ply their recreation. At least where my own sons are concerned, they’ll

not set foot there so long as they expect to be fed.

But there’s still time to dynamite the Charle and Hamilton boondoggle.

To know the skateboard culture is to understand that the center for

Orange County’s Tony Hawk and Andy McDonald wannabes is a place called

Vans at the Block of Orange shopping mall. If you’ve ever been to this

indoor/outdoor skateboarding dreamland, you know how impressive it is.

The problem is it’s simply too far away for Costa Mesa skaters unless

they can drive themselves or beg their folks for a ride.

You can see where I’m going with this. The closing of the Ice Chalet

is a great opportunity to transform its aging hulk into a scaled-down

version of the Vans skate facility in Orange. And the idea is worth

exploring for a number of reasons. Among them: It takes the Charle and

Hamilton site off the map, it takes the city out of the skateboarding

business, and it offers up a first-class facility where kids can safety

skate in their own community. For the city, it’s a revenue generator

instead of a money-draining liability. And for the food and beverage

tenants of Mesa Verde Center, I’m betting business would bristle whenever

these young skateboarders come around.

Here’s the test: At least giving this idea an opportunity to happen

will require creative leadership on the part of a Costa Mesa City Council

member with some vision and courage. I’m hoping any one of them or all of

them will schedule a noodling session with the folks from Segerstrom and

Vans to at least explore their interest and scope out the site to see if

it could work.

Personally, I think it would be really sweet.

* BYRON DE ARAKAL is a writer and communications consultant. He lives

in Costa Mesa. Readers can reach him with news tips and comments via

e-mail at [email protected].