Great Skate #11 - Ramsden Park

A lot of outdoor rinks in Toronto close after the February 26 weekend. It adds a sense of urgency to the Great Skate Project. How many more skates can I squeeze in before the season ends?

Great Skate #11 took me to to the Ramdsen Park rink, next to the Rosedale subway station. I was skating solo, but had lots of company on the ice. A comment on the City Rinks site says this rink is "often excellent". I arrived soon after the Zamboni had cleaned the ice, and really noticed how hard and smooth the ice felt compared to the Orillia rinks of the previous weekend.

It's a double-pad rink, with a top-40 radio station playing over the loudspeaker. Both rinks were pretty busy. Young boys were practising their hockey skills on the pleasure skating side, while a large group of grownup boys played a fairly intense game of shinny next door. 

I enjoyed a half-hour skate, dodging the hockey demons. Four teenagers joined us, skating arm-in-arm. Then a clutch of small children, the adults accompanying them, and a guy practising his figure skating techniques added to mix. It was nice being part of such a diverse crowd, but I began to feel like it was taking too much energy to avoid getting clipped by another skater.

Leaving the rink, I checked my map of outdoor rinks that I got from the Toronto parks and rec website. The dot for the Rosedale Park rink seemed very close to the Ramsden Park dot, so I set off on foot to see if I could score two rinks in one day.

After a long trudge through the posh streets of Rosedale, I realized that my map was misleading and I was nowhere near Rosedale Park rink. Great Skate #12 would have to wait for another day.




Location: Ramsden Park, 1020 Yonge St & Ramsden Park Rd, Toronto, ON M4W 1P7, Canada

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Great Skates

Great Skate #21 - Greenwood Park (renovated)

Image
The weather on Sunday, January 5 was mild and snowy - a perfect day for skating. My friends and nieces joined me at the Greenwood Park rink. Those of you keeping track might notice that Greenwood has already had its Great Skate, but it's had such a dramatic makeover since then that I'm counting it as a new rink. Two years ago, at Great Skate #8 , the Greenwood Park rink looked like this: Greenwood Park rink on February 11, 2012 It was a typical Toronto rink. Not beautiful, but it did the job. Last winter, the rink was closed for renovations. It reopened in November , looking like the winner of a skating rink beauty contest: Greenwood Park rink in November 2013 It used to be a single ice rink surrounded by a chain link fence, where you might feel a bit like a gerbil in a cage (if gerbils could skate). Now Greenwood Park has two rinks. One, used for shinny and skating lessons, is covered by a snazzy roof (which probably has some practical, keep-the-ice-icy
Read more

Great Skate #7 - Ryerson Community Park

Image
Cathy joined me for a peaceful afternoon skate at Ryerson Community Park on February 4th. This is the little rink tucked into the Ryerson University campus. There weren't many skaters out and everyone else was a university student. Two guys were practising their hockey skills, using turned-over benches as goals. A girl practised her figure skating spins while flirting with a guy who looked like he was torn between flirting back and joining the hockey players. The Ryerson rink is round, and because there were so few skaters on the ice, it was a good opportunity to explore something I've noticed during Great Skate 2012:  people always skate in a counterclockwise direction . I tested this, deliberately skating clockwise. With just Cathy and I doing laps, we weren't getting in anyone's way, and there wasn't any peer pressure to overcome. At first, no problems, although it felt a bit odd. Then after a few minutes I realized that we had somehow turned ourselves a
Read more

Great Skate #34: Love Crescent Parkette

Image
On Saturday, March 7, I enjoyed a solitary skate at a natural ice rink in Love Crescent parkette .* That was probably my last Great Skate of the season. Since then, the weather has shifted from wintery to spring-like. The sun is warm, the air is soft and you can hear water dripping everywhere. There may be a few die-hard skaters and shinny players out there, but I think most of us are ready to switch to cycling, ball hockey and other warm-weather activities. The Love Crescent rink was first built in 2013 by a group of community-minded skating enthusiasts. The street is tucked away in a neighbourhood just north of Kingston Road in east Toronto. It's not a place you pass through on your way somewhere else; you have to know where you're going to find it. The rink builders were clever. They designed the rink in the shape of an oblong donut. In the centre is a space for shinny players. Around the centre, separated by a wide snowbank, is a track for pleasure skating. There are
Read more

Great Skate #33: Gage Park, Brampton

Image
On Sunday, March 1, the Great Skate Project revisited one of the rinks of my youth: the skating trail in Brampton's Gage Park . My friends Jennifer and Riubert joined me, with their two small boys. Gage Park is located in downtown Brampton - the quaint, slightly shabby part of Brampton that has been eclipsed by the mushrooming housing developments all around it. In the late 1980s, Brampton rebuilt its City Hall, and that project included the installation of a skating trail in the neighbouring Gage Park. I think it was the smartest thing that Brampton councillors have ever done. It's been years since the last time I skated at Gage Park. This was the first time my friends had been there, so I was glad my memory of it lived up to reality. I don't know how long the skating trail is, but it does a big loop around the perimeter of the park. There is a skate sharpening booth ($5 per pair), a snack truck and public washrooms. Parking (free on Sundays) is across the s
Read more

Great Skate #40: Bryant Park, New York City

Image
The rink at Bryant Park doesn't have the same "I saw it in the movies" cachet as the rinks at Central Park and Rockefeller Center , but it is pretty spectacular. The rink is the centrepiece of Bryant Park's Bank of America Winter Village . Chalk up a point in favour of corporate sponsorships: admission to this rink is free. (I did pay for a lock to secure my locker though.) The amenities include a spacious changeroom, a snack bar and skate rentals. Also, a platoon of penguins and snowmen that unsteady skaters can use to keep their balance. There were lots of good things about this Great Skate, but here's what I got excited about: the skating direction was clockwise. Skating clockwise is a very rare thing on public ice rinks. I asked one of the staff members if they always skated clockwise. He said that the skating direction was counter-clockwise in the mornings, and clockwise in the afternoons. So sensible. On a Friday afternoon, the rink was busy but
Read more