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ROLLER/ICE RINK ON THE EMBARCADERO

The Embarcadero Holiday Ice Rink at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco is in its 15^th year. People have been able to enjoy ice skating outdoors during the holidays and thousands take advantage of the opportunity. There is now a push underway to make the ice rink a permanent part of the San Francisco Embarcadero experience and to add roller skating to the list of activities.

This is an absolutely perfect place for a roller rink. It can be built in a way where the surface can easily be frozen over for ice skating during the winter holidays. During the spring summer and fall this same rink can easily accommodate roller skating bringing a fun, exciting and healthy experience the Embarcadero and enhancing the positive benefits that the Embarcadero Holiday Ice Rink has brought to the Embarcadero and San Francisco.

The removal of the Embarcadero Freeway and subsequent plans to renovate the Embarcadero has resulted in the creation of the space on Stuart Street across from Justin Herman Plaza. This is the area we propose be transformed into an ice/roller rink. This is the location near where the San Francisco Friday Night Skate has gathered since the 1989. It is the location near where San Francisco's Critical Mass bicycle movement began.

Originally, it was a part of the Mid-Embarcadero Renovation Project where there have been a couple of ideas put forth that just have never seemed to work out. This is the area as it sits today

The original plan was to create a sculpture of an 18 foot high art piece called "Embark". Sculptor Buster Simpson's plan for the striated stainless-steel foot near the foot of Mission Street had won the unanimous approval of the city Art Commission. The general public, however, was far less impressed, and the Supervisors turned thumbs down on the foot by a 6-to-4 vote after hearing from thousands of people by e-mail, fax, letters, phone calls and in person at the Supervisors meetings.

The foot was given the boot

Later there was a proposal to install a huge municipal pipe organ that is currently in storage and dismantled in Brooks Hall under the Civic Center. The area would become the Organ Pavilion and needed $5 million in privately raised money to build and maintain the instrument and pay for performances. By the summer of 2003, there was to be regular noontime concerts drawing thousands of people from their downtown offices, energizing the area and even reviving interest in pipe organs in these pipe-organ-unfriendly times.

Those dreams have all played out.

This is a general layout of the area as it is today. The green grass in the center is surrounded by a makeshift gravel running track It is seldom used and was designed for the sound of music to flow from the southern end northward towards Justin Herman Plaza.

To transform this into a world class roller/ice rink, all that is necessary is to slightly reconstruct the area in the diagram that is surrounded in blue.

There is a concrete barrier that surrounds the grass. The barrier and the green grass area is about one foot higher than the gravel track that surrounds it. All of that would have to be removed. The four huge concrete balls that are located two on both ends would have to be removed.

The entire area inside the blue lines would be leveled and replace with a concrete base and topped "black ice" asphalt. We would use the same surface that is used at the Skatin' Place at 6^th Ave and Kennedy Drive in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The surface will be 170 feet by 74 feet and constructed so that it can be frozen during the winter and act as an ice rink. In the spring, summer and fall it can be used for roller and inline skating. The area will also be able to occasionally accommodate other events like swing dancing, flash parties and a plethora of fun, exciting events, but mainly skating concrete can be laid in a way where

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and Supervisor Chris Daly have already expressed positive feedback on the idea. This promises to be one of the most wonderfully unique aspects of the Embarcadero experience. The roller skating community will now begin the process of making this idea a reality.