Conditions so far have been ideal for a long season of skating at Center Street Park’s ice rink, which had its earliest opening day ever last week, and to celebrate and take advantage, the Friends of Center Street Park on Dec. 7 held a community skating event that the group hopes to keep going as a weekly Sunday morning routine.
By 9:30 a.m., more than a dozen people, most of them children, were enjoying the ice. The frigid wind was mitigated slightly by warmth from the rising sun as volunteers with shovels cleared the rink of the previous night’s inch or two of snow.
“We’ve come to this park since the kids were little,” Jennifer Clark, a Cooper’s Park resident, said as her 9-year-old son August tried on some borrowed skates inside the park’s central building. During skating events, the building is unlocked and converted to a warming hut, and the Friends group has a sizable stock of used skates that it lends to families for free.
Outside, August joined the other kids who were taking turns with plastic support structures for beginner skaters to balance on the ice. Some grabbed hockey sticks to knock pucks across the solid ice. Some parents watched from the sidelines, while others braved the rink themselves. The sounds of winter fun broke the morning silence across the snow-covered field between 65th and 64th streets.
This kickoff event was scheduled for 9 to 11 a.m., and event organizer Derek Neupauer hopes to open the building every Sunday at the same time this winter for residents to come use the rink and the park’s facilities for skating. Neupauer is a Tosa East Towne resident and member of the Friends board. Like Clark, he has been bringing his young children to the park since they were babies, and he is eager to encourage more families to enjoy the rink this winter.
“It’s been absolutely amazing. We’re really, really excited,” Neupauer said. “It makes the winter really enjoyable.”
The park ice rink has been a mainstay of the Friends of Center Street Park’s schedule since the 2014-15 season, but the group has had to delay or shorten some skating seasons because of warm weather. A couple years ago, the rink was only open for about a week during one particularly poor season for ice, and it didn’t open at all in 2020 during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year, the stars aligned. Volunteer crews with the Center Street Hosers began Nov. 28, the day after Thanksgiving, building the rink’s walls, forming the oval outline on park’s field. That timing is typical; they try to plan the build around Thanksgiving, when the ground isn’t too frozen for driving down stakes. Some winters, they have to wait to fill the rink. This time, they added water right away, and it begin solidifying just before Wauwatosa’s first major snowstorm, which dropped at least 9 inches of snow Nov. 29.
After a few days of deep freeze, the Friends group was able to remove its “Keep Off the Ice” signs and officially opened the rink to the public on Dec. 4, which the group affectionately refers to as Brad O’Brien Day, after a neighborhood volunteer who has a reputation for being the first to put his skates to ice.
The Friends group buys a new liner for the rink every year, which costs about $1,200, according to one of the lead Hosers, Ed Haydin, who also serves as the group’s unofficial recordkeeper. Before hitting the ice Dec. 7 with a shovel to help clear the snow, Haydin scrolled through an online document on his phone, offering a quick digital tour of a wide range of institutional knowledge about the rink, from its dimensions and maintenance instructions to past years’ opening and close dates.
The rink is all maintained by volunteers, mostly a bunch of neighborhood dads, Haydin said, through a decade-long partnership with Milwaukee County Parks. The Friends group pays for the rink, usually with proceeds from its annual Center Street Hosers Mid-Winter Classic hockey tournament.
The group’s loaner skates were all donated, and they are maintained using a sharpener purchased by one of the Friends members. Everything else depends on volunteer time. The group expects to hold weekend skate nights when conditions and availability are right, to be announced later in the season. And Neupauer would love to expand the hours of the Sunday morning skates, if more volunteers come forward to help out. Email centerstreetpark@gmail.com for more information.
“A big part of this rink is making it accessible to people,” Neupauer said, so the Friends are making a serious effort to schedule more events with the warming hut open and free skates to borrow.
The rink is open all hours that the park is open, though for the warming hut and skates, residents are encouraged to stop by 9-11 a.m. each Sunday or whenever the Friends’ promote additional events.
- David Paulsen, a Tosa East Towne resident and editor of Tosa Forward News, has more than 25 years of experience as a professional journalist. He can be reached at editor@tosanews.com.
