The Culture Guerilla On Ice. | Mikey Angelo Rumore/The Minaret
The outdoor ice-skating rink has returned to Curtis-Hixon Park for the second year in a row, and I’m wondering whether I should bother going down there.
Even though I enjoy ice-skating and hardly ever get a chance to do it since I’ve lived in Tampa my entire life, I try to avoid downtown. It’s about as cold and wet as this strange, semi-tropical ice-skating rink itself.
My friend Conner McDonough and I visited the rink last year. The ice was as nasty and slippery as one would expect from an ice-rink subjected to the whims of Florida weather.
Nonetheless, I found it generally skate-able, and I began skating laps, barely dodging an assortment of children who seemed to have never seen ice before.
Their parents mostly sat outside the rink, some reading magazines, some texting, others simply soaking in the pleasure of watching their children fall headfirst into the ice. It was weird.
Conner had less luck skating. He found the ice too slippery and bumpy, and had to periodically hold on to the side of the rink to stay up. I noticed that many skaters had the same problem. The scene turned into a bunch of older people clutching the sides watching children in the middle of the rink slip and tumble every which way. When we got sick of it, Conner said, “I felt like Dwayne Regretzky out there.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against ice skating. But, the outdoor rink just seems like another misguided attempt to attract people to a dismal downtown.
Since the late-80s and early-90s, when downtown Tampa’s long-standing department stores like Woolworth’s and Wolf Brothers closed down, the area has been undergoing a crisis of identity.
As these downtown retailers crumbled, developers saw an opportunity to implant some upscale dining and shopping. And many of these investors had been pushing for downtown to become more ritzy since before the department store backbone of downtown Tampa fell. Twenty years later, downtown’s abundant “For Lease” signs tell us how this idea turned out. And an ice-skating rink is not going to replace vacant storefronts with businesses. What will?
The central fallacy of downtown Tampa’s development through Skypoint condos, elitist art museums, and affluent bars like Fly Bar, is that such places don’t attract business, but move locals out because they can no longer afford to be in the downtown area.
What results is not so much a cool weekend destination, but an aristocracy. It has become a downtown for those 9-5ers who work in the banking towers.
But their presence isn’t bringing local business back into downtown’s numerous abandoned storefronts.
For the past 20 years, developers and local government have acted as if they can pour prosperity downtown from the top down, as if adding more upscale boutiques, restaurants, hotels and condos will do the trick. This approach has only driven out local Tampa businesses.
I could go down to the ice rink. I’ll skate around in circles. I’ll probably trip on a deep groove or a slippery patch of ice. My head will smash against the ice, but, since it’s half-melted anyway, I’ll avoid serious injury. Barring a concussion, I’ll remark about how I feel just like my city, a place where good intentions become bad ideas.
Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michaelangelorumore@gmail.com.
