Like Elkhart did a decade ago, South Bend and Mishawaka are now chasing the ice skating path as a lure for their downtowns. But here’s the key ingredient: Not just in winter.
Mayor Dave Wood announced Monday that Mishawaka could craft a Rockefeller Center-style plaza at Beutter Park, where a ribbon of ice would weave around pieces of art, tucked between a beer garden and a new, two-story building for skating rentals, a warming area and a café. When ice melts, the ribbon would become a walking path.
The $7 million plaza project will come back to the city’s Redevelopment Commission and possibly the parks board for a review of the final design. The project already has $114,000 from Indiana’s Regional Cities Initiative and will be partially financed with tax increment finance dollars, Wood said.
South Bend is building a circular path at Howard Park where, on one side, it would bulge into a round “ice pond” that could be used for purely recreational games of pond hockey, said Aaron Perri, director of the city’s Venues, Parks and Arts. In summer, benches and water jets would come out, converting the path into a “splash plaza.”
Elkhart had debuted its ice path at NIBCO Water & Ice Park near the downtown RiverWalk in 2007 — a unique concept at the time, but also the first public ice rink in Elkhart County. Downtown Chicago’s Maggie Daley Park, born in 2012, also sports an ice skating ribbon that converts to roller skating near Millenium Park, which has a standard ice rink of its own.