Through sheer presence, Kaitlin Bell and Kamryn Rivera were living out the entire point. The two girls are 10th grade classmates at the Syracuse Academy of Science. They learned through TikTok about this new “Skate in the Square” at Clinton Square, where the city on Sunday was offering free roller skating, with teenagers as the focus.
Kamryn and Kaitlin, close friends, instantly bought in. A willing grandma gave them a ride downtown, where they patiently waited in a line along Clinton Street for the chance to lace up skates and do endless circles on this striking, looks-so-good-from-a-drone’s-view temporary rink.
Their main goal, like so many others, was simply staying up.
After a while the girls took a break, watching a flood of fellow teens and parents and little kids who danced or wobbled or — in the case of such youth hockey players as brothers Tanner and Colton Clisson — moved like lightning in circles on a hot, blue sky June afternoon.
Roller skates are challenging, noted Kaitlin, who said ice skating is a little easier to pick up because of the “push things” provided to young learners. Yet the big benefit, both girls said, was the event itself. Finding something to keep you busy in the summer when you’re a kid in Syracuse isn’t always easy: You always need a ride, for instance, to get out to the beach at Green Lakes and while the girls noted, yes, they enjoy swimming at Thornden Park…
Too often, as Kamryn said: “There’s nothing to do.”
They found an unexpected remedy — as Mayor Sharon Owens hoped — on Sunday afternoon, on roller skates, at Clinton Square.
The pop-up event was the climactic moment of a five-day run successful “beyond my wildest dreams,” the mayor said. Sunday’s gathering had particular resonance. A mist of grief still hung over the city from a double shooting last week that law enforcement officials said represents utter anguish:
A 16-year-old, after accidentally shooting a 13-year-old friend with a gun, turned the weapon on himself in shock and grief and took his own life, while the 13-year-old is now on life support.
Those events touched off another wave of pain in a community where far too many families know first-hand the lifetime damage and sorrow from gun violence. The response, Owens emphasized, will be continuing commitment on countless levels to children who face struggle every day, but one we-can-do-this-right-now decision was to make the Sunday afternoon skating a free event, specifically for teens, as a reminder of what true community can be.
The mayor invited participation from such outreach groups as SNUG, an anti-violence initiative, and the Good Life Youth Foundation, whose founder — Hasan Stephens — was there with his 4-year-old daughter, Lissie, just learning how to skate.
To Stephens, the gathering was a brief template of possibility. He raised his hand toward the crowd on the rink and spoke of all these “different colors and ages and people together,” and his hope was that it will not just be a reflexive response to tragedy, a one-time surge that too swiftly disappears.
Symbolically, practically, logistically: City officials contend the whole mission is to see the communion of roller skating as an example — and a beginning.
The rink, Byrd said, was the handiwork of city planner and landscape designer Josh Wilcox. He worked closely with planning aide Jehlani Williams, who admits she was thinking of how the rink would jump out via drone image when she first imagined the bright, Erie Canal-inspired layout for the rubbery VersaCourt tiles, making up the surface.
“It’s great to see strangers having fun on something I built,” said Williams, who returned to the rink with Byrd Monday night to practice roller skating. The entire goal, Williams said, “is creating memorable spaces you remember for your whole life” because, bottom line:
Children never forget the places where they had fun, which certainly will be the case for North Syracuse middle school friends Kendall Walker and Lorren Reid – who told me Sunday how they rode past Clinton Square the other day with Lorren’s dad, Lawrence Reid, saw the crowd, heard the music and knew:
They were coming back.
Wilcox contemplates all of this as an ignition point, not as a one-and-done. Not long from now, Interstate 81 construction will essentially shut down Clinton Square as a festival site, for a while. Wilcox sees that civic gathering place reemerging in a few years as the absolute heart of downtown, a spiritual midpoint on the 750-mile Empire State Trail and a core visual statement, one way or another, on how the city responds to Micron’s staggering regional infusion of industrial capital.
“I’ve been thinking about how to change Clinton Square since the dawn of time,” said Wilcox, who spoke of how a major restoration a quarter-century ago left too many curbs and edges, how the striking fountains could be improved and transformed, how there are logical changes that could make the square not only more welcoming to festivals but more historically resonant and beautiful, at all times…
And how this moment of profound Central New York transition becomes an ideal chance to take a breath and think it out.
An aside, a related dream I throw out there all the time: In the same spirit, imagine a shared City Hall-Syracuse schools-corporate initiative that came together to make sure, say, every second grader in our city schools truly learned to ice skate, giving kids in the nation’s snowiest large city something to do for the rest of their lives in our long and relentless winters, a program that would undoubtedly provide Syracuse with national attention…
And would be no more impossible than, oh, turning a downtown park, overnight, into a summertime roller skating rink.
Big dreams were certainly on the mind of the mayor, who said she was “stopping by” Sunday — under her arm, she carried roller skates emblazoned with the words, “Madame Mayor” – and then stayed for hours, talking to children and parents and teenagers.
“Today is just about people enjoying the city and each other,” she said, thinking of the tragedy a few days ago. “Look at this. Old and young. City and suburb. So diverse. Everyone — everyone! — smiling.”
She remembered roller skating to disco lights and music in her own Geneva childhood, and she listened as many parents described wistful memories of heading with friends to, say, the old “Sports-O-Rama” in Mattydale. She paused from those reflections when Pam Schnell, a Cazenovia woman who’s roller skated for much of her life, weaved through the crowd simply to tell the mayor:
“This is amazing.”
The eureka moment occurred last year during a summer event at Clinton Square, when at-that-time-deputy mayor Owens — a candidate then for the job she holds now — turned to city parks commissioner Syeisha Byrd and said:
“If I win, will you turn this into a roller skating rink?”
Byrd said yes, absolutely.
Owens won. Byrd remembered. She sought out Wilcox and Williams, who teamed up to put the “pop-up rink” together at a cost to the city of $63,745.70, which Byrd sees as a fine investment in return for the overflow crowds that showed up in late June, day after day.
“I’ve always had a love for kids, who deserve the best in the world,” Byrd said. “Give’em everything you’ve got, and you’ll get a great kid.”
She has served as parks commissioner for two summers. Both those seasons began with tragedy. Last year, the pools had barely opened when a 15-year-old was shot to death at Onondaga Park. Sunday, school board president Tamica Barnett — a fire department lieutenant who runs “Who Want Smoke BBQ and Catering” — said that afternoon’s free roller skating was intended as a commitment and message to city children, trying to cope at a young age with such trauma as the double shooting:
Their summer will be about love and community, rather than despair.
Barnett, Owens and Common Councilor Rasheada Caldwell reached into their own pockets and — with Allyn Family Foundation support — provided free food during the roller skating, through Barnett’s operation.
The “pop-up” gatherings were originally intended to only have a 5-day run. Based on the response, the mayor decided to keep the rink open throughout July. Deputy parks commissioner Chris Abbott said bring-your-own-skates access will be free during the month, though there won’t be formal supervision unless city officials add more organized events, which parks administrators said just might happen.
The best part Sunday was all the storytelling, from those on skates. Here was Ronnie Edwards, 38, a skater since he was 18, leading groups of people as they danced to old-school songs. Here was Melissa Clisson, a Camillus mom celebrating her 33rd birthday, who brought her hockey-playing sons to zoom around on the rink because her best birthday gift is seeing the joy “of something they want to do.”
Here was 10-year-old Zoe Clanton, skating with so many others in her family, who could barely stay up when she started and by the end had that life-changing realization: I can do this. Here was Diane Floyd of Cicero, who brought daughters Milli’on and Nubia after seeing the rink on the news — a decision made in no small part because Nubia received new roller skates for Christmas, and this was her big chance.
As for Ted Herper, who drove in from Rome with 5-year-old Sydney, he said it was a throwback to his own childhood days in roller rinks and skate parks, “a chance to share an important part of my own adolescence” with his daughter.
Reached a day later, he said his feet still hurt from all that skating. Herper rented skates that ran a little small. He thought it would be OK, assuming Sydney most likely wouldn’t want to stay for very long in the hot sun. Instead, she had zero wish to leave, which not only personified the phenomenon of “Skate in the Square” but is the quality Owens sees as the city’s larger dream and mission.
“We have trouble closing,” she said, “because no one wants to go home.”
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