Alysa Liu’s hometown skating rink tells a surprising story about cities

Liu grew up training at the Oakland Ice Center, a product of the now-defunct community development programs that once helped create economic opportunity across California.

[Photos: Peter Kneffel/Picture Alliance/Getty Images, JasonDoiy/iStock/Getty Images Plus]

It could have easily become a high-rise luxury condo complex. Or maybe a struggling office tower now being converted into luxury condos. Maybe a parking garage, or a data center.

But instead, 30 years ago this spring, Alameda County Parcel Number 8-641-8-5 became home to the Oakland Ice Center—where recently-crowned Olympic gold-medalist figure skater Alysa Liu still trains.

Located just north of downtown Oakland, in what the city considers the Uptown Retail and Entertainment Area, parcel 8-641-8-5 was just a vacant, privately-owned lot back in 1991. But in that year, Oakland’s now-defunct Redevelopment Agency acquired it as part of a three-parcel transaction for $1.8 million.

The Bay Area was a hot spot for ice sports in the early 1990s. Mountain View’s Brian Boitano had won a figure skating gold medal at the 1988 Winter Olympics. Fremont’s Kristi Yamaguchi was on her way to figure skating gold in the 1992 Winter Olympics. After a brief flirtation with the NHL’s Minnesota North Stars moving to Oakland (the team infamously moved to Dallas in 1993), the Bay Area finally got its first NHL team in the San Jose Sharks, who dropped the puck for their inaugural season in the fall of—you guessed it—1991.

Oakland City Council Members came to believe an ice sports center was just what they needed to revitalize a struggling downtown. The eight other ice sports facilities in the Bay Area were over-booked with youth and adult hockey leagues as well as figure skaters of all ages training, twirling and competing.

Projections came in that a new ice center would bring in 500,000 visitors annually to downtown Oakland, generating nearly $5 million a year in retail, food and lodging revenue. So in April 1995, Oakland’s Redevelopment Agency signed a ground lease with a private developer team to build and operate the facility, which the agency financed with $11 million in tax-exempt bonds.

Those projections were way off, of course. The private developer team went belly-up just three months after the Oakland Ice Center opened in March 1996. It would take more than a decade and three changes in private operators to stabilize the Oakland Ice Center. The parent company of the San Jose Sharks, which still manages the facility today, took over in October 2007—when Alysa Liu was just 26 months old.

Claire's went from tween mall icon to bankrupt — twice?

© Fast Company