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It’s a Wednesday morning at Lloyd Center, 10 days until Portland loses its only year-round, public ice rink. Wendy May, 69, is lacing up her white skates for one of five times she’ll hit the ice this week. Across the river, at this exact moment, the Portland City Council is voting one final time to demolish the 65-year-old mall, including this, the first mall ice rink in America, where Tonya Harding once trained. Its last day of operations will be Aug. 8.
More than one medical professional has questioned May’s desire to keep skating, given her age and the fact that she’s already broken her wrist, but she’s had to stop skating once before and, dammit, she’s not doing it again without a fight.
As a schoolgirl in Pittsburgh, May walked to an ice rink after school to skate almost every day. “It was my home,” she says.
When she was in eighth grade, the rink was demolished in favor of a public transportation project. Her mother recently reminded her that on the last day of the Pittsburgh rink, the coaches gave all of the skaters daffodils.
“I went to bed crying, holding the daffodil.” The memory makes her tear up.
She wouldn’t skate again until her 50s. “Just call me Alysa Liu,” May says, wryly.
So when the Lloyd Center redevelopment plans came out in February with no ice rink on them despite the developers’ previous promises otherwise, May was furious. It was happening again. She has perspective—this is ice skating, not a war zone, she says—but it’s excruciating to have her community disbanded.
She greets most everyone at the rink today by name, but starting Aug. 8, she won’t see them consistently anymore. Even if they only chatted for five minutes a few times a week, those connections matter.
May served on the leadership team of the Save Lloyd Ice Coalition, which showed up in force to testify at the City Council earlier this summer to appeal the master plan. That effort didn’t save the rink. Nor did getting Ilia “Quad God” Malinin involved on social media during the Olympic Winter Games. But it did bring visibility to the glaring lack of ice rinks in Portland proper, and the group hopes to translate that political momentum into a new year-round, permanent ice rink in Portland.
“The adults in the room could have done something,” May says. “There should be a rink because this is a beautiful thing. And then to have it, poof, disappear? I’m sure that it has fueled my fire.”
“More ice is good ice.” That’s a saying in the skating and hockey community that gets at the constant worry over access to any ice rink. Lloyd has never been good ice. It’s about a third the size of a standard rink, too small for hockey and some elite figure skating routines. But its limitations never prevented it from becoming a community hub. The skaters at Lloyd are diverse in age, race, skating prowess, and the paths they took to the sport. Inclusivity is at its core, welcoming everyone from competitive skaters to mall shoppers who impulsively decide to take a spin.
Lloyd ice might have been bad ice, but it was our ice.
The rink is centrally located, accessible by public transportation, and open for public skating 50 hours each week, including 12 hours of learn-to-skate classes. Many cities operate municipal ice rinks (Philadelphia has five), similar to having a community pool or golf course, but Portland Parks & Recreation does not have one in its portfolio, so Lloyd Center accidentally became ours.
Once the rink closes, its skaters and coaches will scatter out into a figure skating diaspora that reaches to the farthest corners of Portland’s suburbs: Sherwood Ice Arena, Mountain View Ice Arena in Vancouver, and Winterhawks Skating Center in Beaverton.
Now, the group May helped organize is refashioning itself into an official nonprofit organization that will promote ice skating in Portland and try to find or create a fresh sheet of ice within city limits. The Save Lloyd Ice Coalition is becoming the Bridgetown Ice Skating Collective. The new group is busy fundraising and meeting with city politicians in its quest for a 1-acre, flat parcel of land for a permanent new rink. In the short-term, BISC is scrambling to find ice time to bridge the gap between the closing of Lloyd and the possible opening of a new facility.
During the public Lloyd meeting in early July, City Council President Jamie Dunphy floated the idea of opening Veterans Memorial Coliseum as a recreational facility. The city already owns the building, and the Portland Winterhawks play their home games there. Encouragingly, the Winterhawks already host frequent postgame open skates.
The firm that operates the Coliseum, Rip City Management, did not respond to a request for comment, but in March, a city employee told the Save Lloyd Ice Coalition that the Coliseum is probably a no-go for becoming a consistent community ice rink, primarily because the ice floor is temporary and is often broken down to host concerts.
There are also early murmurs of an idea to establish a full sheet of ice at the Portland Expo Center. Options include building a freestanding rink outside, like a sports bubble in the parking lot, or retrofitting a space indoors.
Metro owns the Expo Center; spokesman Nick Christensen says the organization is evaluating operational requirements, costs, scheduling impacts, and overall viability of a rink. “Once that evaluation is complete, we’ll have a much better sense of whether the concept is feasible and, if so, what a potential timeline could look like,” Christensen says.
As Wendy May laces up, skating coach Lydia Finch is on the ice leading a 30-minute private lesson with a young student. The girl is rehearsing her program to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.”
Finch, 26, started skating at Lloyd Center when she was 4. Her father worked graveyard shifts and her mother brought her to the mall in the mornings so he could sleep. Finch saw the skaters and asked to take lessons. It clicked. Finch skated competitively through her teens and began coaching at age 18.
Aug. 8, she’ll be out of a job. A few Lloyd coaches have gotten scooped up by the suburban rinks, but for the most part, those facilities are already fully staffed. So far, Finch’s nearest job prospect is at a rink in Eugene, and that’s too far.
“All of that work and the relationship and the time you’ve given to those kids is just tossed and given to another coach,” Finch says, adding that she’s worked with some of the same coaches since she was 5.
She’s gone back to school for medical assisting as a backup plan, in case her career on the ice is over.
May stands up along the railing to watch Finch coach. “That’s somebody doing what they’re born to do.”
Over in the locker area, competitive figure skater Stephanie Winningham sits on a bench clutching the “crash-out bug.” The hot pink stuffy has been getting passed around the members of the Pacific Ice Academy for months “when we’re feeling ragey,” Winningham, 33, says. Though today her posture doesn’t say rage so much as grief.
In 2023, Winningham was a new mom and signed up for the 30-minute adult classes at Lloyd Center on a whim, skating for the first time.
“I wanted to do something for me,” she says.
Now she skates five or six times a week, and she’s about to fly to Denver for the 2026 National Showcase. One fellow skater calls her “the adult prodigy skater.”
Party bags marked with the coaches’ names line a table near the rink. Beside them is a stack of paper and pens for students to write goodbye messages. The youngest kids could only draw pictures of stars and hearts and smiley faces.
On the wall, skaters have written their answers to the prompt, “When I skate, I feel:…”
Emma says “strong and at home.” Sam says, “Free, like I’m flying!”
Winningham gives her own answer.
“I want to say ‘invincible,’” and then the interview needs to end.
