Outdoors after school Monday, Adam Heiman watched his 12-year-old son Brayalon face off with 17 year-old Aedan Rynkowski at Rogers Avenue Park.
He had just been out there in the morning taking a layer of snow off the ice rink.
While two other outdoors rinks, at Outwater Park and Altro Park, are being maintained by the city, the rink in Rogers Avenue Park is all Heiman’s baby.
“He’s been skating since he was four,” Heiman said of his son. “We lived in Virginia and we’ve been big hockey people. We moved back here, I’m from the area. It’s a nice neighborhood and everyone helps each other.”
Work on the ice rinks at Outwater and Altro parks similarly is a labor of love, by city parks employee Scott Cercone.
Third Ward Alderman Mark Devine said he saw Cercone at the rink at Outwater Park, using a snowblower to keep it spiffy, late last week.
“Scott’s working hard on the rink on Prospect Street,” Devine said. “He’s been taking care of the rinks for a couple of years now. The way he’s got them now, they’re about double what they were last year.”
The city clerk’s office issued a release Monday morning publicizing all three rinks as suitable for skating enthusiasts, and open to everyone, residents and visitors alike, at no charge.
Cercone said “we got a little lucky” with the weather recently and he has stayed busy taking the snow off perfect slabs of ice in the parks he’s keeping an eye on.
If he wasn’t getting paid for the work, he’d do it for free, he added.
“If you want to raise your kids in an urban environment, give them something to do that doesn’t break the bank,” Cercone said. “And it doesn’t even have to require money, just a little effort.”