Ice Skating on Hubbell's Pond Suspended This Winter

As a means to reduce Garden City's 2009/2010 budget, ice skating on Hubbell's Pond, a tradition that dates back 100 years, has been suspended this winter.

"The board of trustees made the difficult decision to not appropriate funding to the Recreation Department to staff and supervise ice skating at Hubbell's Pond this winter," Mayor Robert Rothschild said in a recent Mayor's Message.

The pond is actually called Lake Cornelia, named after Garden City founder A.T. Stewart's wife. It got its nickname, Hubbell's Pond, in honor of Garden City's first mayor, George Hubbell, who built houses along its shore for himself and his children.

Village Historian John Ellis Kordes said the manmade pond, which is owned by the Garden City Golf Club and located off Stewart Avenue, is possibly the result of early excavation efforts for the first Garden City Hotel.

"It was layered with clay and filled with water," he said.

It costs the village approximately $12,000 a season to set up and monitor the skating program at Hubbell's Pond.

Kevin Ocker, chairman of the Board of Commissioners of Cultural and Recreational Affairs, said this includes setting up the warming area, installing sitting areas and ramps down to the ice for safety (the pond sits lower on the golf club property), monitoring the ice, clearing snow from the ice and staffing the pond area to monitor skaters when and if the ice is safe to skate on.

"The funding cut … became reality when the board adopted the 2009/2010 budget. This budget reduction was recommended so that other programs used by many more residents could be sustained," Ocker said. "I think we need to understand that once we say we are in the natural ice skating business, we as a village are committed to the cost whether there is usable/safe ice or not."

Ocker continued, "Once we commit, we 'the village' is responsible to patrol the ice when it is not safe. That is where the major cost comes from. With every tough budget cut decision comes the reality of reduced service to our residents in order to keep the tax increase at a minimum."

The ice must be 6 inches deep with no thinner spots. Ocker said the pond does not freeze evenly and even when conditions are perfect only an area of about 100 feet by 200 feet is actually usable.

"Back then, they did a lot more ice skating because they didn't need the ice to be so thick," Kordes said. "It's changed shape through the years and is actually smaller than it once was."

The pond sits lower on the golf club property but Kordes said residents could catch a glimpse atop Tenth Street.

A picture from M.H. Smith's book, Garden City, Long Island in Early Photographs, 1869-1919, shows the pond as it appeared in 1885. The Cathedral of the Incarnation is to its right and the original Garden City Hotel to its left.

According to Smith's book, it wasn't until the Garden City Golf Club was developed in 1899 that Hubbell decided to landscape its bare shores.

More recent pictures can be found in Kordes' Visions of Garden City, a collection of more than 150 photographs taken by Kordes himself between 1989 and 2005 that depict the village through the seasons.