Harlem Ice Skaters Need Home Ice

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about a figure skating group in Harlem that is shopping for a rink. We’ll also get details on the continuing drama around Mayor Eric Adams.

Figure Skating in Harlem, a nonprofit that teaches skills on and off the ice to young women of color, says it’s not enough to be the subject of a five-part documentary. It wants something it has never had — a rink of its own.

That would alleviate what it calls its “most significant pain point”: its skaters’ desire for more practice time on the ice to work on three-turns and crossovers. Not to mention Lutzes and axels.

In the 27 years since it was organized, the group has rented time slots for practices at rinks in Manhattan and Queens. At $200 to $500 an hour, or more than $100,000 a year, the bookings represent one of the largest items in its budget.

But more than money is involved. The rink closest to the group’s base, on West 125th Street, is in Riverbank State Park, on the Hudson River at West 145th Street. It is an outdoor rink. Rain or snow adds a dimension to practice that skaters do not face at an indoor rink. “Sometimes, we have warm weather,” said Sharon Cohen, the chief executive of Figure Skating in Harlem, “and the ice is canceled.”

The result? The skaters get as little as three hours a week on ice on average. And they get fewer days on the ice than skaters once did because, Cohen said, climate change has cut into their practice time. The season has been shortened to four and a half months a year. “We used to go to the ice from October to April,” Cohen said. “Now it’s November to March.”

So Figure Skating in Harlem is looking for a site where it can build a rink. “All children deserve access to home ice of their own,” Cohen said, “both those skating with us today and the many more whom we could serve without the severe ice constraint we face now.”

The group’s 200 participants do not get on the ice until they have done their schoolwork, and Figure Skating in Harlem’s academic preparation has an impressive track record: Last year the eight seniors in the program went on to college; collectively, they were offered more than $2 million in scholarships. The expectation is that the skaters will maintain an A average. They cannot drop below a B.

The group is well connected: Assemblyman Jordan Wright’s mother was a board member when the group was started, and Yusef Salaam, a City Council member from Harlem, said he supported the group’s effort. “Harlem Ice,” the five-part documentary series that premiered this month on the Disney+ streaming service, lists three high-powered names among the executive producers — Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Robin Roberts. Grazer and Howard founded Imagine Entertainment in the 1980s and shared the Academy Award for best picture for “A Beautiful Mind” in 2002. Roberts is an anchor of “Good Morning America” on ABC-TV.

Cohen said that Figure Skating in Harlem commissioned a feasibility study last year. “It confirmed that everyone needs ice, and we need to be the owners and operators” of a rink, Cohen said. The study, by RES Group, a consulting firm, confirmed what parents of participants have long known: The program faces competition for rink time from private schools and adult hockey leagues that book time at rinks far beyond Harlem.

Transportation to the rinks is an additional expense that the group could eliminate if its participants did not have to travel to practice. It spends $20,000 a year to bus students to rinks in Queens or Westchester County for off-season programs.

And during the skating season? “We do a lot of car-pooling,” said Nigel-Ann La Qua Williamson, whose daughters Ayn Williamson, 13, and Addi Williamson, 11, have been on synchronized skating teams for three years. (Figure Skating in Harlem says the teams, which took to the ice in 2006, were the first teams of color to compete in the United States.)

Even when they go only as far as Riverbank, there is a price. The weekend before I spoke with Williamson, she said, her mother-in-law asked: “Are they skating? It’s so cold.”

“Both girls are now sick,” Williamson told me. “They have colds.”

Weather

Expect a sunny sky, with high wind gusts and temperatures near 29. Tonight the sky will be mostly clear, and the temperature will fall to 19.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

Rules are in effect today.

The latest New York news

Four deputy mayors said they would resign in response to Mayor Eric Adams’s cooperation with President Trump.

Together, they have overseen much of city government in the months since the departure of aides to Adams whose telephones were seized in corruption investigations separate from the one involving the mayor.

The four officials are Maria Torres-Springer, the first deputy mayor; and three deputy mayors, Meera Joshi, Chauncey Parker and Anne Williams-Isom. They told Adams that he had not done his job as a leader. Parker’s departure is notable because, as the deputy mayor for public safety, he has been directly involved in working out the city’s role in the president’s efforts to deport undocumented migrants.

One resignation that is not in the works — not now, anyway — is Adams’s.

“I am going nowhere,” Adams, a Democrat, said on Sunday, even as the list of officials saying he should step down grew longer. He pushed back at those who “are dancing on my grave” and predicted that he would rise again, like the biblical figure Lazarus.

Still, Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council, joined calls on Monday for the mayor to resign.

Now the attention shifts to Dale Ho, the federal judge overseeing the federal corruption case against Adams. It is up to him to decide whether to grant the Justice Department’s request to drop the charges, a request that began with an order to prosecutors in Manhattan from Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general. The acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, resigned rather than comply, as did several other prosecutors in New York and Washington.

Judges generally go along with prosecutors’ requests to drop charges. But allegations that Sassoon detailed in her letter of resignation — that the government did not have a valid basis for dismissing the case — could influence Ho’s thinking. Sassoon also said that Adams’s lawyers had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo,” with the mayor helping with immigration enforcement only if the case were dropped.

Dear Diary:

It was a drizzly June night in 2001. I was a young magazine editor and had just enjoyed what I thought was a very blissful second date — dinner, drinks, fabulous conversation — with our technology consultant at a restaurant in Manhattan.

I lived in Williamsburg at the time, and my date lived near Murray Hill, so we grabbed a cab and headed south on Second Avenue.

“Just let me out here,” my date said to the cabby at the corner of 25th Street.

We said our goodbyes, quick and shy, knowing that we would see each other at work the next day. I was giddy and probably grinning with happiness and hope.

“Oh boy,” the cabby said, shaking his head as we drove toward Brooklyn. “Very bad.”

“What do you mean?” I asked in horror.

“He doesn’t want you to know exactly where he lives,” the cabby said. “Not a good sign.”

I spent the rest of the cab ride in shock, revisiting every moment of the date.

Happily, it turned out that my instinct about it being a great date was right, and the cabby was wrong. Twenty-four years later, my date that night is my husband, and I know that if your stop is first, it’s polite to get out so the cab can continue in a straight line to the next stop.

— Ingrid Spencer

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

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