It’s five degrees on a Friday evening, even colder with the wind chill, and you’re shivering while in line to ice skate at Millennium Park. After the hour-long wait, you cough up 12 bucks to rent a pair of bladed boots that smell like a clammy YMCA, spend another ten overheated minutes struggling to stuff your feet into them, and then cram your remaining possessions into a tiny rental locker.
Everywhere you turn these days, there’s a new slab of ice in Chicago you can pay to skate on. In addition to the ever-popular McCormick Tribune rink in Millennium Park, we’ve now got the winding, Mario Kart-like track in Maggie Daley Park, pop-up ice in Wicker Park and at the Lincoln Park Zoo, and a synthetic surface installed on the patio of Parson’s Chicken & Fish in Humboldt Park. At this pace, we’re a winter or two away from becoming a Canadian province.
