At these abandoned ice skating rinks, hockey turns to hooky faster than frosty ice turns to lukewarm water. Kinda like Blade Runner but without the blades.

Berkeley Iceland opened with a bang on November 1st, 1940 when three-time Olympic skating champion and Hollywood actress Sonja Henie performed before a packed house. Sixty-six years later, the venerable rink closed and soon fell prey to vandals and graffiti artists. Fun fact: East Bay Iceland, the rink’s owner at and after closing, was Richard Zamboni, son of the inventor of the Zamboni ice resurfacing machine.

Bladeless in Bristol

The Bristol Ice Rink opened in 1966 and closed in late 2012 after a 46-year run… and a jolly good run it was! It’s estimated that over 10 million people from all across southwest England visited the rink, including Olympic Ice-dancing gold medalists Torvill and Dean. “It’s not a case of skating being dead and buried in Bristol,” explained rink manager Eddie Pearson, “but we’ve come to the end of our lease and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Urbex explorer Beyond The Boundary did something, however, even if it was photo-documenting the doomed rink in April/May of 2013 and again later that year, just as building demolition was getting underway.

Poconope

The Pocono Ice-A-Rama rink at the couples-only Penn Hills Resort in Analomink, PA opened in 1962 and was promoted at the time as being the only indoor ice skating rink in the Poconos. Flickr user Kate McCann (k8mccann2) visited the long-closed resort/rink complex in 2014 and yeah, vacations in the Poconos aren’t what they used to be.

Akita Mañana

It gets pretty snowy in northwestern Japan so one would think winter sports & recreation facilities would attract a loyal local crowd. Well, think again: the Akita Ice Arena is most definitely closed and obviously abandoned. Imgur user plasticscissors visited the shuttered but not-quite-inaccessible arena in March of 2013 and was kind enough to post a host of images. Now you know what an iceless ice skating rink looks like – miles of plastic tiles.

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On Thin Ice 10 Abandoned Defrosted Ice Skating Rinks

Modified inline skates holding pots of black pigment allow this artist to create her huge works (up to 40 feet or more) while rolling around the room, with results that look remarkably like smaller-scale works of hand-drawn calligraphy.

A student at the California College of art, Tian Haisu has dubbed her approach Landskating. She notes that her “whole body is involved” in this unusual process, filling her creations with a unique kind of “power, speed and rhythm.”

Her works feature landscapes, plants and architecture, all created by pressing down on giant unrolled sheets of paper deployed after she has sketched out and thought through these larger compositions on small sheets.

As with any artistic approach, it took the artist time to learn the medium, executing with her feet rather than her hands in a way that both liberates the creative process but also involves complexities and stylistic impacts that are not always easy to predict or control.