BY CLINTON DICK
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Even though the Law School will not begin renovating Harkness Commons until this summer, students can in the meantime skirt around that eyesore and skate onto the newest addition to Kagan’s campus beautification efforts: a new ice skating rink on Jarvis Field.
The project was Kagan’s attempt to combat plunging temperatures and students’ moods. “I was walking around feeling sorry for myself because it was so cold and other students were walking around feeling sorry for themselves because they were cold,” she says. In the end using the temperature for some sort of enjoyment should take one’s mind off of numbing noses and painful breathing.
It seems it has worked. Students can be seen skating gracefully at all hours of the day and there has even been an occasional hockey game. But students who wish to give thanks for another excuse not to study simply have to look up and smile at the eyesore that is Harkness Commons.
Kagan got the idea for the ice skating rink by looking at old articles about the Gropius Complex. “I had been talking to the dean of the design school and he was over and we were looking at the Hark,” she says. “The next day he went to the design school library and he found a bunch of articles about the Gropius complex. He sent them to me and as I was flipping through them there were photographs showing Jarvis Field as an ice skating rink. I thought, ‘My gosh, they must have flooded the field and created a ice skating rink.'”
As for what the new rink will be called, Kagan says, “I have not thought about naming it yet.”