Rink

May/June 2020

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One of the plans that came to Giangreco, who spent years on the Evanston Youth Hockey board, was penned by the city. The Robert Crown Community Center would have been closed down for the summer while the facility underwent a remodel. That plan concerned those in the Evanston hockey community. The sport's growth in the area was boom- ing with the success of the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2010s. "From a hockey perspective, a plan like that might have put Evanston Youth Hockey out of business," Giangreco said. "If you close for even part of a year, fami- lies are going to leave and a lot of them wouldn't have come back." After that idea did not come to fruition, Giangreco and others looked to start the Friends of Robert Crown Center. The non-profit organization was headed by Dan Stein, the group's president. Their goal: To finally make the dream of a new and improved Robert Crown Community Center a reality. Constructing The Dream With Stein, Giangreco and the board of directors working together on this proj- ect, they knew this was more than just an upgrade in ice rinks. "This was bigger than just ice rinks and turf fields," Stein said. "We needed to build a facility that could help those in our community. There is a portion of our city's population that does not have the same resources, especially when school is out." The mindset of including everyone in the new Robert Crown Community Center meant there were numerous stakeholders involved in the process. Aside from those who used the ice rinks, the facility also holds a preschool. The new facility promised all of what was in the old one plus much more. One of the biggest add-ons was a new branch of the Evanston Public Library. "We had to start and weave together all the interests of the various stakehold- ers," said Andy Tinucci, an architect at Woodhouse Tinucci Architects who spearheaded this project. "We did the best we could to make sure each individual stakeholders were being heard and their ambitions were satisfied." Giangreco admitted that with the latest version of the recreation of the Robert Crown Community Center came plenty of skepticism from the community. However, some of that skepticism tapered off in February 2017 thanks in part to Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz. He held an event to help fund- raise with the Friends of Robert Crown Center. In just one night, $1 million was raised and helped get things going in the right direction in the group's effort to raise $10 million. "(Wirtz) gave credibility to what we were doing and showed we had a capital project that had never been seen before in Evanston," Giangreco said. "It's hard to overstate the Blackhawks' role in this process." The group met its goal and the plan passed in 2018 to get this project off the ground. Putting Together the Pieces of the Puzzle Now that the project was a go, the new challenge for Tinucci and everyone else was fitting everyone's wants and needs in to just 15 acres. The new facility called for two NHL-sized rinks, the library branch, a running track, nine locker rooms, two gyms, an art room and more. The challenge of fitting this in one facility meant Tinucci had to get creative. That meant putting basketball hoops a floor above the library but constructing the courts in a way so the noise of bounc- ing basketballs wasn't affecting those inside the library. USICERINKS.COM MAY.JUNE.2020 / 21 "THERE WERE SO MANY REASONS TO LOVE THAT FACILITY. BUT WE LOVED IT TO DEATH. IT WAS IN A STATE OF DISREPAIR AND WAS JUST INADEQUATE." , Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz helped jumpstart the project's financing with a $1 million fundraising event.

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