In West Windsor in the late 1950s and early ’60s there were three choices for nearby outdoor ice skating: Grovers Mill Pond, Plainsboro Pond, and Lake Carnegie in Princeton. The skating center in Mercer County Park didn’t exist until the late 1970s, so all public skating in the area had to be outside on whatever water was frozen to a sufficient thickness to keep you from crashing through.
We soon learned that this was at least three inches, and preferably four or more. It also sort of depended on how heavy you were. But three inches was enough to hold the kids up, and they were the ones who wanted to skate the most.
You also had to be careful about where you skated on the pond or lake. On Grovers Mill Pond, for example, the ice got thicker close to shore and away from where the main water flow through the pond was along Big Bear Brook. No matter where you were, if you were skating around and you heard a cracking sound, it was a good idea to get closer to shore.
Obviously, this much ice required prolonged periods of freezing temperatures, and, until the mid-’70s, the needed cold weather was around these parts for a prolonged period, usually from mid-December until early March—nearly three months. In those years the sustained winter temperature in this part of New Jersey rarely got above the freezing mark except in the middle of a sunny day.
In Princeton the ice on Lake Carnegie was sometimes sufficient to allow skating for its full length, all the way from Alexander Street to Kingston. By around 1970 ice thickness was monitored by the police department and word got around when it was thick enough. Eventually signs or white flags were posted to indicate safe conditions. A red flag meant “no skating” today.
The sustained cold also meant that we had a lot more snow than we have had in recent years. There were years when the first snowfall in December was still on the ground in March. Sometimes a good layer of skating ice was made useless by several inches, or even a foot or two, of snow. Only the real skating diehards would bother to shovel the snow off their favorite skating area.
But some did. Even I did a few times — for the kids, of course. In recent decades, there have been many years when there has been no snowfall at all. But snow not only got in the way of skaters, it also affected the smoothness of the ice surface. You can’t skate very well on bumpy ice. That is why rain was also an unwelcome event when there was a good layer of skating ice. The problem was that it would pool up in the low areas and sometimes leave ridges at the edges of the pools. Skaters could trip over such edges, so you had to be careful after the occasional rain. Fortunately, winter rain was very unusual then.
The usual place that most skaters got on the ice in Grovers Mill was on the pond side of Clarksville Road, where the timber railing on top of the dam is today. Back then the only “railing” along the road was a steel cable supported by wooden posts.
In one place near the southern end of the dam, the cable had fallen down, and cars would park there with their headlights aimed out on the ice for skating at night. As a result that area became the most popular for skating. After a few years of this the township had floodlights installed on a telephone pole in that area. The lights remain there to this day. But they haven’t been turned on for nearly 40 years. That’s as long ago as it was possible to skate there. (The lights are on the pole near the “Turtle Crossing” sign.)
A few times some really adventurous motorcyclists took their bikes on the ice when it was really thick. There was a lot of skidding around, of course, but the fad didn’t last long after the police learned about it.
Eventually, after the winters became warmer and the ice was rarely thick enough, the township posted a sign on Cranbury Road at the edge of the pond that read, “No skating allowed.” It was there all year round for decades and only disappeared a few years ago when the pond was restored.
(One language purist I know told me that the sign meant that you were allowed to “not skate,” but that did not mean that skating was “not allowed.” I still wonder about that.)
