PORTLAND, Ore. — The air still smelled like pretzels and caramel corn. Teenagers in heavy eyeliner still spilled out of Hot Topic, and young girls practiced figure skating jumps on the ice. But construction crews had started dismantling half the mall, and soon the rink would be gone, too.
For now, Jerry Leonard skated away from the boom box he had set up and toward the woman who had been his partner in everything for 60 years. He took her hand. The opening chords of Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” played. Tally Leonard looked up, and Jerry felt what he always had. Heaven on earth. They began to skate.
He was 75. She turned 81 this week — a cougar, their friends joked. Tally and Jerry had skated together on this rink for the first time in 1967, and it had been the center of their lives ever since. They were there four days a week nearly every week. Even now, middle-agers who hadn’t visited in two decades knew to show up for their 1 p.m. dance.
Whole generations grew up believing the mall and its stalwart skating couple would always be there, but Americans stopped going to big shopping centers. Across the country, nearly 15,000 had closed as online shopping boomed. The Lloyd Center in Portland, Oregon, lost its department stores years ago. The mall hung on as a funky collection of art museums, music studios and a children’s play space called Mudland. People continued to twirl and fall on the first-floor rink. But Portland officials decided long ago they wanted something different on these 29 acres.
Last month, the City Council approved a plan for mixed-use housing and green space. A group of skaters petitioned to save the rink “for Jerry, Tally, & Portland,” but city leaders rejected the appeal. The mall closes Saturday.
Jerry knew, as he and Tally looped around young people in baggy jeans, that they had only a few days left to glide together across the ice, but he wasn’t ready to give himself over to grief. Nothing lasts forever, he knew. Celine Dion no longer toured. Boom boxes were out of style. Cities change, muscles atrophy.
But Jerry and Tally had never known each other without this shopping mall rink. What would happen when they lost it? Who would they be if they couldn’t skate?
Looking back, Jerry thinks of their story as one of fateful steps. Would he have learned this sport if he hadn’t caught that “Leave It to Beaver” episode where the gullible Beav buys skates three sizes too big? And would he have met Tally if his local rink in Yakima, Washington, stayed open year-round? Their lives had crossed only because an out-of-town instructor told Jerry he ought to spend the summer months in Portland, a city 185 miles south, “where there’s a girl who skates like you.”
Jerry didn’t imagine she would want to skate with a “hick from the sticks,” but one Tuesday in late February, he had the day off from school, so Jerry and a group of friends drove down to meet Tally.
He couldn’t believe how smooth a skater Tally was. She was better than he was, but he knew what the instructor meant. They both had a soft way of moving, with good leg extension and the same way of holding themselves on the ice.
They skated to whatever the radio was playing then, maybe the Turtles’ “Happy Together” or “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones. It was the closest he had ever felt to flying. Heaven on earth, he thought for the first of what would come to be an uncountable number of times.
He flew down the following weekend, and soon he was commuting to Portland every weekend. A round-trip student ticket cost $14.56, and Jerry worked odd jobs to pay the airfare. Eventually, Tally’s parents said he could move in with them to finish high school in Portland, and the pair spent all their free time on the ice.
The Lloyd Center ice rink has changed a few times over the years, but in the 1960s it was an open-air pavilion with arched bridges, a terrazzo floor and room for 2,800 spectators. Newspaper articles boasted that its rink was bigger than the one in Rockefeller Center.
Those were halcyon days, when locals felt like stars, and actual stars came through. A “tanned, tired and determined” Bobby Kennedy circled Lloyd’s ice in May 1968, just a month before he died. Five years later, 3-year-old Tonya Harding took her first lesson there.
Harding wasn’t a star then, and neither were Jerry and Tally, but the two of them were good enough to make it to the National Figure Skating Championships. In 1969, they won third place in ice dancing.
They stopped competing in 1970, when he was 20, and she was 24, because they wanted to focus on college. But they knew they didn’t want their partnership to end. They married in 1971, and within a few years they had two sons and a dental practice where Jerry worked on teeth, and she served as his assistant. They scheduled their work days around the rink’s open-skate times.
In those days, whole cities converged at their malls. While Tally and Jerry skated, children picked out their back-to-school clothes, and teenagers earned their first paychecks scooping caramel corn at Joe Brown’s. Young couples filled out their wedding registries or bought living-room suites. And even people without money saw the Lloyd Center as a place to be, to browse or loiter, to peer over those arched bridges and watch the couple below pull off perfect arabesques.
In 1991, the mall put a roof over the rink, and the east wind that once froze Jerry to a complete stop as he held Tally over his head no longer blew across the ice. The bridges went away. In 2014, mall owners shrank the rink to an oval the skaters compared to a three-hole golf course. Wedding registries and most everything else moved online. Macy’s closed, and Nordstrom closed, but Jerry and Tally kept coming.
Last week, Jerry led Tally around the edges of the ice, and Dion gave way to Michael Bublé, then “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Moms exchanged numbers and promised to let each other know if they found another good rink. Two floors up, remote workers using the mall as office space hung over the ledge and filmed as Jerry extended his arm for Tally to hold.
The rink was packed. Occasionally, someone fell, and the couple skated over to help them up. Even now, at an age when bodies grow wobbly, Tally and Jerry were solid on the ice. They prayed each morning to stay “sharp-side down,” but they’d had their mishaps. He split her knee open once with his blade. Another time, during a presentation for local dignitaries, he dropped her into the celebratory cake.
A man used the intercom to announce a pause in the public skate. The ice resurfacer needed to smooth the rink. “There will be a short exhibit skate directly after,” he said.
Kids streamed off the ice, boasting about new tricks or their first go-rounds without falling. Jerry watched them, and his heart broke more for them than for himself.
“We had our years to skate here,” he said. “The younger generations won’t have what we did.”
Off the ice, Tally said her memory had started to slip. She couldn’t remember all the dates and names she used to, but her body hadn’t forgotten how to move. When the ice resurfacer finished, Tally skated to the center of the rink, and Jerry followed.
Their legs and arms moved in unison. They wore all black. A woman on the sidelines said “graceful,” and the other mothers agreed.
For years, their post-cleaning exhibition song was “Amazing Grace.” But that was a four-minute routine with a lot of lifts. Now, they skate to Nat King Cole’s “L-O-V-E,” a 2½-minute ditty with no lifts but plenty of footwork.
Someone else might have mourned the new limits of their body, but as Jerry held onto Tally, and they twisted their hips together, he felt the same joy he had during their first skate. That had never changed.
He thought, briefly, of the days to come. The mall’s redeveloper had asked the couple to perform one last time before the Lloyd Center closed for good. Theirs would be the last blades to touch that ice.
And after? Jerry wasn’t sure yet. They had survived without skating for a year while he finished dental school and again for a few months during the pandemic. But they never had faced an eternity without this rink. He knew there was another one over the state line in Vancouver, Washington, but it was a half an hour away, and the rink was cold, and it’s not the place where they fell in love.
They reached the side of the rink closest to the skate rental, and Jerry let go of Tally’s hand. She spun away, and again someone said “graceful.”
Jerry would ask himself later what would become of their partnership without this mall. For now, the song was over, and Tally was a few feet away. He skated toward her. He wrapped his arms around her back, kissed her the way he always had, and when the teenagers and remote workers clapped, they bowed, then left the ice.
The post The mall rink where they fell in love and skated for nearly 60 years is closing appeared first on Washington Post.
