Small Spaces, Big Dreams: Rooftop Ice Hockey Rink Nets Revenue for NYC Office-Warehouse

New Yorkers might think they’ve seen everything, but a Zamboni crawling along hot asphalt through traffic in the foreground of the Manhattan skyline will likely still trigger a double take.

The three-ton ice resurfacer certainly turned heads when a group of entrepreneurial developers steered it through an industrial patch of Long Island City this summer, right up a ramp past their second-floor offices and onto the roof of the property’s adjacent warehouse.

It found its new home and place of employment there on the roof, in a chilled-out steel structure housing an indoor, year-round ice rink for youth hockey training.

On a recent tour of the 7,200-square-foot rink, dubbed The Graveyard, LoopNet learned how property owner Greg Brayman and his family-run team of associates built an ice rink on the roof of their industrial property in the middle of New York City.

And maybe more importantly — why.

“You probably wouldn’t even think about the economics of doing something like this unless you’re in New York City, right?” Brayman said as he opened large coiling doors to a frigid chamber sprawling with glistening ice.

But Brayman and his team are always thinking in the language of New York economics.

Before ice, there was beer. Thousands of gallons of beer. The warehouse had been the hub of the Brayman family’s beer distribution enterprise Phoenix Beverages since the mid-1980s, when they purchased the 82,000-square-foot lot from Guinness, who had the property built to suit in 1972.

Phoenix eventually merged with another firm, but they held on to the property as its landlord — leasing the warehouse as a heavy vehicles depot and retaining some workspace for themselves in the attached two-story office building.

“In this part of Queens, without much access to mass transit, there’s not a ton of demand for the offices,” Brayman said of the industrial nook where the property’s located, across from Calvary Cemetery from which the rink takes its name.

And while occupants like Universal Studios and others in the motion picture industry have been setting up studios throughout the neighborhood, the submarket's industrial pull has weakened to an 8.7% vacancy rate, according to CoStar, the publisher of LoopNet. Some multi-story and even five-story warehouses in the area are now starting to get take up, he said, which further softens industrial demand.

But the neighborhood is changing regardless. Though it lacks a subway station, he continued, Long Island City is slowly converging with Greenpoint, its hipster neighbor to the east that, like many nooks in its borough of Brooklyn, has experienced staggering transformation in the past few decades.

“Whether it’s for the movie businesses, entertainment venues or big box stores,” Brayman said, “I think the rent prices that landlords are seeking will outstrip a lot of these distribution [and other industrial] users' ability to pay.”

So, to use an adage that was made popular by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and has since been adopted by the business world, Brayman looked to “where the puck is going” in the market and saw an opportunity.

“There are some smaller rinks in New Jersey and a handful throughout the city, but there’s no rink quite like this in New York City,” Brayman said. “It’s a 120-by-60-foot training rink that’s two-thirds the scale of a full-size rink.” One such rink recently closed, some are undergoing extensive retrofits, and another is perpetually overbooked.

The nonprofit that Brayman's kids had played for, the North Park Hockey Association, was looking for a training location that would be convenient to its families in Manhattan. “It’s a great, parent-run organization, and I knew they were looking for ice,” he said. “In a way, it was built-to-suit for North Park, but they aren’t our only user — we also have Topline Hockey, for instance, which is a private group of coaches that includes former [players of the NHL team] New York Rangers.”

Quite simply, he said, “there’s demand for ice.”

That’s proven true, as The Graveyard was already booked through the winter by the time it got its temporary certificate of occupancy (TCO) back in September. “People come to skate every day; we’re maxed out and are already looking at scheduling for spring,” Brayman said at that time.

“It’s all about supply,” he continued. The North Park association is getting bigger, he said, and "girls hockey is growing pretty dramatically.” Even with flat or low growth in New York overall, he said, “It works, because supply is shrinking."

Because of that favorable imbalance, The Graveyard is on solid ice. “We get a good price per hour,” he said. “We get higher revenue per square foot in New York City than you would in other places with more space for more rinks, like New Jersey; or in places farther north like Connecticut or Boston, where demand is higher, but so is supply.”

The costs are much higher, too, though. “In New York City, with the price of electricity, the price of natural gas, the price of real estate, the real estate taxes, the cost of labor, everything … the only way to make it work financially is to dial in on the efficiency,” Brayman said.

His team built the facility with those costs in mind, but they are still making tweaks to maximize efficiency as they learn more about how it's used. Helmed by Brayman’s jack-of-all-trades associate, Pat Simeone, the team erected a pre-engineered, Butler-style steel structure with spray-on insulation and an extra external insulation wrap.

They also went with what they said is a unique, ammonia-based chiller system. Instead of having one unit that can hold 80 pounds of refrigerant, it’s divided into four 20-pound units. That helped ease some regulations that would otherwise require an on-site stationary engineer, and it also allows for less output in downtimes.

Also, Brayman’s a fan not just of photovoltaic (PV) panels that convert sunlight into electricity, but also of simpler thermal energy systems that harness the sun to directly heat water and interior spaces. "It’s the finest technology of the 14th century," he joked. "It's reliant on active sunlight, so you need a backup in certain occasions," he said. "But the plus is that it’s free."

As a property owner who also develops mobile home parks, self-storage units and small-bay industrial properties, Brayman believes that with rising electricity costs and increasingly stringent efficiency mandates, the ability to mitigate a building’s energy usage will become a core competency in competition among developers and owners.

The Graveyard team experiments with efficiency measures every day. They use the thermal solar system to power the dehumidifier as much as possible. They use melted snow to chill water for the condenser unit. “Every last piece of used energy, whether it’s extra heat or extra cold, is being recovered and utilized,” Brayman said. There's still tweaking to be done in the dehumidification department, he conceded, noting that it's probably the trickiest part of having an all-season indoor rink.

Would it be easier if they had built an outdoor rink?

Yes and no. For one, the question is moot, because the team didn’t want to do an outdoor rink, Brayman said. They wanted a facility that could stay open all year, unlike the countless outdoor rinks throughout the city that operate on temporary permits for recreational ice-skating rentals during the winter.

Secondly, and oddly enough, Brayman’s property had as-of-right zoning for an indoor rink, but not an outdoor rink. In contrast, some hotels thoughout New York and residential complexes such as the StuyTown apartments in Manhattan can set up an outdoor rink by right, he noted. "It struck me as a little weird, but it worked out fine.”

That said, zoning wasn’t a problem. But permits were. “It only took around six months from the first hammer hitting the nail to us starting to freeze water and getting our TCO,” Brayman said. “But before that, the permitting process took about five years.”

Part of that lull had to do with the NYC Department of Buildings moving to an entirely online system and part of it had to do with COVID, he said, but a lot of it had to do with “just how long it takes to build stuff in New York City,” especially if it’s anything unusual or niche.

“The architects, the expeditors and the permitting people in the city all had to look a little closer at this project simply because it’s not something they are used to seeing,” Brayman said.

Getting someone who’s specialized for such a niche product was key, Simeone added, and finding the right person to bring on board was probably the hardest part of the entire process. “I think there's like one or two contractors who do [smaller indoor rinks] nationally; who know how many tubes you need to carry the polyglycol underneath the ice and how big the pumps need to be and that sort of thing.”

Hopefully, a rooftop ice rink in New York City will be easier for the next group who does it, Brayman concluded. The team has plenty more space to utilize on their warehouse roof if it's going to be them. But the decision as to whether they'll add an additional rink, for now, has been put on ice.