The Rink

"Luther H Holton along with his friends Frederick Lawford and James Nelson stood by the side of an immense shallow pit. It was an unusually long hole in the ground that stretched almost all the way between two parallel streets in the recently burgeoning section of the city now known as " Newtown. " The city itself, was unique in the fact that it had been built on the side of a mountain in the middle of an island surrounded by a mighty river. One of the earliest settlements in North America, the city was undergoing unprecedented development in the mid 19th century. Already established as London's most important colonial center of commerce, the city had just witnessed the construction of a great Iron bridge across the mighty river considered by many to be an " eighth wonder of the world." Adding to that was the completion of a lengthly canal that would allow shipping from the city's port into the interior of the continent. Already, a host of industries were establishing themselves along this canal; steel foundries, grain mills, sugar refineries, countless manufacturing companies, water filtration plants and the city's gas works. The old city had been founded next to it's port a few hundred years earlier, but then began expanding east and west of it's center and up the sides of it's mountain. There are a series of three natural horizontal shelflike terraces climbing their way from the waterfront up the face of the mountain to just below it's summit. Basically flat open areas on a slope, it was here on the uppermost terrace now called 'Newtown', that three men were looking down into a long shallow pit that had just recently been dug up. With it's earth in neat piles stacked around it, stones in tidy little mounds like jewels in a very long tiara...lay the pit that would become a rink. " Are you sure about this? " asked Holton, in a tone more inquisitive than skeptical. " Absolutely " replied the two young architects, quickly answering the question with a unified ...