Fundraising Gears Up as Plans for New Curling House Go Out to Builders

By Wiley Wood

The rubble is gone. A long slab of concrete, painted with targets on either end and lying in a vacant lot on Golf Drive, is all that remains of the Norfolk Curling Club, which was torched by arsonists last December. The playing area, referred to as the “sheet,” is fully 150 feet long, or half the length of a football field. Plans to revamp the sheet and enclose it once again within a building, “a big, metal building,” according to club president, Mary Fanette, are underway.

A baseline model of the new curling house has been designed by Norfolk architect Samuel “Pete” Anderson. The elevation drawing shows an elegant structure with a prominent stone chimney, the building’s long axis oriented at right angles to the road. There are floor plans for a “two-sheet” and a “three-sheet” version of the club, with men’s and women’s locker rooms, a kitchen, a warmroom with fireplace, and a bar (where by tradition the winning team stands the losers to a round of drinks). The plans have been sent out to seven potential builders with a request for proposals.

The cost of the new building is estimated at between 1.3 and 1.5 million dollars, of which a substantial portion still needs to be raised. Fanette calculates that the club received $760,000 from the insurance company and has another $100,000 on hand between its existing capital improvement fund and unsolicited gifts from the curling community. “We’ll need to raise a minimum of $500,000,” she says. “I try not to be daunted. The members are very committed and are rallying behind the effort.”

No part of the existing building was salvageable. The existing two-sheet concrete slab, which has refrigerating pipes running through it, was made unusable for icemaking by the high heat of the fire. In addition, the slab lies too close to the road for current setback regulations. The new club building will have an entirely new footprint.

The wider curling community has extended a hand to Norfolk curlers. Club members traveled over the winter to bonspiels in Albany, Cape Cod, Schenectady, and Washington, D.C., where the host curling clubs often organized 50/50 raffles to help Norfolk’s rebuilding effort. “More often than not,” says Fanette, “the host club would turn over its share of the raffle to us.” Norfolk’s sister club in Bridgeport has made free ice time available to Norfolk curlers on the weekends.

The story of the Curling Club fire, purportedly the result of a middle-of-the-night spree by two substance-impaired teenagers, was widely circulated in the media at the time. “A lot of people, not just in Norfolk but in the northwest corner of the state, have been impacted by the fire,” says Fanette.

Several club members, supervised by master canoe builder Schuyler Thompson, spent the winter building a traditional wood-and-canvas canoe to be offered as a raffle prize. The finished boat, painted Hudson green with gold trim, will be on view at the Norfolk Farmer’s Market. Tickets, at $20 apiece, are available from club members or through the club’s website, rocknorfolk.com.

Other fundraising events are planned throughout the summer and the coming year by the Norfolk Curling Club, which has adopted the slogan: “Rock the Cause, From Fire to Ice.” The groundbreaking ceremony for the new building is scheduled for early September.