On May 1, 1971, the last passenger train pulled out of the Milwaukee Road Depot train shed. At 5:30 a.m. Monday, the first ice skaters pulled in.

About 20 girls from the St. Paul Figure Skating Club inaugurated the hours-old ice sheet under the historic train shed on Washington Avenue in Minneapolis. The skating club and its school, the Depot International Skating Academy, will be the main tenant, but the rink also will be open daily for public skating.

Bill Daniels of Minneapolis and his 12-year-old daughter, Madeline Harsha-Daniels, came to skate Monday instead of going Christmas shopping. Daniels said he moved to the city in 1988 and has been hoping for the train shed's revival since.

"I'm so glad they saved it. It's wonderful that people take the time and make the investment," he said. "As Thomas Pynchon said in one of this books, it's 'old as an iron queen.'"

The depot and the 600-foot-long train shed -- one of only a handful left in the nation -- are on the National Register of Historic Places. The icerink is the first part of a $60 million renovation project to open.

Two hotels -- a Courtyard by Marriott and a Residence Inn -- are expected to open next spring next door on 3rd Av. and 2nd St. S. The 1898 Renaissance Revival depot is to be restored, with a conference center and banquet facility in the former first-floor waiting rooms and 23 luxury suites on the upper two floors. A water park will go between the hotels. CSM Corp., a commercial and residential developer out of St. Paul, is leading the project, which includes public investment of about $12 million.

What did it take to turn a rusted, almost roofless waiting area for trains into a brightly lit skating rink? "A long time and a lot of money," said Donn Hooker, managing director of the depot project. The roof had to be replaced, pollution remedied, the floor and foundation stabilized, and the baggage room rebuilt.

CSM estimates that the rink cost about $8 million. "It would have been far cheaper to bulldoze and start over," Hooker said.

ARC IceSports of Washington, D.C., first proposed building two icerinks in the train shed in the mid-1990s. CSM joined the project to develop the hotels, then ended up taking on the icerink after ARC withdrew in 1999.

CSM decided to build only one of the rinks. The future of the east half of the train shed has not been determined. Hooker said it could house concerts or corporate events but will be used for parking in the meantime.

Gary Holmes, CSM's CEO, said his company shied away from the project twice because of its complexity, "but the third time we bit. We just got sucked into the romance of it."

On Monday, Mary Linden, a children's librarian at the Minneapolis Public Library, was one of the noontime skaters happy that CSM carried through. Linden is a member of the Starlight Ice Dance Club, the only local skating club devoted to ice dancing. She spent her lunch hour practicing graceful moves on the 85-by-200-foot ice sheet.

She particularly liked the glass walls open to the city: "I love the fact it's so bright. So many icerinks are dark and cavernous."

The ice, which is kept softer for figure skating, will be open all year, and weekend skating hours have been extended until 1 a.m.