  We study the thermodynamic properties of a family of integrable 1D spin chain
hamiltonians associated with quantum groups at roots of unity. These
hamiltonians depend for each primitive root of unit on a parameter $s$ which
plays the role of a continuous spin. The model exhibits ferrimagnetism even
though the interaction involved is between nearest neighbors. The latter
phenomenon is interpreted as a genuine quantum group effect with no
``classical" analog. The discussion of conformal properties is given.
