The not-so-sunny day did not stop the opening of the Davis Center on Saturday, the mega-structure on the banks of the Harlem Meer in the Northeast corner of Central Park. After years of complaints about its degraded state due to the administration’s lack of attention and funding, the community welcomes its rebirth and hopes it is only the first of many more milestones.
“For many of us, especially from the Black and South American community,” said City Council member Yusef Salaam, “the opening of the Davis Center is not just a pool, a skating rink, but a homecoming. Within walking distance of where I grew up, this place was a place we could see but not safely touch. This restoration is a healing for me.”
The project, which cost the Central Park Conservancy $160 million in private and public investment, is the most complex since the agency’s founding in 1980 and took less than four years. In addition to the pathways in and out of the park, the former Lasker facility, which was left closed to languish for years due to lack of resources, has been rebuilt. The structure transforms from an ice rink in wintertime to a pool in the summer, and can be covered with turf for playing sports in the transitional seasons. When opened as a pool in the summer, it will be larger than those used for olympic events, and will be able to hold up to a thousand people. Around it are indoor tables where people can eat, rest or just hang out, as well as lockers to store belongings.
A new boardwalk also stretches along the Harlem Meer, and the historic Huddlestone Arch—the creek buried in the 1960s when Lasker Rink first opened—has been reconnected.
The goal is to return a new space to the community that can host a variety of recreational activities depending on the season, from initiatives for the elderly to sporting events, to children-focused events.
