Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at the transformation of the northernmost part of Central Park.
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Last month the $160 million Davis Center at the Harlem Meer opened — a new swimming pool, skating rink and community hub on six remade acres at the north end of Central Park. Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic, says it’s a significant change for the park, which is a barometer of New York’s shifting fortunes. I asked him to explain.
You called this huge project an “act of civic reparation.” How so?
It’s in Harlem, at the north end of the park, which had become very decrepit and crime-ridden during the later decades of the last century. So Davis represents the final step in a long-term effort to restore dignity, beauty and order to that area.
And it’s also an attempt to restore something of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s original vision, from the mid-19th century, which imagined the northern park as a bucolic retreat. Davis doesn’t quite do that. Times change. The park now has to serve many purposes.
But it finds a way to return some of the pastoral ambition of the original plan and also meet the needs of a population that depends on having a pool and skating rink. It’s a great example of how landscape architecture needs to adapt and reflect a changing city and society, which is why it is also tied up with race and the history of Harlem. These are all inseparable issues when you’re talking about critical public spaces like Central Park in a city like New York.
You look to 1989 as a crucial year. Why?
In mid-April of that year, on the same night that a Black woman was raped and thrown off a roof in Brooklyn, a woman jogging near the Meer was raped and brutally beaten. Five Black and Latino teenagers were arrested, convicted and imprisoned for the crime, which they did not commit.
The north part of the park became synonymous with the racial unrest in the city. That year was a nadir. Afterward, attempts began to turn that part of the park around, to clean the Meer, to redo playgrounds and integrate them with the original landscape.
The last step, now just completed, was to replace Lasker Pool, a hulking pool that could convert to a skating rink in winter, with Davis, which involves not just a new pool and a pavilion but a relandscaping of several acres. The pavilion is tucked into a hill, so it feels much less like an urban intrusion than Lasker was, more like a part of nature.
You talked to Yusef Salaam, one of the teenagers who was convicted in the 1989 attack. He is now a member of the City Council, representing the district that includes the north end of the park. What did he say about how Davis differs from what used to be there?
Salaam pointed out that often change is seen as gentrifying — “exclusionary” was the word he used. But he suggested that when something new and good like Davis comes along, people should “receive the goodness because when you give yourself the opportunity to participate in something good, you give yourself permission to lead a full life — to find a way forward.”
I think that is what a project like Davis means in a larger sense. It is an opportunity for people who use it and for all New Yorkers to see a way forward.
That’s certainly not what Lasker was. Lasker wasn’t maintained.
There were many things that brought on the park’s decline, and they all worked together in the way that happens when cities are in free fall.
With the financial crisis of the ’70s, that northern part of the park was virtually abandoned by the city. As a consequence, it also became a center of crime.
It’s easy to ruin things quickly. It takes ages to fix them. This effort has taken more than a generation.
How different is it from what Olmsted and Vaux originally had in mind for that part of the park?
Their idea was that this area would be a complex landscape of meandering paths, hills, forests and waterways — a diverse and seemingly natural creation, although everything in Central Park is constructed and designed.
Many people don’t realize that now. They think the park, or bucolic parts of it, like the north end, with its lake and woods, are the remains of untouched Mannahatta, from precolonial days. But every one of those streams and forests and meadows and lakes was created. It was part of a democratic vision of Olmsted and Vaux to make it seem naturalistic. Central Park was a retreat from the hardships of the urban grid. It was a place for everyone.
And they planned the north end of the park to be rustic.
Right. They conceived it around the Harlem Meer, which linked to a loch and a ravine, which they constructed through the north woods, which they planted. All of this was a sequence of nature that approximated the Adirondacks or some rural stretch of the Hudson Valley.
But as the city grew, pressures on the park increased to serve more people and purposes. And when Robert Moses became head of the parks department in the 1930s, the push was toward adding recreational spaces, so the pastoral idea was replaced by a variety of playgrounds, ball fields and hardscaping. The lake was surrounded by a concrete border. That end of the park became increasingly urbanized.
The culmination in the 1960s was the building of the Lasker Pool, a behemoth tucked into the ravine, which plugged up the waterway. It was very popular in the neighborhood because kids could go there and cool off or, in the winter, learn to skate. But Lasker was not well built. It leaked.
The upshot was it was always a place in need of repair, rundown and poorly maintained. It was important to the community in Harlem, but not really worthy and forbidding, done on the cheap, which sent a message about how the city feels about the people who depend on it. Davis is an attempt to send an opposite message.
Can the city maintain Davis?
Works of architecture are always subject to the vagaries of fate and politics. We’ll see what the economic situation for the city is in the coming years. Lasker wasn’t built in the ’60s to anticipate the near-bankruptcy of the ’70s.
That said, it makes a difference when something is well done and people who use it feel respected and dignified by association with it. These places tend to be more cared for. It’s not a guarantee. But investing the kind of money and care that has gone into Davis often translates into civic pride and ownership.
That’s an important message today, when the city needs signs of progress and hope. And there’s no place more central to the soul of New York than Central Park.
Weather
Expect a rainy Monday with the possibility of a thunderstorm and a high temperature around 64. The rain will continue tonight, when the low will be around 58.
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