A Greener, Wilder Central Park Pool and Skating Rink

In the 1960s, a concrete rink-and-pool combo got plunked into the northwest corner of Central Park. Jammed partway into a bend in Park Drive, muscling in on the Harlem Meer, and choking off a stream that wended its way from the West Side, the structure didn’t so much sit in its site as squash it. If you approached it by ambling through the North Woods’ curving trails and through a picturesque stone arch beneath the Drive, you found yourself facing what looked like the back of a suburban supermarket: concrete wall, dumpster, garbage bins, and an array of droning chillers. None of that is why it had to go, though. Heavy-duty civic blight can endure indefinitely so long as it keeps working, but the Lasker Memorial Rink and Pool was a leaky mess, and the Central Park Conservancy saw that it could turn decrepitude into opportunity by replacing the whole thing and finding ways to give the park’s East Harlem neighbors the same kind of green-carpet welcome enjoyed by more affluent East Siders 40 blocks downtown.

The result is the newly opened Davis Center, by Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture and Design with Mitchell Giurgola Architects, which undoes the clunky intrusion of Lasker and slips a large machine for leisure into an ovoid buffer zone between hillside and restored waterway. Wheelchair-navigable pathways now meander amiably around the perimeter, across the roof, and even through the structure itself, linking up to a new boardwalk that skirts the Meer. The stream once again flows along a new bed between strategically positioned boulders. The new center returns more parkland to the park. And the jewel sitting on a verdant cushion is a new swimming pool that converts into a rink in the winter and an artificial lawn in the shoulder months, flanked by a public building that thrusts into the hillside.

The new building slices into the hillside, its roof covered in greenery above and ribbed with slats of Douglas fir below. Photo: Richard Barnes.

The new building slices into the hillside, its roof covered in greenery above and ribbed with slats of Douglas fir below. Photo: Richard Barnes.

The Davis Center completes the Conservancy’s multi-decade efforts to turn the northern section of Central Park, once the park’s most beleaguered and neglected area, into one of the most alluring. Paths loop through bird-filled woods, passing by restored remnants of fortifications from the War of 1812. The Ravine offers cool and shade even on the most blistering days. And though tourists have discovered the area’s charms, the Conservancy’s horticulturalists have been doing valiant battle with other invasive species. The Meer and rink form the gateway from East Harlem, and the new layout replaces some insidious dead ends with a $160 million attraction — and, boy, will it attract. Instead of turning it over to a private company (like the Trump Organization, say), the Conservancy will manage the facility itself, keeping pool access free, skating fees modest, and off-hours filled with low-cost events. (The pool is now Olympic-length but narrower and 25 percent smaller than it was, a concession to more recent code and accessibility requirements.)

Well-managed recreational water and ice would make people happy even if they were housed in nothing more glamorous than a big tub. And yet it also matters that the new center’s site is formed by gracefully intersecting curves: the twisty S in the Drive, the edge of the Meer, the gentle bend of pathways, the wriggling contours of the topography. Rodriguez negotiates these lines with two arcing moves of her own: the pool’s oval, flanked by a scimitar-shaped building that curves the other way. That great hall is filled with wooden tables, one side lined with Adirondack granite, recalling the rustic stonework in the rest of the park, the other a chorus line of glass doors that pivot open to the outside. A roof covered in greenery above and ribbed with slats of Douglas fir below balances on a row of thin, cruciform black-steel columns that come to a dagger-like taper at either end. A long, slicing skylight, like the glint on the edge of a blade, lets sunshine course down over the stone wall.

Renderings of the site as it will look in summer (swimming pool) and winter (ice rink). Photos: Susan T. Rodriguez.

Renderings of the site as it will look in summer (swimming pool) and winter (ice rink). Photos: Susan T. Rodriguez.

These few grand gestures come equipped with an abundance of sensitive detail, like flaring doorways that look more generous than they are, hallway tiles glazed in park green, narrow strips of accent stone that protrude slightly like shallow shelves, and a high clerestory strip of frosted glass that lets diffuse sunlight (but not leering peeks) into the locker rooms. Indoors and out are braided together: The roof extends into a broad canopy, and the inner stone wall turns and slips through the glass to become an exterior façade. There’s a happy obsessiveness at play here, the desire to make every square inch count. We can only hope that the same meticulousness extends to the mechanical systems buried out of sight beneath the plantings.

The site is the sort that most builders would rather avoid: too hard to access, too many slopes, too much water, not enough space to maneuver. Those drawbacks must have energized the designers, including Christopher Nolan, who spent three decades as the Conservancy’s chief landscape architect and continues as a consultant. It’s not just that they tucked the building into a slope, backing it up against the East Drive’s retaining wall, or that they lidded it with a green roof. It’s that they melded architecture and landscape to produce a poetic hybrid. The semi-interred building isn’t really a New York — or a city — thing (except perhaps for the Irish Hunger Memorial, a low box that wears a chunk of rocky countryside on its shoulder). But there’s ample precedent elsewhere for an approach you might call Hobbitecture. Just an hour away, in New Canaan, Connecticut, Philip Johnson stowed his private painting gallery beneath a hillock and shut it behind a steel door. On the Danish coast, BIG trenched a local museum out of the dunes, creating channels that converge on a sunken plaza. From a few dozen feet away, you could miss the place completely. And in Japan, Tadao Ando spent decades cutting into the hills of Naoshima Island and inserting the concrete chambers of a museum into the earth.

Unlike all those examples, though, the Davis Center feels open and airy — more like the park’s Bethesda Terrace, which negotiates the drop from the mall to the lake near 72nd Street with staircases that flank an arcade. Here, similar conditions produce a completely different effect. Instead of laying out a suite of formal elements — mall, stairs, columns, fountain, lakeside — the architects reshaped the whole area so that the artful wilderness of the ravine spills through Olmsted’s stone arch, the building camouflages itself in greenery, and nature nudges right up to the pool’s fence.

The restored waterways and landscape around the recreation center. Justin Davidson.

The restored waterways and landscape around the recreation center. Justin Davidson.

The Davis Center will have to keep humming year-round, absorbing the shocks of hockey teams and inexpert skaters, the flow of water-craving kids in summer, and a steady stream of picnickers, sunbathers, concerts, and yoga enthusiasts in the shoulder months. Each of those constituencies has its own rhythms and desires; each puts a different kind of pressure on a building that must withstand it all calmly, efficiently, ceaselessly. Ultimately, the architecture will be judged by how people use it and how well it holds up — whether it still looks sharp in six months or six years. In the meantime, crowds braved erratic weather for a festive opening weekend, and even early on a Monday morning, neighbors had already begun to converge, attracted by the new sod, tender trees, and open plaza that makes this 165-year-old wedge of nature look fresh and young again.

The view from above.
Photo: EarthCam