Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we will look at the transformation of the northernmost part of Central Park.
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Last month the $ 160 million DAVIS Center in the Harlem lake – a new swimming pool, skating rink and community shub on six re -made hectares on the north side of Central Park. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of Times, says it is an important change for the park, a barometer of the shifting fortunes of New York. I asked him to explain it.
You called this huge project an ‘act of civic recovery’. How so?
It is in Harlem, on the north side of the park, which was greatly expired in the later decades of the last century and crime was plagued. So Davis represents the final step in a long -term effort to restore dignity, beauty and order in that area.
And it is also an attempt to restore something from Frederick Law Olmsted and the original vision of Calvert Vaux, from the mid -19th century, which the Northern Park presented as a national retreat. Davis doesn’t quite do that. Times change. The park must now serve many goals.
But it finds a way to return part of the pastoral ambition of the original plan and also meet the needs of a population that depends on having a swimming pool and skating rink. It is a good example of how landscape architecture should adjust and reflect a changing city and society, which is why it is also connected to RAS and the history of Harlem. These are all inseparable problems if you talk about critical public spaces such as Central Park in a city like New York.
You look at 1989 as a crucial year. Why?
In mid -April of that year, on the same night that a black woman was raped and thrown from a roof in Brooklyn, a woman who was raped and brutally beaten near the more jogged. Five Black and Latino -Tieners were arrested, convicted and imprisoned for the crime that they do not commit.
The northern part of the park became synonymous with the racial unrest in the city. That year was a low point. Afterwards, attempts began to run that part of the park, to clean the more, to do playgrounds again and integrate with the original landscape.
The last step, now just completed, was to replace Lasker Pool, a colossal swimming pool that could convert into a skating rink in the winter, with Davis, not only a new swimming pool and a pavilion, but a relatives of different hectares is involved. The pavilion has stopped in a hill, so it feels much less like an urban burglary than Lasker, more than a part of nature.
You spoke with Yusef Salaam, one of the teenagers convicted in the 1989 attack. He is now a member of the city council and represents the district that includes the north side of the park. What did he say about how Davis differs from what used to be?
Salaam pointed out that change is often seen as a gentrifying – “exclusion” was the word he used. But he suggested that when something new and good like Davis comes by, people “have to receive goodness, because when you give yourself the chance 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 greater sense. It is an opportunity for people who use it and for all New Yorkers to see a way forward.
That is certainly not what Lasker was. Lasker was not maintained.
There were many things that brought the decline of the park, 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 almost abandoned by the city. As a result, it also became a center of crime.
It is easy to ruin things quickly. It takes centuries to repair them. This effort has lasted 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 apparently natural creation, although everything was built and designed in Central Park.
Many people don’t realize that now. They think that the park, or rural parts of it, just like the northern end, with its lake and forest, are the remains of untouched mannahatta, from precolonial days. But each of those streams and forests and meadows and lakes is made. It was part of a democratic vision of Olmsted and Vaux to make it naturalistic. Central Park was a retreat of the hardships of the urban grid. It was a place for everyone.
And they planned the northern end of the park to be rustic.
Right. They came up with it lake around the Harlem, which was connected to a Loch and a ravine that they built through the northern forests that they planted. All this was a order of nature that approached the adirondacks or a national piece of the Hudson valley.
But as the city grew, the pressure on the park increased to serve more people and purposes. And when Robert Moses became head of the park department in the 1930s, the push was in the direction of 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 limit. That end of the park was increasingly urbanized.
The highlight in the sixties was the building of the swimming pool of Lasker, a colossus in the ravine, which connects the Waterweg. It was very popular in the neighborhood because children could go there and cool or learn to skate in the winter. But Lasker was not well built. It leaked.
The result was that it was always a place that was repair, expired and poorly maintained. It was important for the community in Harlem, but not really worthy and forbidding, done cheaply, who sent a message about what the city thinks about the people who depend on it. Davis is an attempt to send an opposite message.
Can the city of Davis maintain?
Works of architecture are always subject to the whims of fate and politics. We will see the economic situation for the city in the coming years. Lasker was not built in the 1960s to anticipate the near-fanité of the 70s.
That said, it makes a difference when something is done well and people who use it feel respected and worthy through association with it. These places are usually more cared for. It is not a guarantee. But investing the type of money and care that went in Davis often translates into social pride and ownership.
That is an important message today when the city needs signs of progress and hope. And there is no more place centrally in the soul of New York than Central Park.
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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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The man behind the counter looked up at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
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