A Stunning New Pool in Central Park Helps Heal Old Wounds

For more than a century and a half, Central Park has been a leafy barometer of New York’s shifting fortunes. Projecting the city’s vast ambitions and ideals in the 19th century, it morphed into a Hooverville during the Depression, becoming a beehive of ball fields and “Be-Ins” during the 1960s.

A decade later it was a lawless dust bowl, the poster child for urban decline. “An unattended Frankenstein,” one city parks commissioner called it.

Restoring Central Park’s glory has been a labor of decades, its maintenance an endless task. But the $160 million Davis Center, opening to the public Saturday, is a culmination of sorts.

It’s a spectacular new swimming pool, skating rink and pavilion on six remade acres at the Harlem end of the park — the most dramatic change in years to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s pastoral masterpiece of the 1850s.

This northern stretch of the park was shamefully neglected when the city was at its nadir and it became the site of a brutal attack that led to one of the more horrendous miscarriages of racial justice in New York’s history.

So Davis also comes as an act of civic reparation.

Originally, Olmsted and Vaux imagined this area as a rustic retreat. A lake called the Harlem Meer was constructed at the northeast corner of the park. Water percolated to the lake from a ravine in the North Woods along a forested watercourse called the Loch, through a massive stone arch called Huddlestone that was held up by the weight of its own immense boulders.

In photographs from the turn of the last century the lake looks like it’s in the Adirondacks. But as the city densified around the park’s edges, public pressure increased to make the park serve more uses. By the 1930s, the Meer had begun to urbanize.

This was the age of Robert Moses, New York’s omnipotent planning czar, who believed that parks were for recreation. He added a boathouse to the Meer and hardened its shoreline. Playgrounds arrived. By the 1950s, much of the landscape had turned to concrete. A steel fence girdled the lake.

Then in the mid-1960s a hulking pool and pool house called Lasker arrived — an engineering novelty at the time because it was one of the rare pools that could convert to a skating rink in winter. Lasker, architecturally, was like a giant bath plug. It choked off the Loch where it emptied into the lake, forcing the waterway into a culvert, despoiling much of what remained of the area’s bucolic character.

This was when the city’s fiscal crisis devastated the northern park. Playgrounds crumbled. The lake silted and filled with debris. The boathouse was ravaged by arson. Millions of New Yorkers still depended on Lasker. It was a lifesaver especially for Harlem residents during sweltering summers and remained so for decades, until it closed just before the pandemic. My sons swam there when they were little.

But crowds approximated an N train at rush hour on hot days. The pool leaked. Yusef Salaam, the local City Council representative, who grew up across 110th Street from the Meer, told me the other day that he learned the hard way as a child to wear sneakers when he swam at Lasker so he wouldn’t cut his feet on broken glass at the bottom of the pool.

During the 1980s, the city sold concessions for its skating rinks in Central Park to the Trump Organization, and Lasker’s rink gradually became less and less a place for community skating and ice hockey clinics, more of a rental and fee-based facility. Then one April night in 1989, a Black woman was raped and thrown off a roof in Brooklyn and a white woman jogging on a path near the Meer was raped, brutally beaten and left for dead.

New York tabloids noted the incident in Brooklyn. But the Central Park Jogger, as she was referred to at the time, made national headlines, and the Harlem end of the park became synonymous with the city’s skyrocketing violence and racial turmoil. Five Black and Latino teenagers, whom the tabloids labeled the Central Park Five, were arrested, wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for the attack on the jogger. Salaam was among them.

“The north end of Central Park for me and for a lot of individuals before 1989 felt like our backyard,” he said. “But after that, the racism surrounding the park made it a place brown boys could see but not touch. It became an exclusive space.”

Davis, the new swimming pool, is the capstone of efforts to heal some of these wounds and rectify mistakes in the redesign of the park. For decades, the Central Park Conservancy, a private nonprofit founded in 1980, has led those efforts. The Meer has been dredged, the lake’s shoreline softened, fish returned to its waters, new playgrounds built that blend into the rejuvenated landscape.

And in 2022, an entrance to the park at the Meer was renamed the Gate of the Exonerated.

Replacing Lasker, the final step, has been by far the most complex project yet, overseen by the conservancy’s former chief landscape architect, Christopher Nolan, in collaboration with two New York architecture firms, Mitchell Giurgola and Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture & Design.

Community meetings were held to make sure Davis answered the desires of residents who used the pool and rink. Some residents were skeptical about losing even a decrepit neighborhood asset, and worried about a conservancy still associated with the wealthy, whiter end of the park.

Construction began during the pandemic. The conservancy raised $100 million in private contributions toward the total cost. The city covered the rest.

Davis came in on budget. Corners weren’t cut. How often can you say that about a major public infrastructure project? Public-private partnerships are not always successful. The results in this case speak for themselves.

The change is stunning.

That said, the northern park is not once again the rustic retreat Olmsted and Vaux envisioned in the middle of the 19th century. Times change. But Davis does goes a long way toward repairing the landscape that Lasker altered.

Water again flows along a resurfaced stream through Huddlestone Arch around the western edge of the pool and into the Meer. A walking path, which in Lasker’s day dead-ended into an asphalt parking lot, follows the new watercourse. It connects to a new bridge and boardwalk that snakes like a ribbon floating over the lake’s southern edge.

Davis’s pavilion is the project’s centerpiece, a simple, soaring, dignified space facing the pool through giant glass doors that swivel onto the pool’s deck, creating an open-air room with vistas over the lake.

There are distant echoes of Bethesda Terrace, the plaza overlooking the lake and Ramble in the middle of the park. pavilion walls are made of rough, stacked, gray Corinthian granite slabs alternating with green Edith Heath tiles. They rise toward slender steel trusses and a C-shaped skylight, which brings a parabola of sun through the pavilion’s green roof that bounces off the stone.

Lasker glowered like a fortress, dominating the panorama. The pavilion tucks into the brow of a rebuilt hill so it’s nearly invisible from many places in the park.

You can now meander from the Meer up the hill and find yourself, in what will be the shade of Douglas firs, on a lawn, which is the pavilion’s sod roof, suddenly gazing down on the oval pool. It is large enough for 1,000 swimmers, conservancy officials promise.

In winter, the pool will turn into a skating rink. Lasker was shuttered half the year, when the rink closed. During shoulder months, Davis converts into an artificial turf field, so it returns the site to year-round use.

Deborah Wright is a former head of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone and has lived near the Meer for decades, watching the park and neighborhood evolve. “Sometimes it takes a while to make change,” she told me, “but it has come.” Davis is “magnificent, the scale of it,” she said.

Salaam, also an optimist, believes it may help “usher a different mind-set into the community.”

“Often people see new things coming into a neighborhood as gentrification, as exclusionary,” he said. “In this case we should receive the goodness, because when you give yourself the opportunity to participate in something good, you give yourself permission to live a full life — to find a way forward.”