New York cool

A stunning new pool in Central Park helps heal old wounds

- MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

For more than 150 years, 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 labour of decades, its maintenance an endless task. But the US$160 million (5.4 billion baht) Davis Center, opened to the public on 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 as if 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 urbanise.