Nature, Nurtured

Central Park's northern side gets an alluring upgrade.

- JUSTIN DAVIDSON

IN THE 1960S, a concrete rink-and-pool combo got plunked into the northeast 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's 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. Heavyduty 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 giving 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 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 with a boardwalk that skirts the Meer. The stream once again flows along a bed between strategically positioned boulders. The center returns more parkland to the park. And the jewel sitting on a verdant cushion is a 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.