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.
The Davis Center, under construction, with the pavilion tucked underneath the hill to the left and the pool covered by artificial turf for the spring season.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times
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.