The ice rink looked like a toilet bowl with a tank on the back, so ugly that the stewards of Central Park built an island of sediment dredged from the Harlem Meer, a man-made lake, to try to hide it from joggers and cyclists speeding past.
But now, $160 million and three years of construction later, Lasker Rink and Pool, the park’s biggest eyesore, is poised to become one of its main attractions as part of the new, 11-acre Harlem Meer Center.
When it is unveiled early next year, the new center will represent the end of the largest, most expensive restoration project in Central Park’s recent history. It is also one of the most significant recent public projects aimed at serving New Yorkers in the largely low-income communities surrounding the northern end of the park.
“Oh man, it’s a long time coming,” said Yusef Salaam, a city councilman representing Harlem, of the renovations. Mr. Salaam is one of the five men who were exonerated of a 1989 rape of a jogger in the northern part of Central Park. When he was a child, he learned how to swim in the old Lasker Pool — wearing sneakers, because its floor was littered with shards of broken glass.
After Mr. Salaam’s conviction was overturned and he started venturing back to the park, he and his family would enjoy days out at its southern end.
“That’s where the services, beauty and investment were,” he said. “Now, we have the opportunity to come back uptown and say we have that in our backyard.”
Since the start of coronavirus pandemic, New York has seen the opening of several public spaces, including the $500 million Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan and a $260 million park called Little Island nearby, along the West Side Highway. Both projects are in some of the city’s wealthiest ZIP codes, and were embraced by some of its most prominent donors.
The Harlem Meer Center is also a testament to the power of philanthropy, a competitive sport for some wealthy New Yorkers. But in this case, millions of dollars were aimed at creating a space that would be used by the largely Black and Latino communities nearby.
It was never a secret to the Central Park Conservancy — a philanthropic juggernaut with a $407 million endowment and a mission to preserve the park — that the area around the lake needed to be fixed up. The northern part of the park had developed a reputation for disrepair that had been hard to shake.
The conservancy has spent about $1.5 billion on restoring the park since it was created at the park’s nadir in 1980. With the help of gifts from prominent donors, many of them financiers, the conservancy has restored the Conservatory Garden, the Belvedere Castle and the North Meadow.
About $310 million, less than a quarter of the conservancy’s total funding over the last 45 years, has gone to projects on the north end, including the Conservatory Garden, the North Woods and the North Meadow. But Lasker would need the most work.
Its retro blue paint was peeling, and the rink would sometimes flood because of engineering flaws that have dogged it since it was built in the 1960s. Lasker also sat empty for months each year when it was too cold to swim or too warm to skate.
The new center will include an ice rink in the winter; a larger-than-Olympic-size swimming pool in the summer, with turf for the shoulder seasons; and a 34,000-square-foot building made of stone brought down from the Adirondack Mountains, hugged by a freshly paved boardwalk.
The first glimmer of the idea to renovate the area around the Harlem Meer began at City Hall a few years ago. Alicia Glen, a top official under the mayor at the time, Bill de Blasio, approached the conservancy and offered to contribute city money to help upgrade the rink, which had long been in need of repair.
The conservancy ran the numbers and found that it would need to quickly raise $100 million to transform Lasker. The city would end up contributing another $60 million, which was then folded into the city’s capital budget before Eric Adams took over as mayor in 2022.
A group of well-pedigreed uptown donors who put the private funding together will now have most of their names affixed to the new parts of the Meer. Such naming privileges are the holy grail of philanthropic giving in New York.
Thomas L. Kempner Jr., the chairman of the conservancy’s board and a co-founder of a prominent investment firm, and his wife contributed the first $25 million. The couple did not want “a vanity project,” Mr. Kempner said. “This is going to be used by hundreds of thousands of economically less-advantaged folks.” The boardwalk around the new center will be named for the Kempners.
Mr. Kempner then called Andrew Davis, another well-known financier and a fellow graduate of St. Bernard’s, an all-boys private school that sits at the eastern end of Central Park, to gauge his interest.
Deciding to invest $40 million was a “very easy decision,” said Mr. Davis, who remembered playing sports at the north end of the park as a student. “It’s about giving back to a place that has allowed us to have success,” he added. The new main building made of Adirondack stone will be called the Davis Center.
A little while later, Mr. Kempner was having dinner with Russell L. Carson, a venture capitalist who has contributed to a number of local causes. The topic of the Meer Center came up. By the end of dinner, Mr. Carson had asked Mr. Kempner to send over any documents he would have to sign to contribute $10 million through the Carson Family Charitable Trust, without receiving naming rights in return.
Ruth L. Gottesman, the widow of a prominent financier, came up with the rest of the money, and the new pool and rink will now be named after the couple. Ms. Gottesman recently donated $1 billion to provide free tuition for all students at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
The fund-raising sprint showed how quickly things can move when there is enough private money involved.
But the city’s investment is crucial, said Elizabeth W. Smith, the conservancy’s president. “Generous donors want to leverage the city’s investment, not replace it, and that’s a big difference,” she said, adding that it was rare to name parts of the park after donors.
The Meer Center, she said, was a worthy exception.
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