Our 20th Season?
The CPDSA began it’s 20th season this year, which should be cause for celebration among the skaters who practice their art at the Skate Circle. We have survived, thrived, and continued a long tradition of skating in Central Park. Skaters have inhabited this corner of the Park in many guises for more than a century. A photographs of Ice Skaters on the rowboat lake just two hundred yards north of us was taken in the 1880s. In it New Yorkers of all kinds, dressed in Victorian garb, glide on the thick solid ice; frozen in time. The newly completed Dakota Apartment building stands alone in the background.
We have a scan of an antique poster advertising a Halloween Skating event on the Mall in 1935. An elderly woman used to stop at the Circle and tell us about roller skating in the park in the late 30s. She had photos and once brought a newspaper article about her and a group of girlfriends skating to work in the 40s. JD Salinger mentions the roller skaters near the Bandshell in his novel “Catcher In The Rye” which was published in 1951.
Click here to read more of the June 2014 Newsletter