NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of the City of New York opened New York on Ice: Skating in the City, an exhibition that traces the history of one the city’s favorite winter pastimes since the 1800s. The exhibition invites visitors to explore how ice skating evolved in the city from its Colonial Dutch and British origins to become a 19th-century craze, and later an opportunity for elaborate spectacle, commercialized leisure, and competitive sport. From frozen ponds to Madison Square Garden, New York on Ice explores how ice skating has become a quintessentially New York pastime, woven into the city’s urban fabric in ways large and small.
“New York on Ice looks at a beloved form of public recreation, mass entertainment, and competitive sport,” said Whitney Donhauser, Ronay Menschel Director of the Museum of the City of New York. “It tells a unique New York story about how ice skating has thrived for more than 160 years and how ice skating has transformed the city’s physical landscape over time.”
Ice skating has long been an essential part of the New York urban experience. Whether outdoors in the city’s parks, below street level on Rockefeller Center’s sunken plaza, or at modern facilities like Chelsea Piers’ Sky Rink and City Pavilion in Queens, New Yorkers have found ample opportunities to glide across the ice. Since the 19th century, millions of people have skated on at least 110 rinks and ponds throughout the five boroughs. Indeed, New York has produced a higher number and a greater variety of ice skating sites than just about any other city in the world.
New York on Ice is presented in four sections through vintage photographs, skating equipment, lithographs, paintings, and costumes. Together they reveal the evolution of the sport and art of ice skating in the city both as a window into a passion and pastime of generations of New Yorkers and as an unexpected ingredient of urban place-making.
Key objects include: mid-19th century paintings and prints of New Yorkers skating in “the new” Central Park from the Museum of the City of New York’s own collection; ephemera and programs from 1930s and 1940s ice spectacles at Rockefeller Center and Madison Square Garden; the costume Sarah Hughes wore when she won the bronze medal at the 2001 World Figure Skating Championships at just 15 years old; and Johnny Weir’s celebrated “Swan” costume from his 2006 Olympic program. Visitors will also learn the story of Charlotte Oelschlagel, the German skating phenom who helped launch an ice performance craze after appearing in a lavish ice ballet in the stage show Hip-Hip-Hooray! at the New York Hippodrome in 1915.
“New York on Ice presents the story of skating in the city over the last 160 years as both a pastime enjoyed by generations of New Yorkers and as a highly specialized area of performances, professional athletics, and commercial spectacle,” said curator Frances Rosenfeld. “This exhibition provides a fascinating window into many different aspects of New York City life, including the history of popular culture and nightlife, the development of public parks, and the rise of Midtown Manhattan as an entertainment district. Skating is a seemingly innocuous topic that turns out to have great depths.”
Section 1: New Yorkers Take to the Ice
In December 1858, when the first section of Manhattan’s Central Park opened to the public, architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had designated the Lake near 72nd Street as a “skating pond” and ice skating quickly became one of the first mass uses of the new park. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers of all ages and classes arrived by carriages, trolley car, or on foot to skate on Central Park’s main lake and other landscaped ponds.
Over the next decade, ice skating spread to frozen ponds, lakes, and waterways across today’s five boroughs. While the majority of skaters were middle or upper class, skating at most city ponds was open to anyone with a pair of skates. It was also one of the few sports available to women; in an era of strictly defined gender roles, skating was deemed sufficiently modest for females.
Ice skating also captured the attention of the era’s artists, who depicted the fashionable pastime as a metaphor for urban democracy and social freedom. While Union and Confederate armies clashed in bloody battles in the Civil war, and the upheavals of industrialization and urbanization transformed life in their own city, New Yorkers on ice presented a vision of pleasantness – a peaceful and harmonious civic community at play.
Section 2: A City of Rinks
By the 1880s, skating’s popularity had spread and led to its commercialization in the city. Advances in refrigeration technology allowed skating to move partially or entirely indoors and extended the skating season.
In the ensuing decades, indoor rinks opened around the city. Rinks were built on rooftops, basements, theaters, nightclubs, restaurants, and in plazas between skyscrapers. Key anchors of the city’s skating scene were the St. Nicholas Rink on West 66th Street (1896), the Ice Palace on Lexington Avenue (1895), a succession of three rinks called “Iceland” in the West 50s (1916, 1922, 1925); the Brooklyn Ice Palace (1917); and, one of the most famous skating spots in the world, the rink at Rockefeller Center (1936). The advent of “ice shows,” where audiences paid to see skilled performers in elaborate revues, was a further boon to skating’s popularity and profitability.
Section 3: Skating for the People
During the 20th century, recreational skating remained a popular pastime for New Yorkers. As the city government embraced progressive-era ideas about improving the lives of its citizens, it increased its focus on skating as a form of a wholesome recreation that could easily fit into the urban fabric. This took programmatic form beginning in the 1920s when the Bureau of Recreation organized municipal “Winter Sports Carnivals,” which soon expanded into parks across the five boroughs.
The middle of the 20th century saw the construction of new locations for skating under the leadership of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. During his 36-year tenure (1929–65), Moses made improvements to existing rinks and lakes in city parks and partnered with philanthropists to build four additional year-round public skating venues: the Ice (and Roller) Rink in a former World’s Fair building in Queens (1941); Wollman Rink in Central Park (1949); Wollman Rink in Prospect Park (1961); and Central Park’s Lasker Rink (1966). In the 21st century, the city resumed the creation and refurbishing of rinks in partnership with private developers and philanthropists.
Section 4: New York Ice Champions
New Yorkers have competed on ice for almost as long as there has been ice skating in the city. Local figure-and speed-skating contests were organized as early as the 1860s. In 1889, New Yorkers adopted the newly popular game of ice hockey and 19th-century New York star Jackson Haines brought his balletic style of skating to European competitions, where his success earned him the moniker “father of modern figure skating.”
In the 1920s, New York City, with its concentration of sports press and media outlets, a wealth of training facilities and talent, and a population with an appetite for sporting entertainment, became a world center for competitive ice sports. The third Madison Square Garden opened in 1925, attracting ice hockey matches, speed skating races, figure skating competitions and hundreds of thousands of tickets holders in the first year alone. This pattern continued for decades.
Over this time, natives from the five boroughs were celebrated as some of the most famous skating legends including, Brooklyn’s Sonya Klopfer, whose immigrant parents named her for skater Sonja Henie; 1960 Olympic gold medalist Carol Heiss from Ozone Park Queens; and Bronx-born, Olympic gold medal speed skater Irving Warren Jaffee. Today, competitive skaters continue to be trained and sponsored by New York’s long-established clubs and leagues with newer organizations that aim to make ice sports more diverse and accessible. Some of these include Figure Skating in Harlem, Ice Hockey in Harlem, and the all-girl hockey team Central Park Lady Hawks.
