My friend Mark posted a link on Facebook, yesterday, that there are plans afoot to turn Wollman Rink — a large ice-skating rink on the southern side of Central Park that was uncomfortably saddled with associations to bag-of-human-garbage Donald Trump — into something like the world’s biggest Pickleball Court. I don’t know if you’ve been following the great Pickleball Struggle, but evidently zealous Pickleballers are at war with a nation of Manhattan parents over coveted and rarefied playground space. The Picklejocks want it for Pickleball, the parents want it for their kids. Several public spaces have actively banned Pickleball, as a result, and the Picklejocks are up in arms. Personally speaking, my kids are out of the playground stage, so I don’t really have a horse in this race, but I’m siding with the parents on this one. The people I’ve met who are into Pickleball seem a bit too precious and, well, douchey about it, and it’s called fucking “Pickleball,” which is stupid and embarrassing, as far as I’m concerned, so they can fuck right off.
In any case, this development triggered a bunch of recollections.
For a start, when I was growing up, when it came to ice-skating, we didn’t really go to Wollman Rink, but rather Lasker Rink on the upper end of the Park. I’m not sure why, though. Maybe it was cheaper? In any case, it was demolished in 2021, so don’t go looking for it.
That all said, one of my very earliest memories of being out and about with my family (quite possibly with my father, although it’s all very fuzzy, this many years later) is of being in Central Park as a very small child and going to Wollman Rink where, from the upper deck, we watched what appeared to be the filming of a television commercial — one that involved several anthropomorphic, cone-shaped chocolates frolicking around haphazardly on the ice. I have no idea why we were there — were we just passing through? — but we stopped and watched this bizarre display. The image of those poor people dressed up like giant chocolates and bumping into each other remains vivid in my memory. It sounds very silly, yes, but remember this for later in the post.
Beyond its facility as an ice-skating rink, right in the magisterial shadow of what it now referred to as Billionaire’s Row, Wollman Rink also played host to the Schaefer Music Festival from 1967 to about 1976. This series had a dizzying array of acts over the course of its run, not least by big time rock luminaries like The Who, Jethro Tull, The Kinks, The Doors, Traffic, Blue Oyster Cult, Led Zeppelin and, as I wrote about way back here, King Crimson (to name a very small few). For whatever reason, Schaefer Beer pulled out in 1976, and the cause was taken up by Dr. Pepper, who, after a year or two of hosting middle-of-the-road stuff, started staging a more forward-thinking roster of bands including some of my favorites like Blondie, Joe Jackson, The Tubes, The Ramones, Talking Heads, The B-52s, The Cars, The Pretenders and DEVO.
I’m not sure why that all stopped, but it did. The concert series decamped Central Park for Pier 84. I caught a few shows there, but I’m sad to say I never saw any of the Wollman Rink shows.
The reasons for its closure, however, probably had something to do with — according to Wikipedia — the concrete beneath Wollman Rink buckling in 1980. This prompted an expensive and protracted period of renovation that found Trump stepping in with various promises, but evidently not before most of the actual work was already done, as I understand it, but — naturally — taking all the credit for it. Regardless of his contributions to the restoration of Wollman Rink, Trump’s ties to both Wollman and Lasker Rink were severed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021. So fuck you, Donald.
So, now….after all that, it’s gong to be a big Pickleball court. Again, I don’t really care, but hey …. if you’re a Pickleballer, get excited.
In any case, while writing all of this, I started searching for any verification of my distant memory of that commercial…..
…and found this….
Now, I have no way of actually knowing if this was from the same shoot my very young eyes witnessed, nor is there a wider shot of what could (or could not) be Wollman Rink, but sure enough…. here are those dancing, anthropomorphic chocolates or, more specifically, Rolos, as it turns out.
The one thing that makes me think this is the same one is at 00:18, when they suddenly cut to a beaming child brandishing a roll of Rolos … otherwise inexplicably depicted wearing a wool hat and scarf for winter weather … precisely the garb you’d wear to Wollman Rink.
Obviously, the dancing Rolos footage could very well have been captured on a soundstage, but … why would I remember it, then?
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