Everybody at a skating rink smiles.
Ever notice this? The teenagers in hockey skates racing from one side to the next. The moms gently guiding their I-don’t-know-about-this children along the ice. The couples (there are always couples) holding hands out of affection and a desire to stay vertical.
Skaters determined to stay on their feet were grinning and laughing recently on a new patch of ice in New York City. Glide, a pop-up skating rink at Brooklyn Bridge Park, brings a different vibe to the New York skating scene. While its older and more experienced cousin, the Rink at Rockefeller Center, is the bona fide see-and-be-seen destination in the city, Glide is across the river. In a park. It’s quieter. Quirkier.
Glide debuted in December and will stay open until March 1.
It is directly under the bridge, making you feel like you can almost touch the slate-blue bricks of the bridge’s Brooklyn tower. The ferries and barges on the East River bustle by. And when it gets dark, Manhattan turns on its lights, seemingly just for you.
If ever there was a place with Instagram written all over it, this is it.
Or TikTok. That’s how Dorian Herrera and Fernanda Fernandez of the Bronx, both 17, found out about the picturesque spot. They spent about an hour on the ice, holding onto each other and giggling under the lights.
“It was a lot of fun,” Ms. Fernandez said. “I feel like I was going fast.”
However stunning the $400 million campus is now, this section of Brooklyn was anything but in its pre-park days. In 1984, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ended its cargo operations at the Brooklyn piers and planned to sell the land for commercial development. By then, the place was abandoned and assumed to be visited only by ne’er-do-wells, a reputation earned in the 1970s and ’80s.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
