As we slowly but inevitably admit to ourselves that summer is coming to an end, we should at least have something to look forward to in the Tundra that will follow. Come mid-December, both McCarren Park and Prospect Park will open ice-skating rinks for our leisure and severe butt bruises. McCarren’s pool deck area has been more or less greenlit as an ice skating rink (take this with a grain of salt, as these projects tend to get pushed back), with a proposal now being “actualized.”
Down in Prospect Park though, the $74 million Lakeside Center, which will provide the replacement for Wollman Rink, is a definite go according to Parks Department spokespeople that spoke to the Brooklyn Paper. The new and much-delayed facility will cover 30,000 square feet and have both indoor and outdoor skating areas that can be connected or sealed off depending on the need – ice hockey tournaments, figure skating competitions, public skating, ICE dancing!, and more could all take place. Both the McCarren facility and Lakeside are set to open mid-December – pushed back from Thanksgiving – and run as far into January as there is demand. Since Brooklyn skaters just found out they have only two weeks to skate after being kept on ice for over a year as the project faced setbacks, certainly there will be demand for an extension, so stay tuned.