Skating exhibition glides into museum

“New York on Ice: Skating in the City,” an exhibition tracing the pastime from the 1800s to today, has just opened at the Museum of the City of New York.

In a case of clever timing, the Museum of the City of New York has just opened an exhibition exploring the history of one of the city’s most enduring winter pastimes.

“New York on Ice: Skating in the City” takes visitors on a trip through skating history, from the 1800s through today.

Here’s a brief introduction to the show, as provided by the advance materials:

“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 in the 20th century and beyond. 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.”

The show features a wealth of materials including 

vintage photographs, posters, lithographs, paintings and costumes.

As described, “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.”

The exhibition will continue through April 15 at the museum, 1220 Fifth Ave. (at 103rd Street) in Manhattan.

For more, visit mcny.org.

– Mary Shustack

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