CPDSA

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June 2015 Newsletter

CPDSA 20th Anniversary Season

This year, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the CPDSA. Of course, skating in our general area of the park has been going on for more than a century. Ice skating on the Rowboat lake, is documented in photographs from the 1880s. We have photographs of skaters in the Park in the thirties and an antique Poster for a 1936 Halloween roller skate event on the Mall.

In the early 1980s the Parks Department asked a group of skaters – who gathered on the Bethesda Terrace road at 72nd street – to move to the Dead Road because they were blocking traffic. The skaters liked the new area and soon made it their own. Wayne and Erik painted two concentric circles on the ground just south of the path between Mineral Springs and the Bandshell. That area became known as “The Skate Circle”. Through the 80’s a succession of DJs brought increasingly powerful radios and car stereo systems, powered by car batteries, to play music for the skaters.

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