Maybe they do need the ice around for these injuries.
Ambulances have been summoned to Central Park’s famed Wollman Rink and the nearby area at least 11 times in the 10 weeks since it opened on June 16 as a seasonal roller-skating venue. Seven people were rushed to the hospital, according to the FDNY.
By contrast, the FDNY logged seven ambulance calls from the Rockefeller Center plaza where the skating rink switched to roller-skating in mid-April.
The FDNY could not immediately say whether every call at the locations involved skaters.
The Wollman Rink’s “DiscOasis” skating sessions with guitarist Nile Rodgers, founder of the group Chic as the “groovemaster,” have attracted hundreds of skaters including Madonna. Tickets go as high as $99 with skate rentals.
Monica Polanco, 44, a social worker from the Bronx, said she got a discount ticket offer that sounded “enticing” and went skating with a friend on Aug. 5.
A novice, she said she asked for a training device, but was told they were just for kids. Polanco was hugging the rink’s railing, but had to let go to skirt an injured skater who had fallen and was being carted away in a wheelchair.
“Somehow I just found myself falling and tried to break my fall with my hand and wound up breaking my elbow,” she said.
Polanco, as well as the other injured skater, were each taken by ambulance to New York- Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Polanco needed emergency surgery and is out of work for six weeks.
“I think they need to do a better job of protecting people. I never imagined I’d be undergoing major surgery because of some roller skates,” she said.
Wollman Rink Partners, which operates the venue after former Mayor de Blasio’s Administration booted the Trump Organization, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Discussion about this post