Marty Markowitz Owns The Crowd

On a much warmer Tuesday morning, Mayor Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz addressed a crowd at Prospect Park regarding the soon to be constructed Lakeside Recreation Center in the park. Replacing the 46 year old Wollman rink, this center would return the landscape to what it looked like when the park was created and add an additional ice skating rink. It is always nice to hear when one of our parks are restored and renovated, but this event turned out to be more about Markowitz than anyone else.

From The Empire Zone:

“Marty, have you spent a lot of time on the rink here?” Mr. Bloomberg asked, deadpan.

Seemingly impromptu, Mr. Markowitz replied, “In my day, if I had attempted a double lutz, they would have called me a triple yutz.”

“No, klutz,” Mr. Bloomberg joked.

“Klutz, yutz, it’s all the same,” Mr. Markowitz replied. “Now, after all that Junior’s cheesecake, I don’t think this is the kind of figure they’re talking about. I have more in common with Zamboni. And I want to issue a challenge today: when the Lakeside Center is complete, I will race the mayor in a new pedal boat for the right to call Brooklyn a city again.”

The potential 2009 mayoral candidate got a few chuckles from the remarks that stole the show from Bloomberg, but the finale really got the crowd going:

Let me tell you, it doesn’t get any more Brooklyn than Wollman Rink. Nowhere in the world, not even at the Olympics, will you find the diversity of skaters, figure-eighters and Icecapaders on display here. From African-American and Caribbean to Russian and Haitian, from Polish to Pakistani, from hipster to Hasidim, this rink, I might add, has always been, and will remain, one of the city’s most popular dating spots. Bet you a lot of you don’t know that. In fact, so many couples have fallen in love skating at Wollman Rink that having two rinks and being open year-round might just signal a population boom down the road. But hey, the more Brooklynites, to me, the merrier, and I know you feel that way, too. And I’m confident that for Prospect Park and for Brooklyn, double the ice will be twice as nice.

Marty certainly knows Brooklyn well and how to get the locals rolling in laughter. It will be interesting to see how the competition in 2009 shapes up and how Marty will take his place in that race. If anything, he seems to be able to run circles around the opposition, easily besting Bloomberg at this community event.