My Summer At The Pool
During the hottest summer ever, I went for a swim at New York City's public pools
It’s the end of a sweltering July afternoon, a day that already feels lost to the composite memory of the summer. I shut my laptop to sever the virtual umbilical with work, sling my bag over my shoulder, carry my bike downstairs, and pedal off on my usual journey to the pool. As I cross the intersection of Bergen Street and Fifth Avenue, I think for one insane second of taking the left and pivoting to Sunset Park, before remembering the steep climb at the end and, already feeling the sweat through my shirt, press on for Red Hook. I lock my bike to a fence in view of the IKEA and an Amazon fulfillment center, fish out my padlock to show the Parks employee at the check-in table who sleepily waves me through with an “enjoy yourself.”
In the locker room, which doubles as the weight room at the Red Hook Recreation Center, I stuff my phone, wallet, bag, shoes, and shirt in a small locker and carry only my towel and keys with me to the shower. After the mandatory rinse, I unfurl the towel for another Parks employee stationed just outside the locker room to prove I’m not harboring anything illicit. He nods me onto the deck, and I’m blinking in the sun as I pass two police officers glued to their phones and get my first good look at the pool. It’s just before 6 o’clock, an hour until closing time, and the place is mostly empty. About two dozen stragglers either swimming or dozing in the evening light. I go the long way round to the north side of the pool which has been baking in the sun all afternoon. I flap my towel over a decrepit lounger and over the fence I can make out the sinister new Brooklyn Tower, over a mile away, poking through a gap in the Red Hook Houses. I turn to the edge of the deck, look down into the lapping chlorination, take a breath and brace for the chilly embrace of the water to strip away everything I need it to.
This was my third summer spending time at New York City public pools. Fifty three of them dot the five boroughs, ranging in size from Olympic to barely bigger than that of a hotel. Five pools are closed for Summer 2023, including the iconic Astoria Pool in Queens (news to me when I biked there with plans to swim on my 28th birthday) and the Tompkins Square Park Pool (yes, it exists and yes, probably for the best.) Most of the city’s outdoor pools were developed and built in the 1930s under a Parks Department led by Robert Moses (yep), and were made possible through the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal-era federal agency which put millions of people to work in building public projects. Eleven pools opened over the hot summer of 1936 and were heralded as both state-of-the-art architectural marvels and the cutting edge in public recreation.
Both Red Hook and Astoria were part of this original group, as was the Hamilton Fish pool in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which remains one of the most beautiful places on the island for my money. The McCarren Park Pool, the first I ever visited, opened July 31, 1936 and was designed to fit 6,800 people at a time. Due to the current ongoing lifeguard shortage, only about half the pool stays open during operating hours today. The Sunset Pool, an absolute gem tucked into the neighborhood’s hilltop park, apparently features an underwater lighting system. Whether it’s still in working condition is irrelevant as the pools are never open after dark.
The public pools are totems of the history of a city trying to provide for its citizens. But it’s a complicated story, naturally. Just as Robert Moses is credited with the creation of such a vital public recreation resource, he was also responsible for the racist destruction and disinvestment of many of the city’s predominantly Black, Puerto Rican, and Asian neighborhoods. One might not think about public recreation as the battleground for a city’s politics but the fact remains true today. The public pools are relics in use - each one showing the distinctive disregard and disrepair resulting from decades-long disinvestment in anything “public”, particularly parks and recreation. In the proposed budget for FY2024, Mayor Eric Adams had initially committed to 1% of the city’s budget (equal to ~$1 billion) being allocated to its Parks Department. The budget that passed met only about half that goal. This was better than some expected, but an infuriating shortfall especially held up against the $11 billion total expense of the city’s police department, officers of which are somehow allowed to have their phones on the pool deck while swimmers are not.
Despite the crisis around them, the pools are an invaluable asset for the city. I started swimming at McCarren in the false start return-to-normal summer of 2021, when the cooling calm brought on by a few minutes floating on my back in the water was a necessary tether. It felt like such a gift: a place to exist, to relax, with my phone locked in a box. Half-naked alongside my fellow New Yorkers; nothing to buy, no one to impress, nothing to do except wait for the sun to dry me off. Summer 2023 was the hottest ever recorded, throwing the value of the pool into stark definition. There’s been quite a bit of writing in the past few months arguing for the necessity of public pools in America, and the fact that the country doesn’t seem interested in building any more.
It’s argued that the utility of public pools is multi-dimensional: apart from the obvious recreation benefit, pools are a public health component, a social cohesion instrument, and a way of rectifying a history of segregation in public spaces. This final point is no simple task, and there is a risk of papering over the recent past. When public pool segregation became unlawful in the 1950s, Black swimmers were met with intimidation, harassment, and brutalization across the country. In her book, Race, Riots, and Rollercoasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America, this historian Victoria W. Wolcott recounts horrific stories from the period including nails being thrown into the bottom of a public pool in Cincinnati, and bleach and acid being poured into a public pool with Black swimmers in St. Augustine, Florida. The systematic restriction of access to free public swimming has resulted in a decisive disparity: Black children are six times more likely to drown in a swimming pool than white children.
An exhibit at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Waterworks (a former public pool on the Schuykill River), entitled POOL: A Social History of Segregation, sought not only to illustrate this past but also amplify the voices of Black swimming champions and activists in aquatics, who have worked for decades to create more equity in American swimming, which as argued by Angela Beale-Tawfeeq (Research Director of Diversity in Aquatics) begins with giving all children a safe and welcoming place to learn how to swim.
As the summer was drawing to a close and I looked for every opportunity to go take a dip, I started asking myself why I like the pools so much. I almost exclusively go alone, usually don’t stay very long, and often spend just a few minutes in the water. When friends ask me about the pool, I joke that the Parks department has done everything in its power to take the fun out of the experience, what with the rules and the absence of music, floaties, or refreshments. But the sparseness is what I’ve come to appreciate: as a swimmer you are forced to remove yourself from distraction, but you’re rewarded with respite. The pool can feel at times a bit chaotic: they are public, and the public uses them. Teenagers, pregnant mothers, elders, Europeans, even the occasional tattooed twenty-something. What I love most about the pools is that they’re free: you walk in, you swim, you walk out. The rare non-commercial space in New York, where it often feels like it costs $20 just to leave your apartment.
In his recent column for New York Review of Architecture, the comic writer Eric Schwartau pinpoints another reason I’m drawn to the pool, that “there’s something exhilarating and alluring about bathing with strangers, about relinquishing control over how you are perceived.” When I enter the pool, despite baring my pale shoulders and chest and legs, I feel comfortably invisible without disappearing entirely. Under the surface of the water I crack my eyes open and remember the childlike wonder of trying to make out the murky shapes of other limbs. And when I leave with my hair still damp under my helmet, that cooling presence of the pool lingers all the way home, a shield against the unbearable heat of the city.
This month’s playlist comes from yours truly. It’s meant to capture the feeling of the last gasp of summer, as seen from the deck of the pool: