Above: plans of almost every public pool, at their true orientation and relative scale to one another, organized chronologically. Below: private pools that are part of multiunit residential buildings, also organized chronologically. Each address is a building with a pool. The list does not include backyard pools and most club pools.
The last new outdoor public pool, the Floating Pool Lady, was built, or rather docked, at Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2006. Built on a barge, in 2008 it moved up to Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, where it remains today. “My pitch,” Jonathan Kirchenfeld, the architect of that pool, told us, “was that the pool was only part of what we were creating. What we really were creating was a public space. If you look at the actual pool, it only takes up a third of the barge. I think that was an indication of our priorities: to create a gathering place, a mixer.”
That commitment to pools as a place for civic mixing used to be held by communities across the country. As Heather McGhee describes in her book, The Sum of Us (2021), in the early twentieth century, public pools were the in thing. Towns saw pools not merely as an excellent way to cool down, but as focal points for civic pride and even as foundries for civil society. McGhee quotes a county recreation director in Pennsylvania: “Let’s build bigger, better and finer pools. That’s real democracy. Take away the sham and hypocrisy of clothes, don a swimsuit, and we’re all the same.”1
From 1908 to 1959, New York City built twenty-two public pools, among them some of the largest in the world. Construction peaked in the 1930s, when Robert Moses, then the Parks Commissioner, used funds from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to build eleven gigantic aquatics centers, each capable of holding thousands of swimmers. In 1936, dubbed in a profile of Moses by Fortune “the swimming pool year,” a new WPA pool opened every week, with celebrations attended by tens of thousands.2 These pools reflected the sort of scale possible when the client is the city, supported by the federal government—for example, the McCarren Park pool was 330 by 165 feet, and could hold up to 6,800 swimmers. They were also equipped with the latest in chlorination and pumping technology. As Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker, Moses held openings in the early evening, to maximize the dramatic effect when the underwater electric lights switched on.3
Rendering of what is likely Manhattan’s first rooftop pool, from an advertising brochure for Grancie Towers, 180 East End Avenue, built in 1960. Public Domain.
McGhee argues that nationally, this enthusiasm came to an end when the term “public” grew to include everyone. Across the country, whether by law or by custom, public pools were highly segregated. As McGhee explains, BIPOC American children were forced to escape the summer heat by swimming in dangerous rivers. While public pools were only officially desegretaed by Title III of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, repeated drownings propelled a series of legal cases in the 1950s that compelled communities to desegregate their pools. Many communities almost immediately began to close or sell their public pools rather than mix races. In Montgomery, Alabama, the City Council reacted to desegregation by choosing to close not just their cherished Oak Park pool, but the entire parks department. At the Fairground Park Pool in St. Louis, one of the largest pools in the world, violent rioting accompanied the first day of desegregated swimming on June 21, 1949.4 Plummeting attendance led to its closure six years later. In 1971, the Supreme Court condoned the closures when, in Palmer v. Thompson, it ruled that the closure of pools in Jackson, Mississippi, harmed everyone equally. Justice Hugo Black wrote, “There was no evidence of state action affecting Negroes differently from white.”
As communities closed their public pools, there was a rush to build new backyard pools and private pool clubs across the nation. At first, with the administration of Mayor John Lindsay (1959–1965), New York City bucked the trend towards racially motivated pool closures. From 1960 to 1972, the city built fifty-two more public pools, an even larger number than Moses, in part because many of them were mini- or even mobile pools, strategically deployed to vacant lots. At the same time, however, private pool construction took off. Using real estate listings, primarily Streeteasy (and the occasional phone call with a cagey property manager), we managed to assemble a list of nearly every residential tower with a pool, cross-indexed by construction date (or, for converted projects like the Woolworth Building, renovation date).
While there were nine residential buildings with private pools built in the city the 1930s, construction really got going in the 1960s: From 1960 to 1972, developers built a whopping sixty-six. Unlike Mayor Lindsay’s efforts, this boom would be sustained. From 1973 to 2021, developers completed another 366 buildings with private pools. Using ArcGIS, we created a map of 14,420 surface pools in New York—mostly backyard pools (mostly in Staten Island, which comes in with 9,994). These are not indexed by date, but they are in neighborhoods that are predominantly white and developed after desegregation, such as Mill Basin in Brooklyn (73 percent white, 1950s–70s),5 and Tottenville in Staten Island (84 percent white, 1950s–90s).6
Was the boom in private pool construction racially motivated? Possibly not: People used to go to public baths for their everyday hygiene needs, but then plumbing happened, and now we go to our private showers. We used to go to public theaters, and now we stream Netflix on our laptops. Pools could be just one more front of the domestic’s conquest of the public. That said, when we looked up the first pools in the Avery Library’s collection of real estate brochures, race did appear to play a role. In the advertisement for one of the first private rooftop pools, Gracie Towers on 180 East End Avenue, there was no “whites-only” sign, but the ad prominently features an idyllic rendering of a pool filled entirely with white people. In fact, every brochure we could find emphasized the privacy of the pool (often behind a fence) and the swimmers are predominantly—if not entirely (the rendering technique sometimes leaves some ambiguity)—white.
Poolside rendering from an advertising brochure for the Morad, 500 East 83rd Street, built in 1966. Public Domain
The thesis of McGhee’s book is that racism is bad for everyone, especially when it leads to defunding public goods, and pools are no exception. Of private pools, “the big disadvantage,” said Kirschenfeld, “is they are small, and you only meet people you know.” Often without lifeguards, they are also dangerous. According to the Center for Disease Control, drowning is the leading cause of death for children aged one to four in the United States; most of that drowning happens in swimming pools, and most of those swimming pools are private pools.7 They are also simply not as nice. Even the poshest pool in the poshest tower cannot compete with the vast sunlit expanse at McCarren Park.
While it allowed a few to fall into disrepair and close, to its credit, New York never shut down its public pools out of spite, and it has adopted a more proactive stance towards new pools in recent years. After McCarren Park Pool closed in 1983, the Bloomberg administration found $50 million for a renovation, reopening it in 2012. This year, the city is beginning a $150 million renovation of the Lasker Rink and Pool in Central Park. And just this May, the city granted a site to a second floating pool, the + POOL, designed by Dong-Ping Wong and Oana Stanescu.
Yet since the + POOL was first proposed in 2010, developers have completed another 184 towers with private pools. While not built with public money per se, private development reflects public policy, infrastructure, and zoning decisions. Therefore, as we debate new investments in public pools and weigh their costs, perhaps it is time to look at our city’s ongoing investment in private pools, and better weigh that cost.