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…