The Many Lives of McCarren Park Pool

On July 31, 1936, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia appeared before a crowd of more than 5,000 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint to open the community’s grand new pool. The McCarren Park Pool was one of 11 outdoor public pools that would open that year, paid for with WPA funds and orchestrated by then-commissioner of the New York Parks Department, Robert Moses—the infamous public official now known for his massive midcentury renewal and development projects, both the successful (the Triborough Bridge) and the stymied (a proposed expressway through downtown Manhattan that would’ve steamrollered SoHo).

The McCarren Pool was designed by the architect Aymar Embury II, responsible for many iconic New York structures in his own right, including the Central Park Zoo and the Prospect Park Bandshell. Visitors to the pool were welcomed by a grand archway and bodies of water adding up to three times the size of an Olympic pool, capable of holding up to 6,800 people and boasting 54,450 square feet for swimming, with semicircular diving and wading pools at either end. A network of underground pipes heated all three pools and kept the water sanitary.

For decades after the pools opened, they served as important recreation centers for the neighborhoods they served, including East Harlem and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, Red Hook, and Brownsville, among others. They were a respite for working-class New Yorkers who could not afford a vacation. During the colder months, drained pools operated as roller-skating rinks, as well as courts for basketball, handball, volleyball, and table tennis. In the summer, there were swimming contests, water ballets, and diving exhibitions. The pools were sometimes even preferable to the city’s beaches. A July 2, 1976 article from the New York Times about municipal pools reflected the shifting attitudes toward communal swimming: while the pools “lack the ambience of their suburban country club cousins,” the article asserted, they were preferable to the ocean, because they did not “contain sludge, sewage, or oil spills.”

Though WPA-era pools were intended to democratize public space, they weren’t always peaceful. “Throughout their history, municipal pools served as stages for social conflict,” wrote historian Jeff Wiltse in his 2007 book Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. “Latent social tensions often erupted into violence at swimming pools because they were community meeting places, where Americans came into intimate and prolonged contact with one another.” In the mid-20th century, pools were desegregated throughout the North, “but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming,” writes Wiltse; whites would simply stop frequenting pools where blacks were allowed to swim.

Blacks and whites did swim together at McCarren Pool in the 1930s, although there were sometimes violent confrontations. (In 1930, black Brooklynites only made up about 3 percent of the borough’s population.) Race relations were fraught at WPA-sponsored pools across New York City. In fact, one interviewee told historian Marta Gutman that he remembered African Americans swimming only in the afternoons at Betsy Head Park in Brownsville, as a kind of unspoken rule. Meanwhile, at Thomas Jefferson Pool in East Harlem, there were fights between Italian and Puerto Rican swimmers, as the pool was located in an area claimed by Italian immigrants.

By the 1970s, McCarren Pool had fallen into disrepair. It was closed for renovations at the end of 1984, with plans to reopen it a few years later. But when workers showed up to begin repairs, they found angry local residents had chained themselves to the construction fence. They didn’t want a public pool in Greenpoint anymore—they wanted it demolished. The protestors felt that the dilapidated pool had become a nexus for drug dealers and vandals. Officials decided to call off the renovation. “Why give money to McCarren if the community was divided? Some people liked it, but others, typically older white residents, complained about it,” Manhattan councilmember Henry Stern told The Awl in 2012.

The battle over whether or not to renovate and reopen the pool raged for years. In 1990, the community split anew over what kind of pool the still-shuttered McCarren should be, following a years-long study undertaken by a committee that proposed reopening it with a reduced capacity—from 6,000 to 2,000. Some advocated for a smaller pool, to attract smaller crowds; opponents saw this as a surreptitious way to segregate the facility. “The pool will be so small that they could justifiably say to Latinos and African Americans: ‘It’s full already. You can’t get in,’” one local resident told the New York Times in 1990. Emptied of water, the pool spent much of the following decade slowly crumbling and gathering graffiti.

In the 2000s, McCarren Pool took on a second life. From 2005 to 2008, the city operated it as a performance space: bands like the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth played in the empty bowl, while concertgoers availed themselves of dodgeball games, Slip ‘N Slide, and ice cream trucks. This version of the pool—which exemplified a rapidly gentrifying Greenpoint and its adjacent neighborhood of Williamsburg—had its critics, too. The pool’s “narrowly focused indie-rock programming was not always well received in the diverse neighborhood,” reported the Times in 2008, “with many longtime residents complaining that it attracted only the newer arrivals.”

Those performances were a prelude to McCarren Pool’s next act: it finally reopened as a public pool on June 29, 2012, after a 30-month, $50 million renovation overseen by the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which had rezoned much of the area in 2005. This grand reopening was also marred by tension; within the first week there were fights and arrests, and racially tinged debates over whether outsiders from “other neighborhoods” were responsible. (By the time it reopened, Brooklyn’s black population had increased to comprise about 34 percent of the borough’s residents.) After 28 dry years, today the McCarren Pool frequently fills to capacity—just as it did when it was first opened in 1936, with swimmers waiting in line for hours to cool off during hot summer months.