Inside the South Street Seaport Museum, moments before the talk begins. Two attendees settle in as Nora Cronin's title slide fills the screen. A maritime museum felt like the right place to ask how a city built on water lost touch with swimming. (Photo: The Chronicle / MODA Vi)
The South Street Seaport Museum sits at the edge of Lower Manhattan where the city meets the water that made it. It is a fitting place to talk about public pools, because the story of swimming in New York has always been a story about the city's relationship to its own shoreline: who gets to be in the water, who is kept out, and what it means when a city surrounded by rivers and ocean still produces residents who have never learned to swim.
Nora Cronin, Program Director at + POOL, delivered a talk that moved between civic history, archival images, public health data and personal enthusiasm. She traced the full arc of public swimming in New York, from the floating baths of the 1880s through the WPA pool explosion of 1936, the suburban decline of the 1950s and 1960s, the crime and disinvestment of the 1980s and 1990s, and into the present, where pool access across the city remains strikingly uneven.
What emerged was a history that is about much more than recreation. Public pools, as Cronin presented them, are civic infrastructure. They reveal what a city believes ordinary people deserve.
Hamilton Fish Pool on the Lower East Side, the first of eleven WPA pools to open in the summer of 1936. The city was in the middle of the Great Depression. It built this anyway. (Photo: NYC Parks Department Archives)
Before Pools Were Recreation, They Were Infrastructure
The earliest public swimming facilities in New York were floating baths, wooden structures placed directly in the river. The city's first free public floating baths appeared in the Hudson and East Rivers in 1870, and by 1890 there were 15 of them. They were open from early summer through October, drew nearly two million visitors in 1911 alone, and served a purpose that had little to do with leisure in the modern sense.
For many New Yorkers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, private bathing was a luxury. Tenement apartments rarely had showers or bathtubs. Cronin showed the audience a photograph of a typical Lower East Side apartment layout with a bathtub in the kitchen, and another of an outdoor privy. These were living conditions where cleanliness required public infrastructure.
The floating baths and the public bathhouses that followed, including facilities on Rivington Street, Carmine Street and at Asser Levy on 23rd Street, were responses to overcrowded housing and uneven sanitary conditions. They were gathering places, meeting spots and neighborhood anchors. They were also shaped by the social norms of their era: gender-segregated, racially divided and governed by rules that reflected who the city considered worthy of public space.
Cronin noted that the women's floating baths required full bathing costumes made of wool, which became extremely heavy when wet and made it nearly impossible to move in the water. The men's baths, by contrast, were often used nude. The joy of swimming, she suggested, was always entangled with questions of access, gender and whose freedom the city was willing to support.
The Summer the City Built for Everyone
The heart of the talk was the WPA pool era. In the summer of 1936, New York City opened eleven major public pools within weeks of each other. During the Great Depression.
Cronin lingered on this fact, and the room felt it. The city was broke. Unemployment was devastating. And the response from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses was to build large, architecturally ambitious public swimming facilities in working-class neighborhoods across all five boroughs. Hamilton Fish on the Lower East Side opened first, on June 24. Red Hook in Brooklyn drew 40,000 people to its opening. Thomas Jefferson in East Harlem brought 10,000. Sunset Park opened with La Guardia dramatically flipping a switch to activate the pool's underwater lighting system.
These were serious public works. The pools were designed by architect Aymar Embury II and landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke. Styles ranged from Art Deco to Romanesque Revival. Crotona Pool in the Bronx featured animal-themed sculptures. Jackie Robinson Pool, originally Colonial Park, had architecture that resembled a castle. Astoria Pool in Queens, the largest of the eleven at 330 feet long, hosted the 1936 Olympic swimming and diving trials.
It is really stunning that these pools all opened within one summer, in the middle of the Great Depression. If I was experiencing something like that, I would feel like this city cares about me
The pools were also effective public health infrastructure. Cronin showed data indicating that drowning rates dropped measurably after the WPA pools opened. Before these facilities existed, New Yorkers swam in rivers and harbors where currents were unpredictable and water quality was deteriorating. The pools gave children and adults a controlled environment to learn water safety. Commissioner Moses launched a free swim instruction program in 1938 as a direct response to an estimated 400 drownings per year in the city.
The civic lesson is hard to miss. A city in crisis chose to build beautiful things for ordinary people. The WPA pools were arguments in concrete, tile and water that public life could still be generous.
How Swimming Became Unequal
After World War II, the story shifted. Suburbanization drew middle-class families out of the city and into homes with backyards. Cronin showed a Sears catalog advertisement from the era selling the ideal of the private backyard pool. Swimming, which had been a fundamentally public activity in New York, began to divide along lines of wealth and geography.
In the city, pools that had once drawn enormous crowds began to suffer from deferred maintenance and reduced investment. Cronin described the 1970s through the 1990s as a period of decline marked by complaints of harassment, robberies and a general sense that public pools were places to avoid rather than enjoy. The stigma was self-reinforcing: as conditions worsened, fewer families used the pools, which made the case for further investment harder to make.
The result was a generational loss. Parents who stopped swimming at public pools raised children who never learned. Cronin noted that this cycle is still visible today. Many New Yorkers, particularly in communities that were most affected by disinvestment, do not know how to swim.
A New York City public pool on a summer afternoon, still drawing crowds nearly ninety years after the WPA era that built it. The bathhouse, the housing towers in the background, the families in the water (Photo Credit: Timeout Magazine)
The Swimmobile Lesson
Mayor John Lindsay's administration produced one of the more creative responses to unequal pool access. The swimmobile was exactly what it sounds like: a pool mounted on the back of a truck, driven into neighborhoods that lacked permanent facilities.
Cronin described them with affection and honesty. They were small. They were improvised. They were beloved by the communities they served. They also served a secondary purpose during the fire-prone summers of the early 1970s by reducing the temptation to open fire hydrants, which diverted water pressure from the fire department.
The swimmobile was humble, improvised and temporary. But it represented a civic instinct worth remembering: if people cannot reach the infrastructure, bring the infrastructure closer to them.
The Map of Who Gets to Swim
Cronin showed a map of current pool locations across New York City. The distribution was striking. Outdoor pools (marked in blue) and indoor pools (marked in red) are concentrated in certain areas while entire swaths of the city go without.
Shoreline neighborhoods, counterintuitively, are among the gaps. Cronin was direct about this: an ocean is a beautiful thing, but a pool is where people actually learn to swim. Open water is unpredictable. Pools provide the controlled environment where children and adults can develop water safety skills before encountering currents, tides and depth.
Access also depends on more than proximity. Commute time, program availability, hours of operation, lifeguard staffing and whether people feel welcome all shape whether a pool is genuinely accessible. Cronin noted that New York City's lifeguard staffing model, which requires all lifeguards to be trained and certified through the city's own program regardless of prior certification, has created bottlenecks that limit programming at existing facilities.
The Future May Float
Cronin closed with + POOL, a proposed floating pool that would filter river water through a layered system of compression, screens and UV light, allowing New Yorkers to swim in their own waterways for the first time in generations.
She described the 2024 pilot test of the filtration system and shared images of the current construction, which is located near the Barretto Point Park area in the Bronx. The pool is designed to serve as a proof of concept: one quarter of the full pool's capacity, tested by the Department of Health for safety and viability. It was originally scheduled for testing this summer but has been pushed to next year due to infrastructure project conflicts along the waterfront.
Cronin was careful to present + POOL as a possibility rather than a certainty. The technology works. The regulatory path is long. The idea of reconnecting New Yorkers to the water that surrounds them is powerful, but it requires the same sustained public investment that built the WPA pools ninety years ago.
One child tried to hug the water and said, 'I wish you were a pool.' Which I think is about the most adorable thing I've ever heard
The Chronicle Takeaway
MODA Vi studies cities as living systems. From that perspective, a public pool is a remarkably efficient piece of civic infrastructure. It provides heat relief, water safety education, childhood recreation, neighborhood gathering, public health benefits and, in an era of rising temperatures, a form of climate adaptation that requires no technology more advanced than filtered water and a trained lifeguard.
A city's public infrastructure teaches residents what they are allowed to expect from public life. When New York built the WPA pools in 1936, it told working-class neighborhoods that they deserved beautiful public spaces. When those pools were allowed to decline, a different message was sent. The question now, as summers get hotter and access remains uneven, is which message the city intends to send next.
A pool is a simple thing. The system behind it is complex: capital funding, maintenance, staffing, water quality, programming, transportation access, community trust. But the promise it makes is straightforward. It says this city has made room for you to cool off, to learn, to gather and to belong.
Whether the next chapter of public swimming in New York can be as ambitious as its past is a question worth sitting with. Ninety years after eleven pools opened in one summer during the Depression, the standard those builders set still echoes. The question is whether anyone is listening.
A rendering of + POOL, a floating, river-filtering pool designed to let New Yorkers swim in their own waterways for the first time in generations. The plus-sign shape is the filtration system itself. Whether it reaches the water is still an open question. That the city is still dreaming about public swimming is the answer that matters. (Rendering: + POOL)