Why America Needs More Public Pools

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My husband often hears me say that all I need to be happy is a sunny day and a pool. (He would argue that I don’t say this so much as I whine it.) No matter how bad a day I’m having, if I can squeeze in just 10 minutes coursing through the water, watching the dappled sun reflect off my arms, life feels bearable again. When I dive my head underwater, I feel temporarily hidden from my problems, as if nothing can find me down there.

Pools are so important to me that in 2020, one of my biggest concerns was whether the pandemic would prevent public pools from opening. I couldn’t bear to watch a whole swimming season pass me by. (In defense of my screwed-up priorities, this was before I had kids.)

That may seem melodramatic, but for decades, experts have argued that pools are essential for mental, physical, and social health. Swimming has been shown to boost moods; it routinely ranks among people’s favorite forms of exercise. When I interviewed Bonnie Tsui, the author of Why We Swim, she told me that being in water gives you “the feeling of both being buoyed and being embraced.” The pressure of the water combined with the release of gravity does something uniquely salubrious to our brains. Sure, you can get this same zing from an ocean or a lake, but not everyone lives near one of those. A pool is a bit of backyard magic, a chance to find transcendence in the everyday.

For decades, writers have been documenting the wonders of pools in our pages. In 1967, Leonard Conversi described how his swimming lessons left him flabbergasted by “unanticipated ease, when the world seems to divide before us like a perforation and the body feels itself inebriate, or falling.” However, after Conversi did a “jig of triumph” at the end of the diving board, he was asked to leave the swimming club and find “an organization more suited to your needs and temperament.” Conversi was unfazed: “To have learned to breathe while moving in an alien element is to have begun to master the secret of animal life.”

Even people who aren’t sun-seekers can recognize the salutary effect of immersion. In 2006, the journalist Wayne Curtis traveled to the thermal pools of Iceland and noted that “stepping into thermal waters is like stepping into Oz: life changes from the black-and-white of imminent hypothermia to a lustrous, multidimensional world of color and warmth.” The pools are a social hub in Iceland; people gather there with their friends and kids. Sounds heavenly.

This idea, that pools can be a “third place” for people to meet and chill, has existed for decades. In a 1952 call for cities to revitalize themselves, the developer William Zeckendorf suggested building parks with swimming pools as one way to keep urban workers from fleeing to the suburbs:

I visualize these fun centers as consisting of a tremendous dance hall, bowling alleys, skating rinks, merry-go-rounds for the children, a swimming pool for the children and one for the adults too—in short, a happy, functionally designed center for dancing and exercise and entertainment … People would feel that their city is a great place to live in, not a great place to get away from.

His entreaty serves as a somewhat tragic companion piece to one that Yoni Appelbaum, an Atlantic deputy executive editor, wrote a decade ago. Starting in the 1920s, pools did become the kinds of recreation hot spots that Zeckendorf hailed—until they began to desegregate in the ’50s. Rather than continue to use public pools, which welcomed all races, some suburbanites retreated to private club pools, such as the one at the center of a racist incident in McKinney, Texas—the town where I went to high school and where my parents still live. During a party at a private-subdivision pool in 2015, teens who allegedly didn’t live in the community showed up, someone called the police, and an officer tackled a young Black girl to the ground, pinning her with both knees on her back. (The officer was placed on administrative leave and then resigned; the McKinney police chief said that the department’s policies didn’t “support his actions.” A grand jury later declined to bring criminal charges against him.)

Public pools have been “frequent battlefields” of racial tension, Appelbaum wrote. “That complicated legacy persists across the United States. The public pools of mid-century—with their sandy beaches, manicured lawns, and well-tended facilities—are vanishingly rare.” Many public pools have become neglected and underfunded, usurped by private pools funded by HOA fees.

I say we start the backlash to this backlash: in the spirit of Zeckendorf, dig up some unused parking lots and fallow fields, and open public pools again. Though this would be a resource-intensive endeavor, it would be worth it. Take it from the famed New York City urban planner Robert Moses: “It is no exaggeration to say that the health, happiness, efficiency, and orderliness of a large number of the city’s residents, especially in the summer months, are tremendously affected by the presence or absence of adequate bathing facilities.” This summer and in the hot, hot summers to come, America needs pools—for everyone.

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