Dispatches from the present
Two summers ago, two colleagues and I tried to spend our lunch break in what we’d noticed was a miniature wading pool about ten minutes southwest of our office downtown. Eager and slightly embarrassed, we showed up in tankinis and one-pieces only to be denied entry by a guard: the pool, he advised, was only for children and their caretakers. We retreated, crestfallen, to Washington Square Park, where two of us ventured into the fountain at its center, ankle deep in our sandals, standing meekly in the warm crossfire. It’s not something I’d do again, but I remember the relief and pleasure of it. The beaches were so far.
I’d heard there were public pools throughout the city but didn’t know anyone who used them. McCarren Pool, which had come up in conversation a few times, was ensconced by high walls and gates that seemed to deny its reality; for the few months that I lived nearby, I never saw anyone leave or enter the enclosure, let alone entowelled or with gnarled wet hair. This pool was a myth, I supposed, unaware that it had indeed been closed in 1984 for a renovation spanning 28 years before it reopened in 2012, the year it was thought that the world might end.
Another colleague mentioned somewhere called Hamilton Fish, which she said was open during the summers. I recalled passing it earlier that spring, on a walk through the Lower East Side. The enormous pool was gutted in the mid-fifties cold, which gave it an uncanny effect: not drained of its potentiality so much as inverted, its affordances were now framed by gravity, impact, the possibility of pain. I’d long harbored the fantasy of walking through an emptied pool. The thought of diving into it and my bones crumpling beneath me flitted through my mind. I wondered when it had last been in use.
Like the 78 other outdoor public pools in the city, Hamilton Fish (named after a governor of New York during the 1850s; surname coincidental) is, as it turns out, open for recreational use every summer. It was one of eleven pools built in 1936 by Robert Moses under the Works Progress Administration, offering reprieve for what was then a neighborhood of overcrowded tenements. The city’s pools remained open for periods throughout the pandemic, but its adult lap swim program, suspended in 2020, did not return until this year, and only at limited capacity. There were not enough lifeguards in 2025 to staff more than one pool per borough, from 7 to 8:30 a.m. three days a week, for the grown-ups of New York who wished simply to swim uninterrupted.
My friend Vanda and I discovered this possibility obliquely—the Parks Department website is labyrinthine—and made a plan to test the waters one morning in late August, in the final days of the officially designated summer. Vanda had swum competitively growing up in Hungary and the U.K., and I’d grown up idly lapping swimming pools for most of the year in Hong Kong. This was our first try with the public-pool scene in New York.
I was late, there was no line to enter, and I approached the trembling cyan body of water with what must have looked like suspicion, squinting across lane after ample lane in search of anyone beneath their cap and goggles who looked enough like Vanda. Through a Rorschach of red and blue she somehow appeared, and I slipped into the cold water beside her.
It was Wednesday, dawn had not yet finished breaking, and all the swimmers of Manhattan had converged here to make some headway. The park’s brick recreation building stood red, grand and stolid at the head of the pool, like a solemn guardian. Every lane—and there seemed so many—glistened with ten or twelve bodies, but there was miraculously space for all; each was so wide that it accommodated, I realized, not one but two active circuits within its width. What from afar had looked like sheer entropy was in fact a silent, self-enforcing flow.
The pool was Olympic, extending fifty meters long and thirty meters wide, so that laps doubled in length, with the need to turn around half as frequent. The floor was level, standable, so that there was no deep end. I entered the fold a few strokes behind Vanda, who over the course of our time swam freestyle, then breaststroke, then a firm and nimble backstroke. We paused after each lap to catch our breaths before reentering the gentle current. Life was long. At one point I copied Vanda’s backstroke but at a more leisurely pace. A swimmer behind me, doing the front crawl, began to inch closer and closer. It was like being pursued by a shark, and I swept the water with greater force for a few dozen yards. He did not pass me, but I returned to freestyle after that.
At the end of the swim, we picked up our belongings at the foot of the pool, where bags and clothes had been draped over an iron fence, and strode dripping to the showers, which were nozzles off some posts between the trees. The air was gauzy and sweet, and strangers around us spoke to one another like friends. A sixty-something lady sat next to us on a bench, putting her sandals on as we toweled off. It was her third time at lap swim this summer, she said, using her fingers to shake the wet out of her hair.
The pools would close again in just over two weeks. It was the beginning and end of a summer love affair: revealed too late, overambitious in its bloom. The relief and pleasure of it. The promise of a return next year.