Red Hook Pool - Brooklyn NY

City:: Brooklyn, New York City, NY
Site Type:: Parks and Recreation, Swimming Pools
New Deal Agencies:: Work Relief Programs, Works Progress Administration (WPA)
Quality of Information:: Moderate
Site Survival:: Extant

Description

Red Hook Park swimming pool was one of eleven pools constructed by Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief workers for the New York City Parks Department in 1936. As the Parks Department website puts it:

“A new era in active recreation arrived in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Department of Parks assumed jurisdiction over the city’s bathhouses and harnessed Works Progress Administration labor to develop a series of outdoor pools for the city.

The WPA swimming pools were among the most remarkable public recreational facilities in the country, representing the forefront of design and technology in advanced filtration and chlorination systems. The influence of the pools extended throughout entire communities, attracting aspiring athletes and neighborhood children, and changing the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time.

The eleven pools were opened within weeks of each other in the hot summer of 1936, bringing relief to thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers.”

When the Red Hook pool opened on August 17, 1936, 40,000 people attended the opening, which The New York Times described as “Red Hook’s event of the year.”