Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America

Conclusion: The Promise and Reality of Swimming Pools as Public Spaces

CONCLUSION THE PROMISE AND REALITY OF SWIMMING POOLS AS PUBLIC SPACES While conducting the research for this project, I frequently visited the swimming pools I was studying, if they still existed. On one occasion , I spent an evening at Athletic Park Pool in Newton, Kansas—the same pool that Samuel Ridley attempted to desegregate back in the 1930s. In some ways, the scene in 2000 was much as it might have been during the swimming pool age. Hundreds were congregated at the pool. Children played in the water and waited in line for the diving board. Teens gathered around the concession stand and chased one another on the lawn. Some fathers played in the pool with their children, but most adults sat along the pool deck chatting with friends and neighbors. The pool was the town’s social center that warm summer evening. In other ways, however, the scene in 2000 was markedly different than it would have been back in the 1930s. Most notably, blacks, Hispanics, and whites all mingled together, content to be a part of the same community. I seemed to be the only one who noticed or cared that the crowd was racially diverse. And yet, as an outsider, I could not tell anyone’s social position. Some swimmers may have been affluent; others may have been poor and unemployed. Whatever inequalities and social divisions existed in Newton, they were not apparent at the pool. Once people left their cars and changed into their swimsuits, signs of social status were difficult to detect. After spending the day at Newton’s public library reading about how Athletic Park Pool divided residents back in the 1930s, my swim that evening reminded me of the promise of municipal pools as public spaces. Swimming pools and public space generally have the potential to foster a vibrant community life by counteracting many of the segmenting and alienating aspects of modern life. They offer an informal social space—a meeting ground—where people separated by social differences, large yards and high fences, busy lives, 208 Conclusion and electronic entertainment can interact and communicate face to face. Municipal pools can humanize relationships between people. They enable the sustained and unhurried interaction necessary for members of a community to meet, forge bonds of friendship, and develop a sense of shared interest and identity. This is what a reporter for the Wilmington Evening Journal observed at Price Run Pool back in 1925. He wrote that “everyone seemed imbued with the community spirit.” Residents became “acquainted with each other” at the pool and “cement[ed] bonds of community friendship.”¹ The same was true at Newton’s Athletic Park Pool when I visited it in 2000. The scene at Athletic Park Pool also reminded me that municipal swimming pools and other public spaces can level social differences. For one, they diminish social distinctions by bringing diverse people together at the same place doing the same things. This was certainly the case in Palmerton, Pennsylvania , during the 1930s. Eighty-something-year-old Joseph Plechavy reminisced to me about his childhood days at the town’s swimming pool, where this son of an immigrant laborer “yakked” and played with children who lived on the other side of town. “It didn’t matter who you were,” Plechavy recalled, “you swam at the pool.”² Municipal pools can also diminish the significance of economic inequality by affording all social classes access to some trappings of the good life. The resort pools of the interwar years, for example, democratized the life-style of the leisure class. The poor and working classes could lie out on a sandy beach, refresh themselves in cool water, and visually consume attractive bodies just as though they were on vacation at a shore resort. Finally, pools force swimmers to cast off most material accoutrements of life. Swimmers leave behind their homes, cars, clothing, and other outward signs of status that define people’s identity in a consumer society. Swimmers return to something resembling nature, in a more natural state themselves. As an Allegheny County public official insisted in 1939, “let’s build bigger, better, and finer pools, that’s real democracy. Take away the sham and hypocrisy of clothes, don a swim suit, and we’re all the same.”³ In all these ways, the stark inequalities of life could become less apparent and less meaningful at municipal pools. While not immediately visible at the Newton pool, municipal swimming pools highlight another virtue of public space. They allow ordinary...