In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INTERLUDE THE TRAUMATIC EARLY HISTORY OF FAIRGROUNDS PARK POOL Before the Progressive Era ended, city officials in St. Louis further reconceived municipal swimming pools and reshuffled the social composition of swimmers. In 1913 the city opened an enormous circular swimming pool in Fairgrounds Park and promoted it as a leisure resort for almost all citizens. The city permitted both sexes to swim together, and the pool’s resortlike character attracted virtually all levels of St. Louis society and many adults.While working class and middle class, males and females, and children and adults now swam together in this gigantic pool, blacks and whites did not. City officials barred black Americans from the pool even though blacks and whites swam together at an earlier municipal pool. Fairgrounds Pool was the first gender-integrated municipal pool in the northern United States and also the first one officially segregated along racial lines.¹ The simultaneous occurrence of these two social transformations was not coincidental. City officials excluded blacks because most whites did not want black men interacting with white women at such an intimate and crowded public space. Although an anomaly when it opened in 1913, Fairgrounds Pool foreshadowed what would occur at municipal pools throughout the northern United States during the 1920s. It represents one point of origin of the mixed-gender, racially segregated leisure society that came to predominate during the twentieth century. Prior to the opening of Fairgrounds Pool, the social composition of municipal-pool swimmers in St. Louis was the same as in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Working-class blacks and whites swam together, whereas men and women and prosperous and poor did not. St. Louis opened its first public bath in 1907 on 10th Street between Carr and Biddle. The fa- Interlude 79 cility was located in the midst of what one newspaper called a “ghetto district ” and contained only showers and tubs. The bath accommodated men and women, but the facilities for each were completely separate, even to the point of having the two groups enter through different doors.² The facility attracted a racially and ethnically diverse crowd of working-class residents. According to a local newspaper, “Greek, Italian, negro [sic], Irish, German, French, American—they were all there, sweating, grinning, and scolding at one another in strange tongues.”³ Official attendance statistics confirm the racial diversity of the bathers. During the bath’s first four years of operation, the number of black bathers increased steadily: 517 the first year, then 1,209, 3,448, and 4,352 in 1911.⁴ This steady increase suggests that city officials actively encouraged blacks to use the facility or, at the very least, did not discriminate against them. The social composition of swimmers at the city’s first municipal pool was the same. Bath House No. 2, which contained a twenty-nine by eighty-nine foot pool, opened in 1909 in another working-class section of the city. City officials intended the indoor pool to lure working-class residents into the facility ’s showers and also promote physical fitness. As at the first bath, men and women were kept separate, but blacks and whites were not. In its first year of operation, 337 blacks used the facility.⁵ A small number, granted, but understandable considering the pool was located within an overwhelmingly white neighborhood. The important point is that this municipal pool intended to function as a bath and fitness facility for the city’s working classes was gender segregated and racially integrated. By the early 1910s, St. Louis officials recognized the need for a municipal pool that promoted recreation and even leisure.Unlike other major American cities, St. Louis was not located close to a body of water that residents could conveniently frequent as a summer resort. While some daring youths swam in the Mississippi River, it was too muddy for most residents and lacked a beach. The city’s elite traveled great distances in order to vacation near pleasurable shores. In 1909 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “almost a third of St. Louis society” was spending the summer along “that delightful stretch of the Atlantic seaboard on the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine coasts.”⁶ The vast majority of the city’s residents, however, could not afford to escape the city to Magnolia, Massachusetts. They were left to sweat out the torrid days of summer in hot discomfort. Because the masses could not get to a beach, city officials decided to bring the sea and the sand to them. The...

Share