As fall begins, I’m remembering my best summer stunt. It was one of those late-summer Sundays when the only thing to do is swim. I had a particular swim in mind. I got the idea for it during the bleakest days of last winter. When things seemed like they couldn’t get worse, I started to think about swimming across Manhattan—about plowing through every pool on the island. I would be like Neddy Merrill, the protagonist of John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer,” who swims across the suburbs, from one back-yard pool to the next. He swims because he’s lost everything—his social status, his home, his family. He’s delusional and drunk. Actually, I wouldn’t really be like him. My predicament wasn’t comparable. My drinking was under control, for the most part. My swim would be investigative, maybe healing. I spent my childhood in pools: they were like a second womb. A day spent swimming in each of Manhattan’s pools seemed like an obvious move.
In Cheever’s story, Merrill is forced, at one point, to cross a public pool. “It stank of chlorine and looked to him like a sink,” Cheever writes. “A pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers blew police whistles at what seemed to be regular intervals, and abused the swimmers through a public-address system. Neddy remembered the sapphire water at the Bunkers’ with longing, and thought that he might contaminate himself—damage his own prosperousness and charm—by swimming in this murk.” My pool marathon would take place almost entirely in Manhattan’s murk—that is, in public pools. I love outdoor public pools. As I marked the locations of Manhattan’s pools on a map, a constellation emerged: the people’s moat, a secret waterway, a liquid realm. Among the honking taxis, flashing lights, and fretful pedestrians, I would swim.
I started at the bottom—the most downtown pool—which is in Vesuvio Playground, on Thompson Street, in SoHo. There were ginkgo trees, a pretty iron fence. It looked to be a tiny pool. As I reached the deck, a stout woman in a khaki-green uniform stopped me. “Do you have a child?” she asked. I did not. I do not. “This is only for kids!” Now I could see: it was a wading pool. There were children splashing, a couple of dads. Noting my disappointment, I think, the guard said, “But we have a lotta pools for adults around here.” The nearest one, she said, was on Varick and Carmine.
I headed northwest. Three old men were sitting on a stoop across from Father Fagan Park. Orange morning glories climbed toward the hot sun. On Varick Street, a promising-looking three-story brick building appeared, wrapped around the corner at Carmine. The Parks Department’s leaf logo was stencilled on one wall. Three women sat at the entrance. One asked me whether I had my lock. I did not. All I had was a notebook, pens, a map, a MetroCard, and some cash. Nothing is allowed on the pool deck, they said, not even notebooks. Everything must be locked in the changing rooms. I said I’d be quick—just a lap or two. One of the women, a guard, sighed and said she’d stash my little cloth bag under her chair.
The changing room smelled of rubber and chlorine. A frail, very old lady sat in front of a locker in her bathing suit, cocooned in a raggedy white towel. Her hair stuck out from beneath a purple nylon cap, which covered only the top of her skull. I hurried past and walked out to the pool. The cerulean water sparkled. I crossed the concrete deck and threw myself in.
“He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools,” Cheever wrote. I felt the same way. The water was cool and silky. My arms clasped above my head, I dolphin-kicked underwater, turning my two legs into one strong tail. “Being embraced and sustained by the light-green water seemed not as much a pleasure as the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project.” I pulled my arms down by my sides, then brought them around and out of the water, breaking the surface with a butterfly stroke. I took another stroke, ribboning across the surface, and kicked until I touched the wall. A Keith Haring mural—painted in 1987, three years before he died—danced on a wall above me. A waving figure rode a dolphin, which kissed the shadow-puppeting hand of a king. A fat fish ate a swimmer. A merperson gyrated.
I swam back underwater, and when I came up a lifeguard with curly blond hair was eating a blue ice pop and flirting with another guard in mirrored aviators, who was twirling his whistle around his index finger. A man and his son were lying on a bench set against the brick of the main building, a converted public bathhouse. Two scraggly pigeons cooed.
Back in the locker room, the old woman hadn’t moved. I grabbed my bag from the guard. “You were quick!” she said. I pulled on shorts, found a Citi Bike, and headed east on Houston. A posse of tatted and tanked boys sauntered past, looking like they had something to prove.
The Hamilton Fish Park Pool, which is on Houston Street just below where Avenue C begins, was one of eleven pools to open across the boroughs in the summer of 1936. Eleven! Robert Moses, who swam at Yale, had just become the city’s Parks Commissioner, and he and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia worked closely with the federal Works Progress Administration. Some of the W.P.A. pools are magnificent. The Hamilton Fish pool is colossal; it was used by the U.S. Olympic swim team for a training session in 1952, before they headed to Helsinki. A sign there says that the W.P.A. pools changed “the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time.”
I left my bag with the guard (“no problem, no problem”) and, yes, hurled myself into the water. I followed a black line that ran across the bottom for fifty metres—nearly a hundred and sixty-five feet—lengthening my stroke as I swam. Across my path, there were underwater legs running in slow motion, as if the beat of the world had slowed. Girl legs chased boy legs. The sounds of shrieking, laughter, and lifeguards’ whistles were all muffled. The water refracted the light. A woman with a snorkel dived in front of me. I dodged her and continued, stretching out, settling into an easy freestyle. The water was refreshing, cool but not cold. At the wall, I flip-turned, swam back, and got out. Two lifeguards in orange shorts were leaning against a fence. One exhibited the usual tic, twirling her whistle around her index finger. A teenage boy with a scruffy beard and a tattoo of a heart over his heart was peppering her with questions while his friend stood by silently. “It seems like it’s a good job for a young person, right? How far can you swim underwater? Where do you train? How much do you get paid?” (First-year guards get $13.57 an hour.)
Citi Bike returned, I walked north up Avenue C. Cold air wafted out of an Associated Market. Sixth Street smelled like fried chicken. On East Tenth Street, I found the Dry Dock Playground pool. (This neighborhood was known as the dry-dock district in the nineteenth century, when it was filled with bustling ironworks and shipfitters.) Trees and grass were sparse. Fence, concrete, water. I swam a lap in ten seconds. The Jacob Riis Houses towered to the north. Lifeguards blew their eternal whistles, one after another, in a circular, comforting way, the sound of soccer games ending, thunderstorms arriving, marching bands parading, a summer night. “Everyone out!” they yelled. It was their afternoon break. Outside the pool fence strolled an old man with his pocket radio tuned to a baseball game.
I ran to catch the M14D up and across town. The driver looked like Robert DeNiro, who swam and swooned at the Carmine Street pool in“Raging Bull.” No one seemed to mind that I was sopping wet, wearing a bathing suit and shorts. At Union Square, I transferred to the subway. Underground, cops threatened a group of dancers. At Times Square, everything turned red. Kids were draped in flags. It was the Dominican Day Parade, and the crowds swelled and pulsed, overflowing from Sixth Avenue.
Midtown is a public-pool wasteland. But I wanted to keep swimming north, and hotel pools abound there. I tried the Parker Meridien, on West Fifty-seventh, following a group of tourists into an elevator. On the forty-second floor, I found the entrance to an indoor pool bordered by a wall of windows. I used, depressing to say, my white-person-with-a-suntan visa and swept past the attendant onto a sun deck. Silent people lay on chaises longues. The view to the north encompassed all of Central Park. Helicopters flew up and down the Hudson. A girl in a black ruffled bikini read “War and Peace.” A middle-aged woman did the Times crossword. A young man read “Vie et Destin,” by Vasily Grossman. I did a lap. The pool was small and overchlorinated, pathetic after the grandeur of Hamilton Fish.
On the Upper East Side, I swam across the John Jay Park pool, another W.P.A. production. It sits above the F.D.R. on Seventy-seventh Street. Then I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Thomas Jefferson Pool, on 112th Street and First Avenue. I mentioned, casually, that I was swimming through Manhattan—every public pool on the island, more or less.
“I have to be honest,” he said. “My friends all make fun of me. I have a fear of the water. Sharks and stuff.”
I told him that he didn’t have anything to fear in a pool. He laughed and said he was from Queens.
What he meant, I concluded, was that New York City’s public pools have sometimes been scenes of gang violence. I shut my mouth. We pulled up alongside the park.
“Keep dedicated,” he said. “What you’re doing is a real inspiration.”
I couldn’t see how it was anything of the sort, but I appreciated the encouragement.
Thomas Jefferson Pool: yet another souvenir of the W.P.A. It opened on June 27, 1936, with a ceremony attended by ten thousand people. I asked a guard if she’d watch my bag.
“I’m just going to do one lap,” I said.
“I feel you,” she said.
I swam across the Olympic-size pool, catching the smell of grill smoke when I took a breath and hearing the shouts from a nearby soccer game. The pool was full of kids but, as elsewhere on my pilgrimage, not too crowded. I swam around a group of teen-agers, boys and girls. They moved like a unit back and forth across my path, magnetized to one another. I reached the wall and looked around.
The New York City public-pool deck is a strange expanse of nothing but people and water. There is none of the detritus common to private facilities, because nothing is allowed: no food or beverages, no newspapers, and no clothes except bathing suits and trunks. If you must wear a shirt, it has to be white—to avoid, I was told, gang representation (as well as color dyes running in the water). Electronic devices are also forbidden, making the city pool one of those rare places outside the smartphone’s dominion. There’s nothing to do but swim.
Further up First Avenue, at 124th Street, I hit a small pool built in the nineteen-seventies, next to the Robert F. Wagner Houses, where Mayor Bill de Blasio held a press conference, in July, announcing a plan to reduce violent crime in the city’s public-housing developments. It was a quiet, peaceful scene on the pool deck. A few kids played in the water. I swam across and did the backstroke on my return lap, admiring the dozy clouds and the milky-blue sky. I got out and strode toward the exit.
“That’s it?” a lifeguard called. “No more lap swim?”
“That’s it. I’m going to another pool now.”
“You don’t like this one?”
“I do,” I said. “I really do. But I’m swimming every pool in Manhattan.”
“By the end of the summer?”
“By the end of the day.”
“Oh, word? Good luck!” He, too, was twirling his whistle around his index finger. They must teach that.
Now I had to hurry. I took a taxi to Jackie Robinson Park, on 146th and Bradhurst Avenue. The pool was my fourth W.P.A. colossus. It opened in August, 1936, to a crowd of twenty-five thousand. Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the tap dancer and actor, sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Three years later, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses asked to use the pool for a mass baptism. The Parks Department denied their request, saying that it couldn’t abandon its first-come, first-served policy. I stroked across the shallows of clear blue. The paint was peeling on the bottom. In the old brick fortress at the entrance, there was a girl in a wet bikini playing a piano under a bronze bust of Jackie Robinson.
I took the A train to Highbridge Park, at Amsterdam and 173rd. Dominican families were picnicking. Dominican teens sat around hookahs, puffing. The pool was another sparkling acre of water and symmetry—W.P.A., Class of ’36—perched high above the Harlem River, with a view from the deck of the old Croton Aqueduct, which crosses there from the Bronx into Manhattan. “That he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence,” Cheever wrote. The color of the water mirrored the sky. I had reached the northernmost point on my map.
The supervisor of the Highbridge Pool, whose name is Corey, told me that, in 2008, he would not have gone to this pool with his family. But now he would. “When I started working here, there were mini-riots on the pool deck,” he said. People—teen-agers, mostly—would wear jewelry of certain colors to signify gang affiliations. The Parks Department cracked down: no colorful shirts, no jewelry, nothing but a bathing suit. Corey said that the police had made progress in breaking up the Inwood gangs. The Parks Department guards pools vigilantly. From the moment water goes into a pool, he said, even if it’s just a thimbleful, there has to be someone guarding it, not only all day but also all night. He mentioned that the Trinitarios, a Dominican gang, were known to wear lime green.
I sprinted across Highbridge Pool and back, a hundred metres total, kicking and pulling hard, feeling my heart pump. The air was getting cool. It was getting late. I jumped out, breathing hard, and left. I jogged to the 1 train and rode south, to 125th Street.
Sheltering Arms Pool, another relic of the seventies, was much like the little one next to the Wagner Houses. It was tucked into a quiet corner of West Harlem, off Amsterdam. The low sun silhouetted the neighboring church’s bell. The pool is built on the site of a nineteenth-century free asylum for homeless kids, or “children in the midst,” as the institution called them. Now the sound of sloshing and splashing muted the thwack of the handball game on the other side of the fence.
As I got in the water, a girl in a black one-piece approached, flailing, spinning, kicking off the bottom, not really swimming. She surfaced next to me. “Do you know how to swim?” she asked.
I said that I did.
“Could you teach me?”
Five more kids gathered around, bobbing and ducking and jumping. They had just had a swim lesson, they said. One boy showed me how he had learned to breathe to the side while swimming freestyle. I showed them how to lift their elbows high, and how to kick with their legs straight. I swam across the pool. When I stopped, I saw that they were all following me.
“Can you do butterfly?”
I ribboned across the water, demonstrating butterfly. The girl in the black bathing suit followed. At the wall, I hauled myself onto the deck and said goodbye. The kids went back to their playing. In the locker room, a grandmother was trying to dress two small, cranky children.
From the C train on 110th Street, I jogged into Central Park, following a path up a hill to the entrance to Lasker Pool. It was 6:45 and the pool closed at 7. The sharp chemical smell of chlorine made my mouth water, weirdly. I was feeling triumphant. Buoyant. Then, at the gate, a guard stopped me. But there were still people in the water! He wouldn’t budge. No one went in after 6:45. I told him that I was swimming through Manhattan’s public pools. This would be my tenth! (Vesuvio and the Parker Meridien didn’t count.) He didn’t care. I considered charging past him, but I knew I wouldn’t make it. My swim was finished.
Whistles began calling to one another around Lasker Pool, which is set in a small valley formed by wooded hills. I watched through the fence as the last swimmers kicked and hopped and stroked to the ladders. A woman next to me called down to her young son. He was dripping and beaming as she snapped a photo with her phone. Lifeguards shuffled across the deck in flip-flops. One twirled his whistle around his index finger.
Although the pool was empty, the dappled blue water was still moving, almost vibrating. A big pond, known as Harlem Meer, lies just north of Lasker. Covered by large patches of algae, it looked alive, fertile, earthy, bottomless. Kids in a nearby playground screamed on the tire swings, endlessly circling. The sun turned parts of the pond gold. Bubbles popped on the surface. The leaves of a tree on the other side of the pool were already the color of rust.
