As NYC’s outdoor pools prepare to close for the season, Public Pools proposes a vision for year-round use as saunas, stages, and community hubs. We showcase their bold ideas currently on view at Citygroup Gallery. 

^{The proposal for the Astoria Pool includes a performance venue on the site of the diving pool. Drawing: Karolina Czeczek} 

On the first Sunday after Labor Day, as the last bather dries off and the lifeguards fold their umbrellas, New York does something curious: it shuts down all 54 of its public outdoor pools (see map below). The weather is still fine but the gates close until late June of the following year, leaving the blue rectangles to sit empty through months of untapped potential.

Architect Karolina Czeczek and photographer Anna Morgowicz want to change this. Their collaboration, Public Pools – currently exhibited at Citygroup Gallery – is part documentation, part speculative proposal; an homage to the city’s most democratic leisure spaces that asks what if these pools didn’t just hibernate for nine months of the year? What if the swimming season could be extended and they could be reimagined as saunas, performance venues, classrooms, or neighborhood gathering spots when no one’s swimming? 

^{Map of NYC’s public pools. Drawing: Karolina Czeczek}

The pool becomes a stage

In the summer of 1936, eleven large-scale public swimming complexes opened across NYC to a rapturous response, with thousands attending each opening ceremony. The pools provided space for safe swimming, social gathering and much-needed recreation. These Olympic-size complexes, cataloged below, funded by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) and were marvels of engineering with the latest cleaning, heating and lighting technology. They created a new kind of public architecture, foregrounding recreation and gender integration in public space.

^{McCarren Park Pool was built to accommodate 6800 bathers at a time, but closed in the 80s until renovation in 2012. Photography by Anna Morgowicz}

WPA pools have become part of the city’s social fabric, hosting performances, Olympic training and free swimming lessons. Although there is a question about the equity of the pools’ distribution in the city, with fewer built in predominantly Latino or African American neighborhoods, the pools have remained steadfastly popular.

Karolina Czeczek proposes adapting all WPA pool buildings into cooling centers in the summer and warming centers in winter to build climate resilience. The former diving pool of the Astoria Pool (top image) could become a year-round performance venue, with its readymade auditorium waiting to host local dance and theatre groups, or film screenings.

From splash to steam
In the late sixties, the city added a new typology: the mini pool, built in response to the dearth of water and cooling opportunities in underserved areas of the city. Around 60 modest 40’ x 20’ splash zones were installed in overheated neighborhoods. A few were literally mobile—rolled out on trucks on hot afternoons.

^{PS20 playground mini pool, Brooklyn. Photography by Anna Morgowicz}

Czeczek imagines these humble pools covered in winter by structures housing public saunas, finally importing en masse to New York the Nordic art of sweating communally in a wooden box. Bleachers on top could host outdoor classrooms or neighborhood movie nights.

^{Proposal for a sauna at mini pools based on the Abe Lincoln pool. Drawing: Karolina Czeczek}

Inflating the swim season
And then there are the vest-pocket pools of the seventies, compact rectangles squeezed into dense neighborhoods, each with a 75’ x 60’ intermediate pool and a 12’ x 12’ wading pool. For these, Czeczek proposes inflatable covers with a heated interior that would extend the free Learn to Swim program into the school year. More kids would acquire a critical life skill, and adults would gain an affordable way to exercise through the winter.

^{Commodore Barry vest-pocket pool, Brooklyn. Photography by Anna Morgowicz} 

The architecture is already there, waiting. New York just needs the imagination to see pools not as seasonal novelties but as all-year civic infrastructure, equal parts pleasure, wellbeing and resilience. For now, New Yorkers have two weeks to make use of the pools – dive in!

^{Inflatable cover proposed for the Van Cortland Pool. Drawing: Karolina Czeczek}

See all five proposals, pool typologies and photographs at Public Pools, an exhibition at Citygroup Gallery, 104b Forsyth Street, New York, through September 6. The exhibition is supported by an Independent Project Grant from The Architectural League of New York and the New York State Council on the Arts.