New York - +POOL
New York - +POOL
New Yorkers used to swim in the rivers around Manhattan all the time. Starting back in the late 1800s, up until the 1930s, there were 15 floating bathing houses dotting the coastline of New York City.
It was a place of refuge from the heat, a place to bathe, and a place of community. Over the years New York’s population rose sharply, and so did its industry. The success of the city unfortunately made most of the waterfront inaccessible, and turned the once fresh and vibrant river into one polluted with runoff and sewage.
Today, the majority of people in New York City have little to no relationship with the water that surrounds them. The people on Manhattan are surrounded on all sides by water they can’t access, let alone swim in. Just like a beautiful park, the rivers that run in and around cities like New York are inherently public space. Not having access to it is like having a huge wall between you and the water.
In order to create opportunities to get in these rivers cleanly and safely, we have to take care of these waters, and treat them like the precious natural resource that they are. A project like +POOL not only gives access to the river for the first time in almost 100 years, but it calls attention to why we can’t in the first place.