The dream of being able to swim in a pool in the East River floated a little closer to reality on Wednesday, as officials unveiled filtration testing at a site just off the Lower East Side.
The project dubbed “+POOL” is set to have a permanent location along the Manhattan waterfront next to Pier 35, with three months of operation funded by the city and the state.
The location comes months after Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams pledged $16 million for a dry-run of the pool — which was first proposed in 2010 by a group of New Yorkers who longed to swim in the East River.
“It feels like forever,” Kara Meyer, the managing director of +POOL, told THE CITY before a boat ride to check out the site. She joined the group as its first full-time employee in 2015, as it raised money with an online fundraiser and drummed up support around the city.
But Meyer says she has learned, with the gift of hindsight from nearly a decade on the job, that the whole process is moving “at rapid speed” as far as complicated infrastructure issues go.
“The regulation and policies that we ignited through this project, they’re going to have an impact on public access anywhere,” she said. “There’s now a framework” for the pool the group says it’s committed to being free to enter.
There are still logistical hurdles to jump before the public can dive in the plus-sign shaped pool but organizers are hoping for a summer 2025 opening.
As they’ve worked through the approvals and permitting systems for the physical project, the +POOL team has also spent the years focused on water safety — teaching thousands of kids how to swim. This year they trained 60 people to become lifeguards, certifying them in the American Red Cross standard (A two-day program separate from the Parks Department’s lifeguard training, which requires a week-long course.)
For now, they’re testing how the pool will work with a scaled-down water filtration system mounted to a floating barge churning away in the East River.
‘The Magic of Being in the Water’
The filtration system starts with a submersible pump that gathers 22 gallons of raw water a minute and then discharges it into a 500 gallon feed tank that has a strainer, to block out larger items.
The water goes through a feed pump and a membrane filtration, which works to reduce turbidity — or increase the clarity of the water — as well as weed out particulate organics and bacteria and everything else you’d find in the river. It then gets hit with ultraviolet light disinfection.
The three-month trial will collect data that will help +POOL move on to its next phase of designing the water-filtering floating pool, including figuring out the final size.
“Access to this extraordinary resource will yield multiple benefits, from community building and health and wellness to economic and workforce development to social and recreational opportunities — while creating myriad opportunities for residents of all ages,” David Garza, the president and CEO of Henry Street Settlement and executive chair of the Lower East Side Employment Network, said in a press release.
Janette Sadik-Khan, who was the Department of Transportation commissioner under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is now a +POOL board member. On the boat trip Wednesday, she recalled her work on “Summer Streets” in 2010, when a stretch of Park Avenue was closed to make room for “Dumpster pools” — which were a hit.
“The attraction wasn’t the seven miles of car-free streets, it was these Dumpster pools,” she said.
“We all know the magic of being in the water in the summer.”
