The Joy of Swimming With Strangers

New York Times

3 hours ago

Swimming among strangers in a public pool is everything that I love about living in the city, but doing it underwater. Traversing a mile back and forth during lap swim in a New York public pool sometimes feels like walking down Broadway at midday or taking the 4 train uptown in the evening. It's meditative, but what each person does affects everyone else; ignoring the other pedestrians creates problems for you and them. As the city's outdoor pools get ready to open, I've been thinking more about this obvious but remarkable detail — this intense togetherness, these feelings of sympathy, of enmity, of forgiveness, even of competition with complete strangers.
But swimming is different from strolling down a sidewalk in one critical way. Pushing yourself in exercise can mean working until you fail, visibly, and it's a particularly vulnerable thing to do among strangers, especially in open, democratic spaces like a crowded public pool. When you cry in public, those around you will probably leave you alone, but even the silence feels intimate. The act of looking away from someone has just as much a sense of companionship as the act of looking at them, and avoiding a stranger when swimming or walking might be just as companionable as walking or swimming together.
New York City's public pools have long been palatial — neo-Romanesque, Art Deco or Beaux-Arts, some now a century old or more. The earliest were constructed as bathhouses for residents of poorer neighborhoods at a time before air-conditioning. Robert Moses, an obsessive open-water swimmer, built 11 huge public pools under the Works Progress Administration and started a free swim program to prevent drowning deaths. (The city's Department of Parks & Recreation continues to offer free swimming lessons.) A French academic once remarked that Los Angeles's banks recalled churches, stately and sacred. In New York City it's our pools, these majestic structures built as public amenities that now, often in dire need of repair yet still anchoring communities, seem incredibly humble.
As of 2023, the last pool census I could find, New York City also has over 15,000 private pools. These pools, largely clustered in expensive neighborhoods, often feature in places like luxury residences, hotels and fancy gyms. Some are more affordable than others, but almost all curate their users. They have a reputation for being cleaner, but their utilization can be only as high as their accessibility. New York City's public pools, on the other hand, in addition to being clean and safe, enjoy mass utilization: According to the parks commissioner, the city's 50 or so outdoor pools serve about 1.5 million people during the 10-week stretch in the summer when they're open. When anyone can exercise with anyone, regardless of wealth — as should be the case — no one can control being seen in this state of vulnerability or by whom.
For years, I organized my life around the adult swim hours at the Metropolitan Recreation Center in Williamsburg, home to one of the 12 indoor pools in the Parks Department system (though fewer than half are operating). When the pool closed — temporarily, I hoped — I reorganized my days around the lap swim hours in Crown Heights, Flushing and Manhattan and learned a whole set of manners at each pool, where swimmers have invented and are inventing rules to live (or at least swim) by.
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