Pool Report: Parks Dept. Leaves Red Hookers Hot And Bothered — Again!
Talk about a long hot summer.
For the second straight year, the Parks Department has failed to open the Red Hook Pool on schedule, citing, for the second straight year, an equipment failure that was only discovered two days before Saturday’s long-planned opening day.
Residents of the hard-scrabble peninsular neighborhood — where 35 percent of the residents are below the poverty line, with median incomes that are less than half the citywide median — are burning mad that the same Parks Department has failed to open the same pool for the same reason in two consecutive years.
“It’s terrible because it’s the second year in a row that it’s happening and the kids in Red Hook need this pool,” said Noel S., who has lived most of his 46 years in Brooklyn, most recently in the neighborhood. “You have to remember these are under-priviledged kids. They don’t have means to go to Coney Island. That’s a $6 round trip.”
The closure was revealed only on Friday afternoon in an otherwise laudatory pool story in Hell Gate. Calls to the Parks Department confirmed the news, but revealed additional details. For instance, a Parks spokesperson said that “motors and other equipment” in “the filter plant beneath the pool” were damaged during preparations for the season opening on Thursday, June 25 — just two days before the pool was slated to open.
The pool was subsequently drained and dried “to minimize damage.”
The agency said it did not discover the damage during an end-of-summer inspection last year. At the beginning of last summer, the agency blamed a crucial pipe that crumbled as the pool was being filled for the season, which is typically done just days before opening. Last year, city employees needed to fabricate several custom parts.
This year, the Parks Department says it is “ordering of replacement equipment” and hopes to have the pool ready “before the end of July” (the end of July is 33 pool days from today).
Last year, the long-neglected, 90-year-old pool did not end up opening until mid-August, after the hottest part of the summer. This year’s heat wave will hit as early as Tuesday. And Red Hook is considered particularly subject to the urban heat island effect.
“That’s foul!” said Quwan McLaughlin, 30, who was playing basketball across the street from the pool when he and his three young kids were told that the swimming hole was closed. “We were going to go to the pool today and on Thursday, because it’s going to be 100 degrees. My sons were excited because they know the pool opens the first day after the last day of school.”
Last year’s failure led then-Comptroller Brad Lander and Council Member Alexa Aviles to blast then-Mayor Eric Adams for underfunding the Parks Department and call for the Parks Department to offer transportation to other Brooklyn pools, such as the Douglass-Degraw Pool and the Sunset Park Pool, both of which are sort of nearby, but difficult to reach given Red Hook’s isolated geography. (We asked the Parks Department about such a shuttle this year, but the agency did not respond to that question.)
The pool itself — a lingering triumph of Robert Moses — is a key amenity in a neighborhood that is “constantly overlooked for city resources,” one advocate said last year.
“Whether that’s our parks, our public transit to protected bike lanes … Red Hook is always getting shafted in terms of the resources available to most New Yorkers,” said Kathy Park Price, a spokesperson for New Yorkers for Parks.
The closure, she added, is a “symbol of the overarching lack of funding for parks in the budget.”
The Parks Department did have a small budget for something, however: More than a dozen custom-made, professionally printed signs have been installed on the fences around the pool, officially the Sol Goldman Recreation Center, reading, “Due to the sudden, unforeseen failure of mechanical equipment, Red Hook Pool is temporarily closed. We are working to make repairs as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience.”
Patience may be in short supply as the mercury rises.
“Having a pool keeps kids out of trouble,” added Noel. S. “They’re not up to mischief if they’re swimming.”
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