Recreation

GHOSTS IN THE WATER

Philadelphia created the city pool as we know it. What went wrong?

By Zoe Greenberg

Painting by Serena Saunders Photos by Heather Khalifa

July 26, 2022

Diane Scott’s grandson appeared to her like a ghost in the days after his death.

Scott, part drill sergeant and part mother bear, has directed the Athletic Recreation Center’s after-school program for the last 25 years with an unflagging energy. But by the time the Rec pool finally opened in June, she was struggling to stay optimistic.

Her grandson, Ahmad Abrams, was shot and killed across the street nine days before the city pool opened, eight days after he graduated from high school. He was only 18.

Everywhere she turned at the Rec she saw her grandson: shimmying to the beat as a little boy, cutting across the basketball court, plunging into the pool. Abrams would have been a camp counselor this summer. He was supposed to be here, and here was supposed to be safe.

Most summers at the Rec, the pool is a refuge, no matter what else is happening. Scott feels lucky to have it in her community — many in Philadelphia don’t.

A More Perfect Union is a special project from The Inquirer examining the roots of systemic racism through institutions founded in Philadelphia. Read the series →

Twenty of the city’s 70 outdoor pools won’t open at all this year because of repairs and staff shortages. Twenty-four opened the week of July 4, halfway through the summer.

Residents and public officials connect the shuttered pools to the city’s gun crisis, an epidemic that tends to spike along with the temperature. District Attorney Larry Krasner recently said extending pool hours would be a way of “saving lives.” Community activist Kirsten Britt protested pool closures last year by placing a coffin at the center of a demonstration.

“It's not just a swimming pool,” said City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, vice chair of Council’s Committee on Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs. “The more we allow for these recreational assets to sit disinvested, the more young people that are going to die because they don't have positive outlets, and safe, fun things to do.”

Scott and many of her North Philadelphia neighbors have fought for decades to keep the pool open in the face of budget cuts and neglect. What’s summer, after all, without a swimming pool?

But it wasn’t always so tough to open the pools. Philadelphia was once the pool capital of the nation, even building the first outdoor city pool in 1884. The city helped to advance a radical vision that others soon adopted: To build good citizens, invest in public space. Those early pools were imperfect public squares, initially unsegregated by race.

Today these institutions of American summer remain imperfect, but for different reasons. At the Rec, the grass outside the pool becomes a swamp when it rains and the crumbling basement is sealed off, locking swimmers out of on-site changing rooms. The pool is also open only five hours a day, with just three dedicated lifeguards instead of the six it needs, according to Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, which maintains the majority of the city’s pools.

“The funding, the funding,” Scott said with exasperation on a recent afternoon, parroting the politicians, as kids in towels traipsed past her to the bathroom because the changing rooms are off-limits. “Where is the money going?”

Parks and Rec Commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell said that the campaign to recruit lifeguards and open 50 pools was a “massive, massive effort” and that the city is doing the best it can under extraordinarily trying circumstances. Philadelphia plans to invest in the Athletic Rec pool through its Rebuild program, funded by a tax on sweetened beverages.

Lean budgets and a national lifeguard shortage are, of course, part of the story. But a century of battles over this neighborhood pool reveals a more complicated picture, about who matters, and who gets the chance to live well in a segregated city.

A ‘PROMISE OF STRENGTH AND CLEANLINESS’

The place Scott loves welcomed swimmers as far back as 1895. That’s when a public bath at the Rec site drew a thousand of the “most interesting rough-and-tumble little fellows that ever went swimming, loved liberty and gave promise of strength and cleanliness in a nation,” according to The Inquirer. The neighborhood was then mostly white, home to large numbers of European immigrants.

A generation later, Azalee Akins, a Black woman born in South Carolina, moved to the neighborhood, one of tens of thousands of new arrivals from the South. Akins worked as a seamstress and raised two sons in a brick rowhouse two blocks from the Rec. Every evening, the pool opened on a segregated schedule: first for Black swimmers, then for white ones. It was prized turf in a transforming neighborhood.

Perhaps because of that, there existed “bad blood between the races,” that reached a “boiling point” every summer when the pool opened, said the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s Black paper. Tensions were particularly surging in the summer of 1941, when the city hired two Black lifeguards to patrol the waters for the first time.

On the evening of July 1, Akins’ 14-year-old son, Joseph, went for a swim. Unbeknownst to him, three white boys slipped past a guard and into the pool at the same time. When they found Akins swimming, they held him underwater long enough that he began gasping for air. After he escaped, he told his friends what happened.

Soon the streets near the pool erupted along racial lines. Groups of boys armed themselves with knives, milk bottles, and baseball bats, fighting each other and whomever else they found, according to news accounts. Hundreds of police arrived on the scene and about 20 people, all white, went to the hospital that night, the Associated Press reported.

Much of the upheaval at city pools at the time was rooted in the unspoken fear that Black men would interact with white women in “such intimate and erotic public spaces,” wrote Jeff Wiltse, a historian whose research is currently featured in the “POOL” exhibit at the Fairmount Water Works.

To make sure that didn’t happen, local white men in Philadelphia policed the pools themselves, often with brutality, said Victoria Wolcott, author of the book Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America. If pools were joyful places for white Philadelphians, they would be kept off-limits to their Black neighbors.

In the days that followed the “full-sized race riot,” as The Inquirer called it, city leaders struggled to make sense of what had happened. Black leaders saw the turmoil as the somewhat predictable result of City Council ignoring their pleas for more recreation spaces.

White leaders, in contrast, proposed that the city build a fully segregated all-Black center nearby. Perhaps it would be better, they said, if the unwritten racial rules were finally written down.

‘WE WANT TO SWIM’

Scott, who is 69, grew up near the Rec, sometimes playing king ball and hopscotch on the asphalt courts outside. It was her devotion to the place that made Oktavia Cherry, the Rec’s director, want to work there; Scott made it feel “just like coming home,” Cherry said.

But when a friend initially asked Scott to help out in the 1990s, she was skeptical.

“You want me to come over there?” she asked.

Her impression of neglect was well-founded. In the years since the riot, white people and city leaders had largely abandoned the North Philadelphia neighborhood, along with its pool. By 1950, the white population had fallen by 12%; the next decade it plummeted by 69%. The blocks surrounding the pool were the subject of a 2013 Inquirer business column proposing Philadelphia should raze certain neighborhoods and “totally depopulate” them.

In the wake of desegregation efforts, private swim clubs cropped up “like weeds'' in the 1960s, according to The Inquirer. That’s partly because the federal 1964 Civil Rights Act excluded private clubs from its mandate. Backyard pools also took off, according to Wiltse.

As white people fled for the suburbs and their own pools, Philadelphia pretty much left its public pools to deteriorate.

“Do you have basic tools?” a 1983 survey commissioned by the city government asked Athletic Recreation Center leaders.

“No,” they responded.

Despite her misgivings, Scott agreed to join the Rec’s advisory board in 1995. Within two years she became head of the after-school program, setting up a dance team and expanding homework help. She enrolled her own kids, and then her grandkids.

“OK, Lord, if this is where you want me to be, this is where I’ma be,” she thought. Even if the city didn’t seem to care much about the Rec, she and her neighbors did.

A few years into Scott’s tenure in 2004, crisis struck. Mayor John Street said the city would have to sell or close the Rec pool, part of an effort to balance the budget. Nineteen other pools were also on the chopping block.

Across every neighborhood, residents fought back. A nonprofit sued the city, arguing that the closures discriminated against Black and Latino residents, who would be disproportionately harmed. (The lawsuit was dismissed). Outside of Mayor Street’s news conference one afternoon, two dozen West Philadelphia kids chanted “We want to swim!” so loudly they briefly drowned out the mayor.

The Rec pool survived — that time. But in 2007, the pool once again came under threat; this time the city closed it because it was falling apart.

Scott cried when she heard the news, and then she began to organize.

I know you heard they’re trying to close the pool for good, she told neighbors outside the Rec. What are the kids supposed to do?

“If that building went down, we just knew we’d look up and there would be new housing,” said Talmadge Belo Jr., emeritus member of the Brewerytown Sharswood Community Civic Association.

The Civic Association and the Advisory Council made signs, called council members, and knocked on doors. Belo even made a short Scribe documentary about the Rec in 2007, filming the empty pool through a chain-link fence as a former lifeguard described its “deplorable” condition.

Ultimately their persistence worked. In 2009 the city built a new pool on the site of the old, this one 4 feet deep all the way across. (Philadelphia has filled in most of the deep-ends in its pools, saying they were underused and dangerous.)

That same year, the private Lombard Swim Club helped to raise thousands of dollars to open the city’s public pools, a striking illustration of just how much Philadelphia had abandoned its commitment to funding such public spaces itself.

JOY IN THE WATER, A MEMORIAL OUTSIDE THE GATES

Today, 13 years later, private swim clubs are faring better than ever and many of the city’s public pools are once again in peril. Most of its indoor pools are indefinitely closed.

“If they’ve been closed, there's no opportunity for children to learn how to swim. If I don't know how to swim, I can't train to be a lifeguard,” said Britt, who is president of the Sayre-Morris Advisory Council and head of #IDeservetoSwim initiative. The Sayre-Morris pool, owned by the School District, has been empty for five years.

Perhaps to soften the blow, Commissioner Lovell often says that Philadelphia has the most public pools per capita of any city in the country, but that is not accurate. (A spokesperson for Lovell said the reference was anecdotal.) Lovell also left out a number of public pools in her tally of outdoor pools this year — a bit of a denominator trick that makes the city look better when announcing the percentage that opened.

But it’s true that Parks and Rec officials, operating with a continually gutted budget, have worked virtually nonstop to recruit lifeguards and open pools this year, raising the starting pay and visiting more than 100 schools. They are already drafting lifeguards for 2023.

Outside the Athletic Recreation Center, a makeshift memorial for Scott’s grandson has sprung up in the base of a sycamore tree, a teddy bear and a basketball nestled among white and purple flowers. Scott can’t bring herself to visit.