We need city pools, and how to find a pool in Philly this summer | Elizabeth Wellington

City kids took public pools for granted. We believed the glistening, chlorinated waters had nowhere else to be but waist-deep with us on days the asphalt sizzled and water ice melted in two seconds flat.

Then came summer 2020. COVID-19 shut down Philly pools and, coincidentally, it happened to be the city’s third hottest summer on record. As is often with the best things in life, we didn’t know what we had until it was gone.

Thousands of Philadelphians will regain entry into their gated, neighborhood oases, but it’s unfortunate that those who need a cool reprieve the most, will not have access to a pool in walking distance from their homes.

» READ MORE: Here are the city pools that will be opening in Philly this summer.

According to an Inquirer analysis, 73% of the pools that will stay closed are in zip codes with a median income of less than $40,000. Only 27% of the pools that will remain closed are in zip codes with a median income of $40,000 or higher.

Among the pools that are reopening, 53% are in zip codes with income below $40,000 and 47% are in zip codes with a median income of more than $40,000.

Access to water is not a luxury, it’s a necessity, where one can pick up an essential life skill — learning to swim — and enjoy the basic comfort of cooling down on days it’s too hot to think.

But it sure feels like a luxury this summer.

The reopening, says Maita Soukup, a spokeswoman for the city’s parks and recreation department, has everything to do with a national lifeguard shortage and the difficulty employers are having to hire minimum wage workers.

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In order for the city’s 69 outdoor pools to open, the city needed to certify more than 400 lifeguards. To date, only a little more than 200 lifeguards have been certified despite the fact the city raised the minimum wage to $15.25 an hour.

According to Soukup, the city prioritized opening the most largest and heavily used pools in areas across the city. “In order to make sure that every neighborhood had access to a pool, we looked at the number of visitors and the size of the pool,” Soukup said. “The pools that were the busiest and were the largest were prioritized for opening.”

So Soukup added, while every Philadelphian won’t be in walking distance from a pool, there will be a pool in the area not far from where they live.

The city had been working diligently to reopen as many pools as it can since it got word in early spring that it was indeed safe to grant Philadelphians access. But because the pools hadn’t been open in more than a year, the city was essentially starting from scratch. Following a year or more than year of out of the water time due to the pandemic, candidates required extra training to regain swimming and rescue skills and build their stamina.

The city’s park and recreation department typically begins to recruit new lifeguards in November, actively targeting college students returning home from winter break. This year recruitment began in mid-March. The city of Philadelphia usually offers training and certification classes at public school pools year-round. However, this year they did not have access to the pools. The city, did however, did spend thousands of dollars in March to install pool heaters and deck warming stations at Samuel Playground Pool in Port Richmond so trainees wouldn’t catch their death in the freezing cold of late winter.

“COVID essentially left us having to start [our lifeguard recruitment efforts] from scratch,” said Thelma Nesbitt, one of five water safety instructors who was helping to oversee lifeguard certification “But reopening these pools is important because it brings back a sense of normalcy to the communities and after the year we had, we need it.”

The impact of COVID-19 doesn’t end there. Popular swim programs like Swim Philly and Philly Swim for Life Camps won’t happen, said Soukup who said instead of focusing on extra-curricular activities, they focused on “getting as many pools open as possible this year.”

» READ MORE: More than 25 of Philly’s pools likely won’t open this summer, due to lifeguard shortages

As a part of COVID-19 protocol, all visitors to Philadelphia city pools will be required to leave their names and numbers upon every visit for contract tracing.

Still pool enthusiasts are beyond grateful for the city’s efforts. “Last year I was afraid for the future of the pools,” said Mica Root, founder of Swimming Philadelphia, a blog that chronicles the happenings at city pools. “That would have been a terrible. It would [have] had such a negative impact on the quality of life, fight for racial justice, and everything our city is trying to improve on.”

The first public pools were warm, unchlorinated waters that poor people bathed in back in the late 19th century, said Jeff Wiltse, a professor of history at the University of Montana and author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. There were several in Philadelphia in the 1880s.

By the early 20th century, bathhouses were chlorinated. When pools became coed in the late 1920s, they also became segregated. “Most whites at the time had racist prejudices against Black men,” Wiltse said. “So it was unthinkable to allow Black men to interact with white women in a social setting as physically and socially intimate as a swimming pool.”

The civil rights movement helped to desegregate pools in the 1950s and 1960s, but as white people moved out of the city, the pools weren’t kept up with the same fervor. Still, neighborhood residents flocked to pools in cities like Philadelphia and they became the heart of the neighborhood in hot, sticky, Philly summers.

“I started swimming in the 1980s after a bad car accident,” Nesbitt said. “I met a lot of people. I became a part of the community of lifeguards. There were so many good people. My kids all became lifeguards, too,” Nesbitt said. The experience defined a part of her life as a native Philadelphian.

The reopening of the pools is a sign communities are on their way back to post-COVID-19 normalcy in a way that’s much more meaningful than eating out at expensive restaurants and returning to the hair salon.

» READ MORE: Pools and camps are back, and PlayStreets will expand again: How Philly recreation is reopening

Pools, like libraries, museums, and public parks, encourage gatherings that cross racial and class lines. Because neighborhood pools are often within walking distance, access to them is not hindered by a lack of reliable transportation. I may not have learned to swim until I was well in my 30s, but I had a lot of fun playing in city pools on those hot days in summer camp growing up in 1980s New York. Without this experience, I know I’d be afraid of water.

In our post-COVID-19 world, time spent at pools amounts to the few blocks of time when kids interact with each other in a technology-free setting. Pool play “is tactile, it’s boisterous, it’s physical, it’s one of the best ways kids can break the chains of the COVID restrictions,” Wiltse said. “They are the perfect antidote to the restrictions that we have been living with this past year.”

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