Thomas Jefferson Park and Pool

The Thomas Jefferson Pool, one of eleven giant pools opened in city neighborhoods in the 1930s that changed New York’s summer landscape forever, is a popular summer destination for swimmers, dippers, and waders. Opened in 1936, and with few renovations since, the pool maintains its historic place in the community as a summer escape from New York City’s humid, grimy summers without the racial strife that plagued the pool and the community not so many years ago.

A product of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the eleven pools, implemented by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, were a government-sponsored effort to alleviate bad health conditions and allow for safe recreation in working class neighborhoods. Combined, the new pools could accommodate more than 43,000 bathers at once. Except for McCarren Pool in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, the other ten pools remain open today. Moses, a devoted swimmer himself funded the pools at $1 million apiece from WPA monies provided by the federal government to create desperately-needed jobs and stimulate the economy in the midst of the Great Depression.

The second of the new pools to open, Jefferson Park’s pool — 270 feet long by 125 feet wide — accommodated 2,600 people at a time. Two large fountains emerged from either end of the swimming area, and the separate diving pool featured seven diving boards — one of them a high board. In the 1990s the Parks Department decided the diving pool was dangerous and has since transformed it into a wading pool.

Like all the new Moses pools, Jefferson sported innovative underwater lighting that looked particularly spectacular at night when the celebratory ribbon cuttings were held. According to Robert Caro in the Power Broker, neighborhood parades preceded the speeches; local priests blessed the clear, chlorinated waters; diving and racing competitions fired the crowd up; and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took the stage. “It was he,” Caro writes, “who pulled the switch that turned on the underwater lighting, an event that never failed to bring a murmur of “oooohs” from the crowd, it was he who gave the word to raise the flag and it was he who got to cut the ribbon and shout to the waiting children, “Okay, kids, it’s all yours!”

The Jefferson Park Pool is located right by the East River on 111th St. in what is now a primarily Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican neighborhood. However, in the 1930s, the neighborhood hosted the largest Italian-American community in the United States, and a very large Jewish community as well.

Robert Moses, concerned for the peace and safety of the pools, set out to prevent racial mixing. Jefferson Park’s Pool, in ethnically-mixed East Harlem, not far from largely African American Central Harlem, was the place Moses most worried about. Some historians are questioning Caro’s claims regarding how Moses deterred use of the pool by New Yorkers of color, but his key point still stands. “One could go to the pool on the hottest summer days,” Caro wrote, “when the slums of Negro and Spanish Harlem a few blocks away sweltered in the heat, and not see a single non-Caucasian face. Negroes who lived only half a mile away, Puerto Ricans who lived three blocks away, would travel instead to Colonial Park, three miles away — even though many of them could not afford the bus fare for their families and had to walk all the way.”

Bizarre as it seems, swimming pools defined the front lines of racial segregation — and integration — in both the south and the north. Treasured by all, pools demarked turf. Thomas Jefferson Pool didn’t remain as lily-white as Caro suggests, but as Italians and Puerto Ricans bartered and battered for control over neighborhood territory, the pool glowed hot.

As Puerto Ricans evolved into the area’s new majority, their ability to claim territory also increased. Bobby Rodríguez and Frankie Yulfo, still of El Barrio today, remember having to make their way through the Italian gang called the Redwings to get to the pool. One attempt was particularly unsuccessful and Bobby got stabbed in the back. A?rea Almeida remembers that sympathetic Italians would sometimes watch out for her as she passed through their territory. Other times, she explained, when the ground was particularly fought over, “you had to cross the Italian section with a lot of Puerto Ricans. And if you were by yourself, honey, you would not walk, you would run.”

So if it was so hard to get to the pool, why did the Puerto Ricans keep trying? Partly because they wanted to use the pool and have fun like everybody else. Carlos Diaz remembers jumping over the fence at night with his friends after the pool had closed. They would find crowds of kids still swimming; trying to keep away from the patrol cop’s flashlight. If play was one reason to persist in using Thomas Jefferson pool, equal rights was another. Felipe Colón, who owns the popular restaurant El Fogón, put it this way: They fought until they were finally left alone. They fought for access. The pool was a nice place built by the City — so it was meant for everyone. The pool is a symbol of determination. Puerto Ricans wouldn’t let anyone browbeat them and not let them use a facility that belonged to everyone. They suffered and fought to get a better way of life and the benefits that they have now.

The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission declined to permanently protect the pools by designating them as landmarks when some citizens suggested that action in the 1990s. But landmarks of a kind they are: marking an era of city leaders willing and able to take responsibility for the population’s health and well-being; the painful struggles of the city’s diverse populations to claim space for themselves; and the sweetness of triumph over the meanness of racism. Today the public can bathe in the pool’s history as it bathes in its cool water. Come and swim.