\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through <\/em>The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.<\/em><\/p>\n My husband often hears me say that all I need to be happy is a sunny day and a pool. (He would argue that I don\u2019t say this so much as I whine it.) No matter how bad a day I\u2019m having, if I can squeeze in just 10 minutes coursing through the water, watching the dappled sun reflect off my arms, life feels bearable again. When I dive my head underwater, I feel temporarily hidden from my problems, as if nothing can find me down there.<\/p>\n Pools are so important to me that in 2020, one of my biggest concerns was whether the pandemic would prevent public pools from opening. I couldn\u2019t bear to watch a whole swimming season pass me by. (In defense of my screwed-up priorities, this was before I had kids.)<\/p>\n That may seem melodramatic, but for decades, experts have argued that pools are essential for mental, physical, and social health. Swimming has been shown to boost moods; it routinely ranks among people\u2019s favorite forms of exercise. When I interviewed Bonnie Tsui, the author of Why We Swim, she told me that being in water gives you \u201cthe feeling of both being buoyed and being embraced.\u201d The pressure of the water combined with the release of gravity does something uniquely salubrious to our brains. Sure, you can get this same zing from an ocean or a lake, but not everyone lives near one of those. A pool is a bit of backyard magic, a chance to find transcendence in the everyday.<\/p>\n For decades, writers have been documenting the wonders of pools in our pages. In 1967, Leonard Conversi described how his swimming lessons left him flabbergasted by \u201cunanticipated ease, when the world seems to divide before us like a perforation and the body feels itself inebriate, or falling.\u201d However, after Conversi did a \u201cjig of triumph\u201d at the end of the diving board, he was asked to leave the swimming club and find \u201can organization more suited to your needs and temperament.\u201d Conversi was unfazed: \u201cTo have learned to breathe while moving in an alien element is to have begun to master the secret of animal life.\u201d<\/p>\n Even people who aren\u2019t sun-seekers can recognize the salutary effect of immersion. In 2006, the journalist Wayne Curtis traveled to the thermal pools of Iceland and noted that \u201cstepping into thermal waters is like stepping into Oz: life changes from the black-and-white of imminent hypothermia to a lustrous, multidimensional world of color and warmth.\u201d The pools are a social hub in Iceland; people gather there with their friends and kids. Sounds heavenly.<\/p>\n This idea, that pools can be a \u201cthird place\u201d for people to meet and chill, has existed for decades. In a 1952 call for cities to revitalize themselves, the developer William Zeckendorf suggested building parks with swimming pools as one way to keep urban workers from fleeing to the suburbs:<\/p>\n I visualize these fun centers as consisting of a tremendous dance hall, bowling alleys, skating rinks, merry-go-rounds for the children, a swimming pool for the children and one for the adults too\u2014in short, a happy, functionally designed center for dancing and exercise and entertainment \u2026 People would feel that their city is a great place to live in, not a great place to get away from.<\/p>\n His entreaty serves as a somewhat tragic companion piece to one that Yoni Appelbaum, an Atlantic deputy executive editor, wrote a decade ago. Starting in the 1920s, pools did become the kinds of recreation hot spots that Zeckendorf hailed\u2014until they began to desegregate in the \u201950s. Rather than continue to use public pools, which welcomed all races, some suburbanites retreated to private club pools, such as the one at the center of a racist incident in McKinney, Texas\u2014the town where I went to high school and where my parents still live. During a party at a private-subdivision pool in 2015, teens who allegedly didn\u2019t live in the community showed up, someone called the police, and an officer tackled a young Black girl to the ground, pinning her with both knees on her back. (The officer was placed on administrative leave and then resigned; the McKinney police chief said that the department\u2019s policies didn\u2019t \u201csupport his actions.\u201d A grand jury later declined to bring criminal charges against him.)<\/p>\n Public pools have been \u201cfrequent battlefields\u201d of racial tension, Appelbaum wrote. \u201cThat complicated legacy persists across the United States. The public pools of mid-century\u2014with their sandy beaches, manicured lawns, and well-tended facilities\u2014are vanishingly rare.\u201d Many public pools have become neglected and underfunded, usurped by private pools funded by HOA fees.<\/p>\n I say we start the backlash to this backlash: in the spirit of Zeckendorf, dig up some unused parking lots and fallow fields, and open public pools again. Though this would be a resource-intensive endeavor, it would be worth it. Take it from the famed New York City urban planner Robert Moses: \u201cIt is no exaggeration to say that the health, happiness, efficiency, and orderliness of a large number of the city\u2019s residents, especially in the summer months, are tremendously affected by the presence or absence of adequate bathing facilities.\u201d This summer and in the hot, hot summers to come, America needs pools\u2014for everyone.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. My husband often hears me say that all I need to be happy is a sunny day and a pool. (He would argue that I don\u2019t say this so much as I whine it.) No<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[574,575,177],"class_list":{"0":"post-8946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-pools","10":"tag-public"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}