Lower Manhattan Wades with Baited Breath as Plus Pool Crawls Closer to Reality
While Parisians proudly showed off a Seine river that had been cleaned up enough to host swimming competitions at this year’s Summer Olympics, Lower Manhattan may be the verge of surpassing the City of Light for natatorial pride. On August 7, Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul announced the next step for an unusual floating swimming pool in the East River.
The vision, written as “+Pool” (and spoken as “Plus Pool”), consists of a buoyant dock surrounding a cross-shaped swimming hole (with a safety net on its underside). The pool is designed to capture and filter the flow of the river in which it is immersed, and discharge newly sanitized water in its wake.
Almost from the day this idea was announced in 2010, Lower Manhattan community leaders have advocated for it and pressed City officials to approve its launch at a local site. They most often pushed for a mooring spot in the East River just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, but also discussed locations alongside Governors Island, and in the Hudson River between Pier 26 and Pier 40.
City and State officials instead decided to locate +Pool in the East River south of Pier 35, near Rutgers Street. The pilot program consists of a barge at this location that will test the design of the filtration equipment proposed for +Pool, and assess whether it can purify East River water to the point at which it will be safe to host bathers. If this gear works as intended, the City and State hope to create a miniature version of +Pool as soon as next summer.
“New York City’s waterways are some of our most important assets. By exploring the possibility of a +POOL, we are not only building on our historic investments in public pools across the city, but also expanding equitable access to swimming for all New Yorkers, especially our children,” Mayor Adams said.
The concept behind + Pool began to germinate 14 summer ago, when three friends — designers Jeffrey Franklin and Archie Coates, along with architect Dong-Ping Wong — wondered why there was no facility that would allow the public to swim in the Hudson or East Rivers.
Researching the idea, they realized that 150 years ago, New York had more than a dozen such accommodations. Called “floating baths,” they consisted of decks mounted on pontoons, surrounding a swimming area, with safety nets beneath. The river water passed through the nets, and the floating baths could be towed to almost any shorefront location in the City. By the 1920s, however, environmental despoliation had made bathing in local rivers unsanitary, and the vessels were scrapped.
This idea was resurrected in modified form in 2007, when a barge was retrofitted to enclose a 100,000-gallon swimming pool. In this case, the pool has a solid bottom and the water within is fresh, never coming in contact with the river in which it sits. This vessel — named the Floating Pool Lady and currently the only one of its kind in the United States — is parked at the Bronx waterfront each summer.
But Mr. Dong, Mr. Franklin, and Mr. Coates were interested in a plan that would bring swimmers into contact with the actual water that surrounds this city of islands, albeit in a way that posed no risk of drowning or disease.
They came up with +Pool. Like the floating baths of the 19th century, it features a webbed underside, rather than a solid hull. But the new design includes a water-filtering membrane that acts like an enormous strainer, catching and retaining impurities. As a bonus, the system will disgorge more than one million gallons of freshly decontaminated water back into the surrounding river each day.
In November 2019, CB1 enacted a resolution calling upon the de Blasio administration to move ahead with multiple amenities planned for the Brooklyn Bridge Esplanade, among them + Pool. Around this time, the + Pool team installed a full-scale model of their proposal in the East River between Pier 17 and the Brooklyn Bridge. The installation was not for swimming, but instead was a demonstration piece that changed color depending on water quality. That iteration of the project generated considerable local enthusiasm.
In January of this year, Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams announced that the State and City would jointly fund a $16-million plan for a floating swimming pool to be located in New York waterways. Albany contributed $12 million to the project, while City Hall kicked in an additional $4 million. The original aim was to have the first iteration of +Pool open by this summer, as a test, with a larger rollout ready for the 2025 swimming season.
That deadline slipped, and while the Pier 35 location chosen by the City’s Economic Development Corporation (which is overseeing the project) effectively vetoed Community Board 1’s push for placing a +Pool in district waters, the site is only a few blocks north of the CB1 boundary line.
The implementation of the full-scale version of +Pool (for which no timeline has been announced) is slated to include a cross-shaped floating dock, the branches of which will form a quartet of adjacent pools — one each for toddlers, for adults swimmers, for competitive sports, and for recreation. The versatile configuration will allow each pool to be used independently, or combined to form an Olympic-length lap pool, or opened completely into a single, massive natatorium.