I visited my good friend SingSong one recent Saturday in her current home of New York City. Since I spend most of my time in Philadelphia, the Special Olympics participant of major U.S. cities, it is nice to escape to an actual metropolis every now and again. Since my trek took place in July, a time of year during which New York is almost as hot as I am, it was decided that a traditional summertime activity was in order.
The original plan was to travel to Brighton Beach, which was perfect except for one small flaw: it was Brighton Beach. While I’m certain the sunlight would have looked quite magnificent bouncing off of the bullet casings in the water, we opted out this time. Besides, it would have required a ride aboard the New York City subway. Normally, I don’t mind the MTA, but in the dead of summer, descending into any given station is similar to walking into Rush Limbaugh’s armpit after he has finished a run (to the fridge) (or from the annual Gay Pride Parade). Thus, we settled on the next best thing: a city pool.
Like “Brighton Beach,” the term “city pool” doesn’t always conjure up the most pleasant of images. When most folks hear the term “city pool,” they picture a concrete hole in an overgrown-with-weeds (or an actual weed plant farm), possibly abandoned, property. Said hole is filled with stagnant water that made its way there via a 1937 rainstorm. Splashing around in this atrocity are the poorest of the poor, people so far below the poverty line that they have begged for money from street bums and art majors. Not helping matters is the fact that most areas containing “city pools” also have an equal, if not greater, amount of “private pools” and “bathtubs.”
The New York City city pool (I think it’s OK to use “city” twice there, right?) SingSong took me to differed greatly from the above description. For example, there were TWO concrete holes on the property.
Also, the place was perfect. No overgrown weeds. No stagnant water. No poor people. No Rush Limbaugh. Two very clean and well-maintained Olympic-sized swimming pools glistened under the early July sun, as well as under the supervision of numerous lifeguards. It was quite a relief to SingSong and I; we may have very well thought, thanks to the aforementioned stigmata attached to the term “city pool,” that we’d be entering a fenced-in version of New York Harbor. Again, this wasn’t the case at all; the pollution content was at a strict 0% (compared to the Harbor’s 200%) and, unlike New York Harbor, all of the bodies in the city pool were living.
Being a part of the city government, however, the pool was not without its regulations. Like the airport, courthouse, or any store frequented by Lindsey Lohan, bag-searchers greet you. I suppose that’s a good thing; if someone shot, blew up, or otherwise harmed swimmers with a weapon smuggled onto the premises, the ensuing blood and body parts could clog the pool filters. What really confused/irritated/semi-amused me was the t-shirt rule.
Only, and I mean ONLY, white t-shirts are permitted in the pool area.
If your shirt is any color other than white, you must lock/discard/eat it, even if your sole plan was to leave it on a plastic lounge chair while you swam. I have to wonder how difficult it was for the two (yes, TWO) pool employees to tell people (including us) this. Both of these employees hailed from not-so-Caucasian races…and were forced to execute a “white only” rule, even if it did apply to clothing. For the record, bathing suits of any color were permitted. At least for now.
Lockers are available to use, although the “lock” part of the term is your responsibility (technically, the pool provides many public “ers” to patrons). If you don’t bring your own padlock, your valuables have all of the security of a September 10, 2001 airline terminal. Fortunately, the combination lock I brought did the trick and also served double duty as a nostalgic reminder of the past when combination locks were used every day by us in high school. The actual memory of HOW to open the lock was not part of this reminder, unfortunately. Squeezing our stuff into a 10-inch-by-10-inch locker (which is nearly TWICE the size of a standard $3000/month Manhattan apartment), we commenced swimming.
The experience was fun and wholly devoid of incident. The universal 3-foot depth of the pools was kind of a downer; diving into one could very well result in serious head damage, sending you to the hospital or New York City government. Before long, the lifeguards constantly blew their whistles, signaling that swim time had ended for pool cleaning and maintenance. I wondered why the guards didn’t simply demand everyone exit the pool verbally before remembering that they would have had to say so in about 97,000 different languages, including Klingon.
In closing, my apprehension toward city pools was shown to have been misplaced; it simply belongs on Philadelphia city pools. It was a definite improvement over the township swim club my family belonged to during my childhood. The club was seriously located directly across the street from a sewage treatment plant and defined “good” conditions as “maybe you’ll only contract three diseases today.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and retrieve my black t-shirt from the impound.
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