SEEKING
TO RECAPTURE THE GLORY OF THE PAST. OR MAYBE NOT.
Originially published April 9, 2006
Wearing
Speedos and tank suits, hundreds of swimmers crammed the enormous
pool at McCarren Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. On this steamy day
in 1937, they splashed, swam and hurled themselves into the water
- their antics immortalized by a photographer from the Parks Department
who recorded the moment.
Flash
forward to 1984: Some of McCarren Park's neighbors barricaded the
entrance to the pool, which had been shut down the previous summer.
Employees of the city's Parks Department preparing to restore the
pool were turned away by a small group of local residents, who told
city contractors to leave the pool in its crumbling state, recalled
Julius Spiegel, the Brooklyn parks commissioner since 1981. Their
complaint was that young people from other neighborhoods had been
hanging out at the pool and destroying the place.
Fast-forward
22 years, to now. The McCarren Park pool is draped with signs that
read "Danger." Grass and weeds shoot through the concrete
around the empty open-air pool, and the huge auburn building that
partly surrounds it is encircled with a chain-link fence and blanketed
with graffiti.
For
years, the McCarren pool has been a battleground. In the 1980's, many
wanted it demolished, while others wanted it restored. Reinvigorated
by recent arrivals from neighboring Williamsburg, those in favor of
restoration have renewed their push to save it, to recapture the glory
depicted in the 1937 photo.
But
others want it left as it is, seeing it as a valuable and unusual
space perfect for dance performances, film festivals and other community
activities. Ron Delsner Presents, a former subsidiary of Clear Channel,
the Texas-based radio giant, is planning a series of concerts this
summer at the pool.
"Now
that they're not going to destroy the pool," said Phyllis Yampolsky,
an artist and a longtime community resident who wants to see the pool
restored, "it's magnetic."
Ms.
Yampolsky, who has lived in Greenpoint since the mid-1980's, was sitting
at the kitchen table in her spare row house. Wearing hiking boots
and cargo pants, she resembled a wizened New Age guru. She deflected
questions about her age - "I want to put 'Chronology is bad for
your health' on a T-shirt," she said - but she is as passionate
as ever about her pet cause.
She
began battling to fix up the pool in 1989. Over the years, she has
become one of the staunchest advocates for restoring the pool, which
was built in 1936 by Robert Moses as one of 10 pools that stretched
across the five boroughs. McCarren was the largest. Today, it is the
only one that is closed.
"There
was a lot of opposition from the old guard in the community,"
she said as she described the atmosphere in Greenpoint two decades
ago. That "old guard," she said, mainly people of Polish,
Italian and Irish background, was dead set on keeping out young people
who flocked to McCarren from other neighborhoods.
Junior
Nieves, a 51-year-old Time Warner Cable repairman who grew up in Greenpoint,
vividly remembers the rough times. "There were riots," he
said. "The Puerto Ricans were on one side, the Polish were on
the other, and all hell was breaking loose. The cops were chasing
everybody."
Five
years after McCarren pool closed, Ms. Yampolsky joined the Friends
of McCarren Park, a community group that wanted the pool demolished.
But after seeing the pool for the first time, she changed her mind.
Soon after, she and a few other seceded and created a rival group,
the Independent Friends of McCarren Park.
Ms.
Yampolsky wants McCarren pool to look the way it did back in 1936,
but with some modern improvements. She envisions something like a
Roman bath complex, with baths, exercise rooms and a cafe. She has
created a booklet illustrated with watercolor sketches and historical
photos, and even commissioned an architectural model of a restored
pool by Robert A. M. Stern, paid for by a grant from the New York
State Council on the Arts. She plans to use the booklet to spread
her ideas about the pool and to help with fund-raising.
The
Parks Department estimates the cost of restoring the McCarren pool
at upward of $40 million, and at the moment no one is willing to foot
the bill.
That
is where Ron Delsner Presents stepped in. Last summer, the company
paid for a modest cleanup so the pool could accommodate an experimental
dance performance by Agora, a troupe founded by the French-Canadian
choreographer Noemie LaFrance. It was the first public event to grace
the graffiti-covered space since it had closed. Because of the donation,
Ron Delsner Presents received a contract to present 10 more events
this summer.
Agora's
performance was a success; according to Ms. LaFrance, 10,000 people
packed the rundown space to attend the company's three-week run. "They
were excited," she said, sitting at a large table in her Williamsburg
loft, "to see something that seemed so dead and so without hope
get a little bit of hope."
Ms.
LaFrance, 32, has short, messy hair, a slight accent and a penchant
for speaking abstractly. Since the performance by Agora, she has become
one of the most visible players in the fight over the pool's future.
But her vision of McCarren looks substantially different from Ms.
Yampolsky's. If it were up to Ms. LaFrance, restoration crews wouldn't
touch the place.
Last
summer, her wish was granted. Except for minor touchups, the pool
remained in shambles, the graffiti left intact. Mr. Spiegel, the Brooklyn
parks commissioner, laughed when he recalled the cleanup process.
"I wanted to clean the graffiti up, and she wanted to keep it
rough-looking," he said of an encounter with Ms. LaFrance. "She's
an avant-garde artist, I'm a bureaucrat. But we're both from Montreal."
Ms.
LaFrance sees fund-raising as secondary to preserving McCarren as
a public space, and she says the pool should be used regardless of
its looks.
Ms.
Yampolsky bristles at this notion. "Before," she said, "it
was poison. Now, everybody wants a piece of it. But nobody is raising
the money to restore it."
