New York City Is About to Get a Pool in the East River. Here Is Why That Took 150 Years.
New Yorkers are surrounded by water on nearly every side and have almost nowhere to swim in it. That is about to change.
This May, a floating pool called +POOL is scheduled to be installed at Pier 35 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The pool filters up to one million gallons of East River water daily through a custom, chemical-free, layered filtration system. The initial version is a modest 2,000 square feet, designed as a proof of concept before a full-scale facility is built. Public swimming is not guaranteed yet. City agencies need to observe the filtration system running at full scale before approving public access.
Still, this is genuinely significant. New Yorkers have not had legal public swimming access to their rivers for roughly a century.
How the East River Got This Bad
In the mid-19th century, swimming in both rivers was commonplace. By 1870, the city had embedded 22 public pools into the waterways, complete with dressing rooms and gas lighting for night swimming. Then the city grew, and the water did not keep up. Industrial dumping, combined sewer overflows, and the destruction of the harbor's natural filtration system drove a collapse over the following decades. By 1926, dissolved oxygen levels in the East River had dropped to 13 percent, below the point at which most fish can survive. The floating baths closed, and public river swimming disappeared.
Today, rainfall still triggers approximately 21 billion annual gallons of raw sewage into the city's waterways through a combined sewer overflow system dating to the 19th century. Less than one percent of New York City's total shoreline is currently open to public swimming.
What +POOL Actually Does
The project does not clean the river. That distinction matters. +POOL filters the water that enters the pool itself, creating a clean swimming environment inside the structure while the river around it remains the river. The concept was developed in 2010 by architect Dong-Ping Wong, who designed a plus-shaped floating pool where the walls themselves serve as the filtration mechanism. The plus shape is functional, not decorative. The original full-scale design calls for four sections that can function as a children's pool, a lounge, a lap pool, and a water sports area simultaneously, combining into a 9,000 square foot facility. What arrives at Pier 35 this spring is a smaller rectangular version to prove the filtration system works before the full build-out proceeds.
The project received a combined $16 million from New York State and New York City as part of Governor Hochul's NY SWIMS initiative, described as the largest statewide investment in swimming facilities since the New Deal.
Why This Matters Beyond Swimming
The Lower East Side location was not chosen at random. The surrounding community district is an environmental justice area, with a significant portion of its children living below the poverty line. A public pool at the edge of the East River is infrastructure, not novelty. New York trails nearly every other major American city in public pool availability, and the pools that do exist in summer are notoriously overcrowded and understaffed.
The deeper point is what cities do with their waterfronts, and who gets access to them. The High Line proved reclaimed infrastructure can become beloved public space. Brooklyn Bridge Park proved industrial waterfront can be converted into something people actually use. +POOL is the next version of that argument, and the most technically ambitious one yet.
The barge is reportedly en route from Mississippi. Whether public swimming follows this summer depends on what city agencies see when the filtration system runs at full scale. But the infrastructure is moving, and that alone is new
New Yorkers are surrounded by water on nearly every side and have almost nowhere to swim in it. That is about to change.