“We don’t own a car, so we can’t drive to the lakes, the beach and more,” said Jesse Amaro, a home health aide. It was on one of the hottest days of last summer, and the stream of people stretched down the sidewalk into the early afternoon.
She surveyed the stream of sunbathers, whose only relief was a mist from a hose circling a street sign. It will take her and her young daughter an hour to get in, and then 3 p.m., when the pools are closed for an hour for cleaning and the staff take a break, they will have to finish their swim or courage to queue a second time to return. enter. Amaro, 46, decided to skip it. They go home.
These struggles contrast with the flashy ambitions of 1936, when the city opened 11 of its largest pools. They were designed as lavish bathing palaces for the masses, symbols of civic pride and public investment. During the New Deal, the federal government helped build these elegant, opulent spaces for poor New Yorkers – mostly white at the time – whose children often died. drowned trying to cool off in rivers.
But many pools in New York, like others around the country, remain segregated. Some have claimed that Robert Moses, the park’s powerful commissioner, intentionally built them in the center of white and black neighborhoods, rather than at the edge, creating white pools. and black in fact.
To prevent unrest during a time of racial tension in the late 1960s, the city began opening dozens of smaller pools in overheated, underserved Black and Latino neighborhoods.
The draconian policies, enacted decades ago in response to pool violence, continue to limit what bathers can get onto the pool deck, infusing into the pool what Ms. psychology in the prison yard”.
