Swimming among strangers in a public pool is everything that I love about living in the city, but doing it underwater. Traversing a mile back and forth during lap swim in a New York public pool sometimes feels like walking down Broadway at midday or taking the 4 train uptown in the evening. It’s meditative, but what each person does affects everyone else; ignoring the other pedestrians creates problems for you and them. As the city’s outdoor pools get ready to open, I’ve been thinking more about this obvious but remarkable detail — this intense togetherness, these feelings of sympathy, of enmity, of forgiveness, even of competition with complete strangers.
But swimming is different from strolling down a sidewalk in one critical way. Pushing yourself in exercise can mean working until you fail, visibly, and it’s a particularly vulnerable thing to do among strangers, especially in open, democratic spaces like a crowded public pool. When you cry in public, those around you will probably leave you alone, but even the silence feels intimate. The act of looking away from someone has just as much a sense of companionship as the act of looking at them, and avoiding a stranger when swimming or walking might be just as companionable as walking or swimming together.
New York City’s public pools have long been palatial — neo-Romanesque, Art Deco or Beaux-Arts, some now a century old or more. The earliest were constructed as bathhouses for residents of poorer neighborhoods at a time before air-conditioning. Robert Moses, an obsessive open-water swimmer, built 11 huge public pools under the Works Progress Administration and started a free swim program to prevent drowning deaths. (The city’s Department of Parks & Recreation continues to offer free swimming lessons.) A French academic once remarked that Los Angeles’s banks recalled churches, stately and sacred. In New York City it’s our pools, these majestic structures built as public amenities that now, often in dire need of repair yet still anchoring communities, seem incredibly humble.
As of 2023, the last pool census I could find, New York City also has over 15,000 private pools. These pools, largely clustered in expensive neighborhoods, often feature in places like luxury residences, hotels and fancy gyms. Some are more affordable than others, but almost all curate their users. They have a reputation for being cleaner, but their utilization can be only as high as their accessibility. New York City’s public pools, on the other hand, in addition to being clean and safe, enjoy mass utilization: According to the parks commissioner, the city’s 50 or so outdoor pools serve about 1.5 million people during the 10-week stretch in the summer when they’re open. When anyone can exercise with anyone, regardless of wealth — as should be the case — no one can control being seen in this state of vulnerability or by whom.
For years, I organized my life around the adult swim hours at the Metropolitan Recreation Center in Williamsburg, home to one of the 12 indoor pools in the Parks Department system (though fewer than half are operating). When the pool closed — temporarily, I hoped — I reorganized my days around the lap swim hours in Crown Heights, Flushing and Manhattan and learned a whole set of manners at each pool, where swimmers have invented and are inventing rules to live (or at least swim) by.
Most public pools in New York are divided into three lanes, organized by speed. You take the lane that best matches your level. As I’ve traversed the city’s public pools, I’ve learned some social norms: You can ask someone who’s overtaking everyone to move to a faster lane, but you can never ask someone who’s holding everyone up to move to a slower lane. Overtake others as little as possible — even when done politely, it’s an aggressive gesture — and with minimal disruption. And never chronically lap everyone else in the lane. It’s antisocial.
These aren’t official rules. They’ve grown organically out of the time and company spent in these lanes among swimmers and with lifeguards. They’re different at different times of day and in different neighborhoods.
At the Constance Baker Motley Recreation Center in East Midtown, swimmers like personal space, so lanes are filled according to one simple rule: Swim alongside as few people as possible. Freed from jostling, I spent my hour focusing only on the brilliant blue of six feet deep, the high windows casting sunlight underwater. When I got out, the other swimmers were crowded around a lifeguard, demanding he reassign space as more people entered the pool.
Constance Baker Motley was the least social pool I visited (at Asser Levy and Chelsea, lifeguards will sometimes give you tips on your front crawl or chat with you at the wall between laps), but whatever the rules at each pool, you follow them to keep the peace, and in the process, you have to make others’ workouts a little smoother. This jostling and negotiation are part of the joy of public swimming. The system can be tense but also humbling. When someone cuts me in line or bumps against my ankles, I can spend the whole swimming hour scowling — only to feel bad when the person smiles at me in the locker room.
On any given day, my lane (medium) might have more slow swimmers or fast swimmers, and I have to adjust my speed to the speed of the lane, try to be just one leg on a larger organism. In a crowded lane where most people are faster than me, I take the opportunity to work on speed, taking more breaks. When most people are slower, I work on my breaststroke. Swimming with other people helps me understand what I can do, both socially and physically. My personal record doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s always influenced by those around me.
I love this collaborative spirit, even if it’s hard to appreciate until I’m out of the pool. And it’s found not just in the exercise itself but also in the whole life of the pool. Once, I lost my grandmother’s anklet in a public pool. The lifeguards let many swimmers stay behind after lap swim had closed so they could help me look for it. They were being kind but were probably also happy just to keep floating around together. (The anklet later materialized in the locker room, but no one complained about getting the extra time in the pool.)
Despite my love for public pools, I have sometimes wished I could afford access to a private one, mostly when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed by the visibility of public swimming. It’s hard enough to try to beat a personal record without having to do it in front of dozens of people. But lately, I’ve been thinking this visibility and voyeurism might be the point. It’s a vulnerable thing to try to improve yourself — especially when to do so, you have to help other people do the same.
This intimacy can be humbling or frustrating. I feel hints of these social joys and awkwardnesses in everything I do in the city and everywhere I go. It’s what makes the urban social experience what it is — this begrudging companionship, this fleeting generosity, this competitive jostling, this fidgety, uncomfortable closeness with strangers.
Apoorva Tadepalli (@storyshaped) is a regular swimmer and a critic based in Queens.
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