Water World
I was hoping that a search for Red Hook Pool images would yield something other than this, given the number of Brooklyn photo blogs that seem to sprout up faster than food-hipster restaurants on Smith St. But alas, no. The romantically decayed McCarren Pool in Greenpoint gets its share of attention. But no Flickr-powered shutterbugs seem to have figured out how to smuggle in their cameras to the mammoth Sol Goldman Pool in Red Hook.
We'd often heard tell about it, but it always seemed vaguely difficult to get to, and its long list of regulations (white t-shirts only, boys; and nothing but your towel, your flip-flops, and your sunscreen come with you to the pool area) always seemed like a huge disincentive. However, lately Helena has gotten a taste of swimsuit life, in the form of wading in the lake and a supersized kiddie pool at our friends' place upstate over the weekend of the 4th. And she loves it. So, this weekend, we drank the chlorine in a major way --on Saturday we joined some tot-centric swimming lessons at a local high school, and then on Sunday we paid an impromptu visit to this legendary shangri-la of public bathing in Red Hook.
And here's where I wish I had pictures to share. Short of an actual theme park, it was the biggest goddamn swimming pool I've ever seen. It was the kind of piece of huge public works that simply aren't done any more -- only corporate dollars can accomplish these sorts of feats. I tell you -- and I do not exaggerate -- that the kiddie wading pool is larger than our apartment. And I speak, incidentally, only of the 1/2 of the wading pool which was open when we were there.
The main pool...it's just enormous. Let's put it this way. Say you wanted to drown everybody with one of those annoying push-to-talk chirping walkie-talkie things that now seem to be the electronic accerssory of choice. If I didn't think that a mass drowning of the offenders wasn't in some way an ethically questionable solution, I would recommend this facility for your purposes.
From the facility's main entrance, the route to the actual pool is through a byzantine locker-room/shower-bathroom kind of system, and the journey one has to make back to one's locker, should one need to return to it mid-swim, is of a length that makes one hope for some kind of bus service. And the locker room/shower-bathroom area itself is precisely as appealing as you imagine it might be.
But the pool itself is well-maintained and pristine. And free. Come all ye dusty Gothamites, and be refreshed. And somebody take a picture, please.