The Indypendent66%
NYC’s New Deal Era Public Pools Opened with a Splash 90 Years Ago This Summer 17%
By Amba Guerguerian44%
7/16/2026, 8:56:10 AM
Keywords: Public Pools, New Deal, Works Progress Administration, Wpa, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, Nyc, Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Red Hook, Brownsville, Greenpoint, Hamilton Fish, Jackie Robinson Pool, Central Harlem, Racial Inequality, Redlining, Public Sector, Working People, Mayor Mamdani, Tricia Shimamura
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Negativity Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 9.9% saturation with 66 hits. Analysis detected 686 faulty-reasoning hits from 665 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 28% and a BS Rank of 17% (21,170 of 25,472 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 83.10% of the article peer group.
On Monday, July 20, 1936, the Brooklyn Eagle’s front page highlighted the latest developments in the Spanish Civil War, which saw New York City leftists join the fight against fascism.
The borough’s large circulation daily newspaper also furnished plenty of local information, including that the day’s high temperature would reach 85 degrees.
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (right) officially opens the Sunset Pool.
That evening brought Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and throngs of working-class New Yorkers to Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.
As the next day’s Eagle reported, 50,000 enthusiasts flocked to the grand opening of the park’s grand new public swimming pool.
“This is the finest swimming pool in the country,” La Guardia advised the roaring crowd, “and it’s all yours.”
An Eagle photo showed him switching on the dazzling underwater lighting system, illuminating the evening sky.
Outside the facility, 200 cops tried to keep the delirious masses from “breaking into the pool grounds and mobbing the speakers’ rostrum.”
The Eagle said that folks turned out from “all of Brooklyn” for the festivities, which included a performance by a Parks Department diving troupe.
Sunset Park would be the first of four pools that opened in the borough that summer (in Red Hook, Brownsville and Greenpoint).
In mid-August, La Guardia and Moses received a similarly rousing response at the Red Hook launch.Funded by FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), 11 outdoor pools opened across the five boroughs in the summer of 1936.
Ninety years later, all remain operational.
They provide enduring monuments to the New Deal and its vision of an expansive public sector that provides goods and services for working people.
Hamilton Fish also opened in 1936 and continues to serve the Lower East Side.
It includes a wading pool for small children (foreground) and a full-sized pool with 12 50-meter lanes that can hold more than a thousand bathers.
Photo: John Tarleton
The extent to which FDR-era policies exacerbated racial inequality (particularly via redlining) is a matter of ongoing controversy .
Throughout La Guardia’s first term (1934-37), he and Moses confronted charges of discrimination regarding public amenities, with Black leaders arguing that white neighborhoods received preferential treatment.
At the opening of the Central Harlem pool (now known as Jackie Robinson) on the second Saturday in August 1936, the feisty mayor shot back at his detractors.
The New York Times reported that 25,000 people attended the ceremony at what was then called Colonial Park.
Tap dance legend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson headlined the entertainment.
La Guardia declared that the sparkling new pool refuted charges by the “knockers” (critics) of his administration’s distribution of resources.
“Come around and look at this pool,” the mayor urged.
During LGA’s first term, Moses oversaw the construction of pools, the building and/or renovation of city parks and the makeover of the Central Park Zoo.
In 1937, La Guardia, a very liberal Republican, easily won reelection over a conservative Democrat.
The city’s network of public pools would continue to expand through the early 1970s.
Although Mayor Mamdani regularly touts La Guardia as his inspiration, it is difficult to see how he can match LGA’s enhancements of the city’s parks and recreation.
There is no spigot of federal funds comparable to what the New Deal brought to the city—and that’s not only because the Republicans are in control.
Pro-corporate Dems rarely invoke the positive legacies of the FDR era.
The New Deal is “at the core of our party’s identity,” Mamdani recently told the New York Times , but “you can’t see it around you anymore.”
At the city’s 11 WPA pools, FDR’s ghost hovers.
Perhaps Mamdani and Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura can devise new funding streams and hatch creative plans for legacy projects.
It’s stillLGA’s first term.
That we’re now celebrating 90 years of summer swimming should at least inspire Mamdani and Shimamura to think big.
Ted Hamm’s Meet Mayor Mamdani is available from OR Books.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.