Floating Public Pool To Open on East River

Starting next week, New Yorkers looking to escape the heat will have a new option — a pool floating on the East River.

The Floating Pool at Brooklyn Bridge Park Beach will open July 4 on a barge moored between Piers 4 and 5 on the Brooklyn waterfront. It will be open to the public, free of charge, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week through Labor Day. A free shuttle bus will carry swimmers from surrounding neighborhoods.

The 25-meter, seven-lane pool can fit 174 people. On the barge's steel decks is a spray pool for children. Translucent murals depict the history of marine life on the New York waterfront.

The pool is docked at a 43,000-square-foot "beach," a parking lot transformed by sand brought in from Red Hook. "Brooklyn's trying to give Paris a run for its money," the president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, Marianna Koval, said, referring to similar pools on the Seine.

"To take a swimming lesson in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, it's pretty incredible," she said, noting that the pool's opening would mark the first time in 200 years that residents could access the previously industrial area for recreation.

The floating pool is the brainchild of Ann Buttenwieser, an urban planner who described herself as "a big proponent of opening the waterfront for recreation."

"When I started this," some 20 years ago, Ms. Buttenwieser said, "there was nothing on the waterfront. We didn't have Hudson River Park. We didn't have Brooklyn Bridge Park."

The Neptune Foundation, a nonprofit organization Ms. Buttenwieser founded to pursue the project, bought a decommissioned cargo barge in Louisiana in 2004. Construction on the Floating Pool was delayed for five months by Hurricane Katrina, but it was ready for its 10-day voyage to New York by October 2006.

After hitting a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C., Ms. Buttenwieser said, "the pool arrived with a lot of water in it." For the past seven months, it has been anchored at nearby Pier 2 as finishing touches were added.

"It's unique. It's something new. There is just something wonderful about being in the water in the water," Ms. Buttenwieser said.

Though the pool will be a novelty to today's swimmers, it is not unique in the city's history. According to Ms. Buttenwieser's research, at the turn of the 20th century there were 15 riverside pools. People often stood in line for hours for a chance at 20 minutes in the packed pools, which had separate days for men — who generally swam nude — and women, she said.

But unlike today's Floating Pool, which has filtered water, they were filled with river water and gradually abandoned after it became clear they were contaminated with sewage.

"Manhattan Island is surrounded by water, and yet people can't swim in it," the CEO of American Leisure, which will manage the pool, Steve Kass, said. The pool is offering the next best thing, he said, and will host activities ranging from swimming lessons to beach volleyball games.

After spending this summer in Brooklyn, the pool is expected to be moored at communities around the city in the future, perhaps visiting the South Bronx for 2008.