Moses Parting the Waters
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Robert Moses never learned how to drive. But he did know how to swim and was on the swim team at Yale. For years, whenever people thought of Moses, they thought of water. He built a marina at 79th Street. His bridges vaulted over bodies of water. Above all, he built Jones Beach in 1929. We take it for granted, but when it opened Jones Beach was greeted as a wonder of the world, the envy of governments that could only dream of providing such a luxury to their people. The beach made Moses internationally famous. When he went to work for New York City in 1934, he sought to provide the Depression-era city with something like the world-class amenities he had built out on Long Island. His thoughts turned to swimming, and in 1936 the city opened 11 municipally operated pools, some of the most impressive ever built.
The Queens Museum of Art’s portion of the blockbuster threevenue exhibition “Robert Moses and the Modern City” devotes a whole section to pools. One of the most famous is the Astoria Park Pool in Queens. Located just across Hell Gate from Ward’s Island, at 24th Avenue and 19th Street, with the mighty Triborough Bridge looming overhead, the pool was part of Moses’s “Hell Gate Waterfront Improvement,” which involved the Triborough Bridge, the transformation of Ward’s and Randall’s islands into parkland, and public housing. The Astoria pool was built with a capacity for 6,200 swimmers, one piece in a municipal system designed to allow 49,000 New Yorkers to swim at the same time.
The Astoria pool opened on July 2, 1936. Astoria Park dates from the 1910s when the city built it. In 1917, the beautiful Hell Gate Bridge, a railroad bridge, designed by engineer Gustav Lindenthal and architect Henry Hornbostel, rose over the northern end of Astoria Park. The city broke ground for the Triborough Bridge in 1929, but put the project on hold as the Great Depression depleted the city’s funds. When Robert Moses came to work for the La Guardia administration, he set out to complete the bridge, which was the most complex feat of steel construction ever attempted. Moses used labor provided by the Works Progress Administration for most of what he built in the 1930s, including the Triborough Bridge and the Astoria pool.
John Mathews Hatton designed the bathhouse, the structure that lends architectural distinctiveness to each of the city pools. Hatton had earlier been the partner of Diego Suarez, one of the most important American landscape architects. Several other architects, landscape architects, and engineers worked on Moses’s staff at the Parks Department and contributed to the pools’ designs. The consulting landscape architect, for example, was Gilmore Clarke, who taught landscape architecture at Cornell and worked for Moses on the spectacular design of Orchard Beach in the Bronx.
The Astoria bathhouse bears a striking art moderne design with “fluted” brick piers and walls and extensive use of glass block, a very chic material in the 1930s, at once very modern in appearance yet within the budgetary constraints of W. P. A. projects. As at other municipal pools, Astoria has separate swimming, wading, and diving pools, as well as bleacher seating for competitions — like the Olympic trials that took place at Astoria in 1936.
Astoria pool today shows the expected wear and tear, but is otherwise remarkably intact, and well worth taking a look at in this year of Robert Moses.
