It’s 90 degrees outside and a crowd is gathered at McCarren Pool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The expansive pool is sufficiently immense to offer 6,800 swimmers sanctuary from the heat, and with hardly any shade in the area, jumping into the water appeals to the visitors. Only one thing stops them: McCarren Pool has not been filled since 1983.

“It was the gem of Greenpoint, the ruby in the ring,” a Greenpoint native and a leader of the Polish Nobility Association Foundation, Leonard Suligowski, 77, said yesterday, gazing out at the chipped concrete, rusting diving platforms, and graffiti.

“It’s surreal seeing it like this, like being in a Salvador Dali painting. They used to line up four abreast to get in, and the line would wrap around the corner.”

Mr. Suligowski will see his beloved pool filled with people again this fall, but not in the way he remembers. The city’s commissioner of parks and recreation, Adrian Benepe, announced yesterday that the 50,000-square-foot pool will be the site of a dance show this September and will serve as a performance space through next summer. He emphasized, however, that his long-term plan is to see the pool filled and welcoming swimmers again, as soon as it is financially possible.

In the meantime, Noemie Lafrance of Sens Productions will use McCarren Pool as the setting for her new site-specific dance show, “Agora,” to run between September 13 and 24.

“I’ve always really liked abandoned spaces, and I was inspired by both the grandeur and the architecture of the pool,” Ms. Lafrance said. “The name comes from agoraphobia … the first instinctual feeling you get in a space that large.”

New York-based Sens Production and the prominent concert producer Ron Delsener Presents – which will organize concerts at the site through the summer of 2006 – are together donating $250,000 toward repairs to make the pool ready to receive the public once again, and Mr. Benepe has said Mayor Bloomberg has allocated $1 million to stabilize the structure and make it safe again.

Repairs will include installing a rail around the pool, resetting a granite step, re-cementing hazardous areas, cleaning and restoring the old ticket booth, and painting over the graffiti.

Ms. Lafrance said her goal is to leave the unique space open for artists to use in creative ways.

“This community has been so innovative in the arts, and doing things outside the box, for so long,” she said. “There comes a time when our theaters and our museums can’t accommodate the work of our artists.”

Everyone involved in the McCarren project is excited to see the pool site available to the community again as it was in its glory days during the 1930s and ’40s.

McCarren was the eighth, and one of the last, of the giant pools opened with funds from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in 1936. The master planner Robert Moses is credited with the distinctive design for Greenpoint’s community pool, which is at Lorimer Street between Driggs Avenue and Bayard Street. The grand, striped arch that served as a bathhouse stands 38 feet high and remains the pool’s most recognizable feature.

Originally, there were three separate pools – a shallow pool for children, the huge main pool, and a deep, semicircular diving pool where water ballets were performed.

Community members swarmed to the oasis on hot days, Mr. Suligowski said, and people had to show up early to get a good spot. Admission was 25 cents, but on Saturdays, he said, you could get in for free until noon. Even walking by the pool on hot days offered relief from the heat, he said.

“Many a time, I couldn’t afford to go in,” he said. “But I would just walk by. It was the coolest spot in town. The wind would come off the water, and people would be shivering when they got out.”

McCarren flourished until the 1970s, when city budget straits led to cutbacks and routine maintenance was no longer performed on the pool. In the early 1980s, when the money was finally available, the pool was closed for renovations. It never reopened.

There have been several plans to renovate and restore the pool in the past two decades. During Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign to have New York City selected as host for the 2012 Olympics, McCarren was considered an ideal site for a practice pool for Olympic swimmers. Like the fallen Olympic dream, however, none of the plans for the pool has become reality.

The string of failed plans has made Mr. Suligowski cynical, and he said he’ll believe the new plans when he sees them realized.

“People in the past, politicos and neighbors, have started programs to get it going again, and they’ve all fallen by the wayside,” he said. “Nothing has ever resulted from all the talk.”

The site’s future as a pool may still hang in the balance, but Ms. Lafrance said she sees no reason not to use the space in the meantime.

Already deeply involved in rehearsals, her 30-person dance troupe performed excerpts from “Agora” at the pool yesterday morning. Dressed in 1980s prom dresses and neon spandex, the dancers crawled, jumped, and ran through the sprawling pool with the energy of children.

With a little imagination, onlookers could almost see them as a group of excited young swimmers taking refuge from the blazing sun – and could almost see the majestic pool, filled with bodies in motion, as again the crown jewel of Greenpoint.