On a sweltering Friday afternoon in Chicago earlier this month, I was in desperate search of relief from the heat. The single air-conditioning unit in my third-floor apartment bedroom was not cutting it: I needed to submerge my body in cold water, fast.
I could have hauled it over to Lake Michigan, but biking for forty minutes in more than 100 degrees was inadvisable. Luckily, just a few blocks from my apartment lay an anodyne oasis: my local public pool.
Within minutes, I walked through the open gate, threw my towel over an unclaimed lounge chair, and hopped into the deep end. My body temperature felt instantly lowered, and I felt grateful for the ability to take advantage of such a vital public good, for free, at just the moment I needed it most.
Well-run public swimming pools are municipal treasures. Beyond being spots to take a dip, they’re third places that are imbued with a social democratic promise. Since their emergence in the late nineteenth century, public pools have been sites of both leisure and struggle, where the fight for a more inclusive vision of social and civic life has played out.
Today, as the federal government mounts an all-out assault on the public sphere, and as the climate crisis creates an urgent need for more spaces to cool off, we can make a clear demand: more public pools.
The first public pool in the United States wasn’t actually built for swimming. Boston’s Cabot Street Bath, opened in 1868, was a place for local immigrant, working-class, and poor residents to bathe alongside each other at a time when indoor…
Auteur: Miles Kampf-Lassin
