Southland Parks — The Beaches and Public Pools of Los Angeles

13 min readAug 3, 2023

Since arriving in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I’ve always been surprised at how just many swimming pools there are — and how infrequently most of them (especially the private ones) are seemingly used… other than as bee graveyards to be occasionally skimmed by some unfortunate charged with dragging a pool rake across their otherwise placid surfaces. If I had a swimming pool, I’m sure I’d be in it everyday… especially during a heat wave such as the one we’re currently enduring. And, although I’ll probably never have my own pool — if I ever do, I will issue an open invitation to my friends to use it whenever they want (between the hours of 6:00 and 21:00).

For the first six months of 2023, not having easy access to a pool or beach wasn’t as much of an issue. If you’ll recall, from January to June, Angelenos were blessed with glorious gloom. If one wanted to get wet, all one had to do was step outside without an umbrella. The fun ended in July, when the cursed sun came out and brought with it a wooly, muggy heat.

To my horror, the two closest municipal pools to me are closed for repairs. The mountains, which I usually turn to for respite from the heat, are almost equally hot as the flatlands. And so I thought I’d use to opportunity to reflect a bit on the local history of pools and beaches which occupy such a central role in our imagination… even if, in reality, they’re not actually used nearly as much as you’d think. And attached, too, is a map of all of Los Angeles County‘s beaches and public pools. If I’ve forgotten any, let me know in the comments. And. if your apartment has a pool, for God’s sake, have a pool party!

There are, according to the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office, about 250,000 private pools in Los Angeles. Los Angeles County’s Department of Parks & Recreation maintains about sixty public pools across the county. The Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors (which formed in 1969 as the Department of Beaches) manages twenty beaches — all of which, it should be repeatedly underscored, are public. The City of Los Angeles’s Recreation and Parks Department — Aquatics Division maintains 39 seasonally available public pools, sixteen year-round public pools, three camp pools, and three LAUSD pools. It additionally manages eleven open water facilities, open year round, at which Angelenos and visitors and use paddle boats and other small craft.

With so many opportunities to swim and so much insufferable sunshine, that Angelenos aren’t in the water more often than they are is, to me, one of life’s great mysteries — up there with “why do Angelenos who like the weather insist on spending their lives inside of cars?” and “why does it take a pandemic for people to realize that it’s nice eating outside?” I have heard many complain about how cold the Pacific is — as if hot water is what one wants on a hot day. My personal view is that if the water is not frozen, it’s not too cold — and if it is frozen, well, let’s put on a dry suit and do a bit of ice diving. But then I’ve always loved being in water. That it remains so difficult for so many Angelenos to get to the beach in a reasonable fashion (i.e. mass transit) is, in my opinion, one of the Los Angeles’s great failings as a metropolis.

Pools are such a part of Los Angeles that it’s sort of funny to think that there was a period of more than 100 years in which there were none in the city. There was always water, though, and presumably swimming existed before there was a Los Angeles — at least since the ancestors of the Chumash arrived at least 13,000 years ago. The Chumash and later, the Tongva, nearly always established their villages near water — whether marshlands, rivers, or the ocean. The people of both nations used sewn-plank canoes made of redwood and waterproofed with sap and tar to navigate the high seas. It’s unimaginable that people would choose to live on islands wouldn’t also enjoy a swim. The Chumash, for their part, even viewed dolphins as close relatives; ones who’d split from the family tree when they fell from a rainbow bridge connecting the Channel Islands to the mainland.

According to writer Patt Morrison, the earliest mention in print of a private swimming pool in Los Angeles occurred in the relatively recent year of 1914. It was attached to a mansion that was described, in the original source, as “pretentious.” The pool presumably contributed as much as the home’s number of rooms or size to that descriptor. Pools had been around for a long time by then, though, having appeared at least as early as the 3rd Millennium in what’s now Pakistan. Within a few decades of that pretentious pool, pools were so common that they were mundane — taken for granted except for my foreigners like artist David Hockney, who was clearly fascinated by their ubiquity and symbolic value.

The pool Morrison mentioned may’ve been the first private pool but it wasn’t the first public one… or even quasi-public one. Swimming pools were a standard feature at bath houses and the Santa Monica Land and Water Company had built one of those in 1875 — almost surely the first in the county. The City of Los Angeles‘s Playground Department (founded in 1904) announced in 1912 the completion of several wading pools… which I suppose are too shallow to count as swimming pools but are public pools, nonetheless. Around the same time, the city had acquired the Bethlehem Baths., and on 22 January 1914, the refurbished baths re-opened to the public as the Vignes Municipal Bathhouse and Natatorium. In 1916, the Playground Department even created swimming holes in the Arroyo Seco and Los Angeles River.; both of which were utterly destroyed with the arrival of the rainy season — when all local rivers swell from babbling brooks into raging rivers.

Although most Anglenos don’t necessarily think of pools as pretentious status symbols, they have retained their ability to inspire artists to see symbolic meaning in them. Swimming pools have — across Hollywood‘s century-long cinematic history — played outsized roles in films and television series. Think of the pool scenes in the following: Angel Boy, The Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Cocoon, Earth Girls Are Easy, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Footlight Parade, the Girl Next Door, the Graduate, Gremlins, Harold & Maude, The Limey, Old School, It’s A Wonderful Life, Melrose Place, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Poltergeist, Romeo + Juliet, Rushmore, Showgirls, Sunset Boulevard, the Swimmer, to name just a few.

The history of beaches begins even earlier — although usually less for symbolic reasons and instead, presumably, because they’re aesthetically appealing and inherently dramatic. The first film shot in California, 1908’s The Count of Monte Cristo, was filmed on Laguna Beach. Two years would pass before the first film would be made in Hollywood.

And while there’s no musical genre, as far as I know, about swimming pools — Southern California is closely associated with Exotica and pretty much synonymous with surf music and beach goth. Beach music, it should be noted, though, belongs to the Carolinas. And because it was in drained swimming pools that Southern California’s skateboarding culture blossomed — so, by extension, we can thank (or blame) swimming pools for skate punk.

Growing up in Central Missouri as I did, pools were a rare site — and usually above ground and next to a mobile home. I therefore contented myself as a child by playing in creeks alongside crawdads and water moccasins. I shared a murky pond with snapping turtles and copperheads. My siblings and I used to hold our breaths and submerge ourselves to avoid biting deer and horse flies.

I don’t actually remember learning to swim. No one has ever complimented my technique, which very well might’ve been picked up from Max and Maggie — our two family dogs that I looked up to as a child since they were older than me and thus, I assumed, possessed of a measure of wisdom which I was not. My first nightmare was about a classmate in preschool drowning in a swimming pool. This was almost certainly because I had, for some reason, been allowed to watch Burnt Offerings. I still dream of water all of the time. In fact, during a nap earlier today, I dreamt that I was swimming in murky green water. When. a giant dark shaped passed beneath me, I woke myself up trying to swim to shore.

When I was eleven, I got a job at Boonslick Scuba & Sail and obtained my PADI open water scuba diving certification. My employers paid me three dollars an hour which I turned around and used to buy scuba and snorkeling equipment. I mostly dove in flooded quarries, strip mines, and lakes until I took a trip to Florida where I dove alongside manatees in a bay, went cave diving, battled strong currents using a DPV (Diver Propulsion Vehicle) in Pennekamp, and sailed a catamaran.

When I returned to Missouri, I resorted to using the swimming pools at Columbia Country Club. I wasn’t a member. At first I’d sign in as a guest. Once the employees knew my name, I stopped bothering with that formality and just headed to. the locker room.

In college at the University of Iowa, I used the same technique to regularly enjoy the pool at the Holiday Inn. I was never kicked out, I don’t think. Why would anyone object to a swimming pool having been swum in? I saved the skinny dipping for the Coralville Reservoir or Lake MacBride. I noticed upon looking at Google Maps that the fountain north of the Iowa Memorial Union that I may or may not have taken a plunge in (fully clothed) has since been filled in with soil and planted with grass.

When I moved to Los Angeles, like so many new arrivals, I quite wrongly assumed that I’d be swimming or surfing in the ocean pretty much everyday. In reality, I hike in mountains for fun far more often than I find myself in the ocean. The mountains are all around us whereas Zuma Beach is a three hour bus ride from Silver Lake. I have made an occasional custom of observing birthdays in Malibu but I’ve surfed exactly one time at Leo Carrillo. And even though I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 24 years, I still don’t know any divers here. And so, I am reduced to sometimes letting myself into the semi-private pools of nearby apartment buildings. If anyone asks whether or not I live there, my stock answer is, “I’m visiting the tenant in #5.”

As much as I like a private pool, I still prefer public ones. I generally prefer public spaces to private ones (restrooms are a notable exception — although I wish that there were more of them). In other words, parks are better than yards, bars are better than wet bars, cinemas are better than cellphones, and community pools are better than, well, you get the drift. Most private pools seem, like so many suburban amenities, merely to suggest the possibility of enjoyment. Like amenity decks, backyard grills, home libraries, conversation pits, and private automobiles; they are idle for the vast majority of their existence… which makes them all the more sad… or at least sort of liminal — like an under-used alley or office park after all the employees have gone home. A suburbanite actually using their swimming pool would almost qualify as newsworthy. Every time a black bear is filmed using one, it inevitably goes viral.

As I researched this piece, I realized that I’ve been to practically every beach between Leo Carrillo and Laguna Beach — both of which are fine beach bookends. I’ve ridden my bicycle through a lot of them, on the Marvin Braude Bike Trail, which runs 34 kilometers between Pacific Palisades and Torrance. I didn’t swim at any point on that ride up and down the coast — although I would have had my companion that day wanted to although I’m less keen to swim at city beaches along the Santa Monica and San Pedro bays. I prefer the slightly more rural beaches, where I’ve seen dolphins, octopuses, sea lions, seals, and sharks — to the city adjacent ones — were an accidental gulp of water might lead to weeks of illness.

California is often characterized as liberal and sometimes it even deserves that reputation. This was not always the case, however. In the past, black Angelenos and visitors were, confined to small and specifically black beaches like the Ink Well. When black families turned Bruce’s Beach into a black resort destination, the county used eminent domain was used in 1924 to take it away In 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to return the seized land to the heirs of Charles and Willa Bruce. Today, thankfully, all beaches in California are to all members public — even if surfies or toffs try to convince you otherwise with fake signs or harassment. They rich have other ways of keeping away the poors including parking permits and lack of mass or active transit access.

If I were the benevolent dictator of Los Angeles, I would ensure that every beach was accessible via ADA-compliant sidewalks, protected bicycle lanes, and downright luxurious bus stops with outdoor showers.

Racial segregation was even worse at Los Angeles’s municipal pools.In 1926, the city adopted a policty of only allowing black swimmers to enjoy these public facilities one afternoon of each week. Afterward, the water would be drained and replaced so that swimmers with light skin wouldn’t have to touch water that had been touched by swimmers with darker skin. Change came about after activist Betty Hill — co-founder of Los Angeles’s NAACP and the Westside Property Owners Association — sued the Playground and Recreation Commission. In early 1931, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Walter S. Gates ruled that the city had no right to make racially discriminatory regulations with municipal swimming pools.

On the other hand, supposedly liberal California is supremely priggish when it comes to beach attire. I’m hardly a radical Naturist but it does seem to me that beachgoers should be able to wear as much or as little as they want to at the ocean. In other words, I’m not advocating for forced nudism — I happen to have a very modest, vintage wool singlet from the 1920s (although it’s a bit too scratchy to actually wear) but whether buck naked, bathing suit, or burkini — the choice should surely be that of the beachgoer. And one what grounds may men bare their areolae where women may not? They are not genitals. What about intersex beachgoers? How can it be controversial to espouse the view that all people — regardless of gender expression or sexual traits — be held to the same standards of decency? I would kindly suggest to anyone triggered by the site of the wrong sort of nipple that a psychiatrist’s couch, rather than the seaside or poolside, is where you should seek solace on hot sunny day.

For everyone else, get to a beach or swimming pool and stay there until this heat passes.

FURTHER READING

Southland Parks — The Beaches and Public Pools of Los Angeles

Written by Eric Brightwell