Ripple Effects
As the world’s greatest cities reimagine and reinvest in their shorelines, denizens are afforded new views of the waterfront.
Words: Archie Lee Coates IV
Illustrations: Frances Yeoland and Jeff Hunt
The world’s greatest cities create opportunities for their citizens to be active — physically, culturally, and intellectually — and New York City is certainly among these. One project in particular, + POOL, is inviting people to swim in a clean East River for the first time in 100 years by building a water-filtering, floating lagoon. A feat of architecture, engineering, and crowd-funding, the project is part of a broader trend in New York City, which had long turned its back on its riverfronts but is now looking to rehabilitate more than 500 miles of shoreline. By reclaiming its waterways and pioneering new public space, the metropolis and its most creative denizens carve out water from the concrete, serenity amid the noise.
“We’re surrounded by active bodies of water teeming with life and brimming with potential.”
As New Yorkers, we often forget Manhattan is surrounded by water, and we definitely don’t think about swimming in it. The rivers feel more like a border between boroughs than a place meant for us to enjoy. Meanwhile we’re surrounded by active bodies of water teeming with life and brimming with potential. So here’s the question: what if we could change how we all see the rivers, just by having a chance to swim in them? The wild thing is, we used to. Millions of us. All the time.
history of the waterfront
In the 19th century, swimming in the river was as inherent to New York street life as grabbing a hot dog or summoning an Uber is today. By 1895, 15 floating river pools bobbed up and down the waterfront, stretching from Battery Park to 159th street.
The pools were an initiative of the city’s Public Works program, an absolute necessity in the early days of an ever-growing New York. A reporter wrote in a New York Times article on August 14, 1870, that people came to take a dip from “all parts of the town, as high up as fifty-ninth-street, and as low down as Pearl and Broad streets.” The waters were clean, and at the height of attendance millions of New Yorkers flocked to the pools to stave off the summer’s heat.
By the early 1900s, as industry began to boom and the population soared, so did its sewage. At some point it had nowhere to go but into the rivers. Slowly but surely, the health of its swimmers became too threatened to stay in the water, and the pools were gradually removed from the river, ending our access to it.
Other major cities across the world were faced with the same issues. From Los Angeles to Paris, the waterways became victims of their cities’ own progress, and our view from the waterfronts started to fade into a distant memory. Industry dominated the shoreline, and the riverbanks became less desirable places to live. So we moved inland and started constructing buildings that reached higher and higher into the sky. As our residences rose, space was harder to come by, and thus public areas became more and more precious.
But as we were simultaneously pushed from the waterfront, we could start to see it again; this time from hundreds of feet up behind walls of windows. For decades, the rivers were only visible from the tops of those buildings, and only within the past few years have we started creating opportunities to get down in them.
In 2011, New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg published Vision 2020, the city’s waterfront revitalization plan, and the city council passed a law that required officials to continually focus on the waterfront every decade. The goal was to “reconnect New Yorkers and visitors to the water and reclaim New York City’s standing as a premier waterfront city.”
There’s nothing that will get us back to the water faster than actually being in it. Once you have the opportunity to touch the water — and not just view it from the shore— your perspective of it changes, and that was something we wanted to experience for ourselves.
inspirations around the world
Long before we ever thought of swimming in the river, a little city in Denmark had already taken the plunge. In the 1960s, Copenhagen’s waters were far from swimmable. Polluted from years of sewage overflow and runoff, their situation was not unlike ours today. So they changed it. After a massive shift in infrastructure and an environmental cleanup, their canals came back to life. But it wasn’t until the Harbour Bath, the brainchild of architects Bjarke Ingels and Julien de Smedt, was created that people felt safe enough to get in the water; that changed everything. Just like that, people started swimming in the river, and all it took was an invitation. Now there are five floating baths in Denmark, with more on the way.
London isn’t far behind. With a long and intimate relationship with the River Thames, now enclosed by roads and buildings that prohibit access, Londoners are pining to get back to the water. An incredible group called Thames Baths is planning an initiative to build a floating bath in the river that naturally cleans the water. Even Berlin has proposed a project called Flussbad that aims at making the entire River Spree safe to swim.
“With a wave of initiatives, we’re edging ever closer
to the water.”
Back home in America, organizations in Boston are fighting to make the Charles River inhabitable again, and the same is true of the Potomac in Washington DC. Los Angeles is partnering with Frank Gehry to envision its 51-mile river revitalized, and Houston is creating a swimming hole in the contaminated bayou. You can’t spin a globe without finding people who want to rethink their relationships with their rivers.
New York is well on its way, too. In recent years, we’ve seen a colossal journey back to the waterfront. The 550-acre Hudson River Park extends up to 59th Street. Brooklyn Bridge Park is now canvassed by picnics and playgrounds, basketball and bocce. Governor’s Island boasts an entire high school devoted to rethinking our waters, not to mention a swell of festivals and fairs. Battery Park, once the site where millions of newcomers entered New York, is now completely accessible.
Riverside Park, previously blocked by the Central Railroad’s West Side Line, now hosts a four-mile stretch of esplanade dotted with honey locusts. Sunset Park’s Bush Terminal Park just opened. Williamsburg’s East River State Park comes alive with gourmet food stalls and sunset films. Even the Gowanus Canal is seeing new life with parks, bioswales, and street-end gardens.
a pool for everybody
In 2010, a few of us — Dong-Ping Wong, Oana Stanescu, Jeff Franklin, and myself — wanted to go farther than the water’s edge. We knew you couldn’t safely swim in the East River, but that didn’t stop us from thinking it would be cool if you could. So, as artists and designers, we proposed a pool. Not just any pool, but one that functioned like a giant Brita filter big enough to clean a section of the river, making it safe for all of New York to swim, just as we used to.
The shape came from combining four different types of pools — lap, lounge, sports, and kids — into one, forming a plus sign.
We then designed a layered filtration system into the pool walls to incrementally remove bacteria and contaminants, ensuring nothing but clean water that meets city and state standards. No chemicals, no additives, just natural H2O. Realized, the project will allow New Yorkers to swim in clean river water for the first time in 100 years.
Six years in, we’ve built a nonprofit from the ground up, complete with a staff and board of directors, collaborating with a team of engineers, scientists, architects, and advisors to build + POOL, the world’s first water-filtering, floating pool.
What started as a wild concept for a new type of public space is actually happening. We put a hopeful idea — a conversation between friends at a café — to paper and shared a simple vision for it online.
Within two days of posting it on Facebook, our website crashed from tens of thousands of visits, and by the end of the week we’d gotten calls from engineers at Arup, a reporter from NPR, and Joshua David, co-founder of the High Line, an effort intended to save an inactive Manhattan train track that turned into a wholly new way of creating public space.
Thousands upon thousands of incredibly enthusiastic friends — not just from New York, but from all around the world — pledged dollar after dollar on Kickstarter to make it a reality.
It’s this active community that propels + POOL today. Now that we’ve gone through an incredibly successful phase of R&D and feasibility — with our friends at Arup, Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, The River Project, Google — we’re working with the city to finalize the design for permitting and will soon launch a campaign to raise the $20 million needed to construct + POOL.
Giving people the opportunity to swim in New York’s rivers again has the potential to change the way we see and experience our urban coasts. With a tidal wave of initiatives popping up in city after city, we’re edging ever closer back to the water. It’s only a matter of time before we’re actually swimming in it. When we rediscover what it’s like to have a view not of, but from the waterfront.
Where to invest
We asked. Our agents answered:
Which New York City parks have shaped their neighborhoods the most?
James Morgan| Compass NYC
“The more dense New York City becomes, the more buyers value open spaces. After a long day, nothing beats walking home across Central Park. It provides opportunity to reflect and appreciate natural forms of beauty.”
Leslie O’Shea| Compass NYC
“The Hudson River Greenway turned a gritty industrial waterfront into a true destination
— a great resource where New Yorkers can congregate to kayak, cycle, or even hit golf balls overlooking the river.”
Jason Saft| Compass NYC
“The High Line in West Chelsea completely reenvisioned a desolate, remote neighborhood into a vibrant community. When the High Line opened, it shed new light and interest on this once-overlooked area.”
Jesse Shafer & Greg McHale| Compass NYC
“Brooklyn Bridge Park took a run-down, underused, and undesirable shipping area and transformed it into a landscaped wonderland. This is repurposing at its very best, and the wallet impact index has been obvious.”
James Cox| Compass NYC
“The Battery Park system has had immense impact on real estate values in Lower Manhattan. It’s by far the most comprehensive, compact park area located within an entire neighborhood.”
Eugene Litvak| Compass NYC
“The Williamsburg waterfront, site of Smorgasburg, truly introduced the neighborhood to the world. It also added to the vibrancy and appeal of surrounding buildings like The Edge and Northside Piers.”
Where to go
Six ways to spend spring on the New York City waterfront
April 2–3
Smorgasburg food stalls head outside at East River State Park.
smorgasburg.com
April 14–17
Artexpo beautifies Pier 94 along the Hudson River.
artexponewyork.com
May 5–8
Frieze New York art fair takes over Randall’s Island Park.
friezenewyork.com
May 21
The Hudson River Park Games blast off at Hudson River Park. hudsonriverpark.org
June 1
A YogaWorks series holds a pose at Riverside Park South.
yogaworks.com
June 18–28
The River to River performing art fest enlivens Governor’s Island. rivertorivernyc.com
From Brooklyn Heights brownstones to Battery Park City high-rises, discover New York City’s finest waterside homes at Compass.com.
