Opening Day is July 4
By Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
It was dramatic in its own right — the official opening of the first modern “floating swimming pool� — but it is where the pool is located that is both symbolic and significant. It is on a large barge that doesn’t look like one, between Piers 4 and 5 in what will become Brooklyn Bridge Park, and although the pool will probably not be a permanent part of the park, it could be considered the first major element of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

That was the tone and tenor of the nine people who had words to say on the side of the 82-foot-long pool, four feet deep, with seven lanes.

One who has been watching people talk about a Brooklyn Bridge Park from a meeting room or auditorium for over 20 years realized that what he saw today was actually the opening of that park.

And one can expect many more such events in the next five years or so as major milestones are reached. Many of the same people who celebrated a new pool in Brooklyn will be at those events to come, but there will be new faces as time and term limits take their toll.

There was a significant new face Tuesday: Patrick Foye who, heads the downstate part of the Economic State Development Corp.(ESDC). An appointee of Governor Spitzer, he was the second speaker after Borough President Marty Markowitz. Foye’s group will build the park, and it was clear from public comments made that his group was the one primarily responsible for cutting through miles of red tape so as to have a dockside pool.

The concept of the pool was the brainchild of Ann Buttenwieser, founder of the Neptune Foundation and a former manager of City Parks.

This is more than a pool with four lifeguards. It is now the water part of the park, next to a one-acre real beach with chairs and volley ball nets. The beach itself is open from 9 a.m to 9 p.m., while the pool hours are from 11 a.m to 7 p.m.

One of the interesting parts of the whole pool operation is the run of a free shuttle bus from Borough Hall to the pool every 10 minutes. This is being funded by the Brooklyn Waterfront Local Development Corporation and will be evaluated as part of a study that organization is conducting on ways to get to the park by means other than cars.

For the record, the first person officially in the pool was Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. He was follwed by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and then Marty Markowitz.

The pool will be in Brooklyn until Labor Day and will be moored somewhere for the winter. It is almost a sure bet that it will always find a home every summer for the next several years.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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