How to Keep New York’s Floating Swimming Pool From Being an Island for the Rich

As of this month, New Yorkers are officially, after 14 years, closer than ever to swimming in the East River—legally and safely, of course. The + POOL, a first-of-its-kind floating urban swimming pool, has had a long history of fits, starts, and development, as Dwell chronicled recently. But when Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the project would receive a whopping $16 million of state and local funding to bring it to fruition, architect Dong-Ping Wong—who conceived of the floating urban amenity—voiced his concerns on Instagram.

Though he had collaborated for many years alongside his former firm partner Oana Stenascu of Family New York, and Jeff Franklin and Archie Lee Coates IV of PlayLab, to bring the project to life, Wong penned in his post that he had been "frozen out" of the project due to his concerns about the organization’s commitment to diversity. (+ POOL states that they are firmly committed to the project’s original intent of being "a pool for everybody," and Stenascu, Franklin and Coates IV told Dezeen last week they "are proud of how the nonprofit is fulfilling our original vision.") His statement, importantly, pointed to issues of race, access, and ties to gentrification in the pool’s forthcoming site outside of Two Bridges in downtown Manhattan.

In his post, Wong (who has his own firm, Food Architects), alluded to a number of issues prevalent in the project’s life span, but didn’t go into further detail. We wanted to know more, and he agreed to speak with Dwell about the challenges of nonprofit philanthropy in building support for a universally accessible project—and his hopes for how, and who, will shape + POOL’s future.

Anjulie Rao: Tell me about + POOL’s inception—what was happening in 2010?

Dong-Ping Wong: The idea actually started in 2009; I just didn’t do anything with it until 2010. I had left my job in the beginning of 2008 and then the recession hit. I was freelancing a lot and trying to dream up what kind of work I’d want to do for myself. And so this idea of doing like overly ambitious, utopian work was very top of mind. I can distinctly remember sitting with my best friend Nick, at what is now the Domino Park in Williamsburg. Back then it was still the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory; it was these old warehouses and you could sneak behind a fence and sit on the river and drink beer without worry. But it was so sweaty. I remember that was the moment where I was like, damn, I really wish I could jump in the river. And then the pool design came to mind, like, Oh, it would be hilarious if a pool was plus shaped, if it was Olympic sized, if you could float it and it could filter the water. It was a goofy idea.

And then I think in early 2010, I had some time and decided to design this thing and see what happens. I had no real intention of making it real; it would be a nice project to launch as an announcement of a new office. And to do that, I called the only person I knew who could do a website: Jeff [Franklin] from this office called PlayLab. They built the website, and did so much more—they helped brand it, we talked about all of these ways we could push it forward. So really quickly, we decided we needed to be cofounders.

AR: In 2012 you gave a great quote to The Observer about crowdfunding as an exciting new model for architecture. Do you still feel that same optimism now?

DPW: I do. I think I’m less naive. But I think the optimism is absolutely there in part because of the early days of + POOL, when we were getting so much energy and love; when we were trying things that were completely out of our realm of expertise. Nobody had direct guidance on what we needed to do because nobody had done this. That’s something architects, frankly, are not very well trained for. We’re trained to respond to a brief and to a client, or a city need; we’re not really trained to just come up with shit out of thin air.

AR: You ran several very successful Kickstarters for + POOL, so why did the team decide to start a nonprofit?

DPW: We started the nonprofit in 2015. Before that we were either crowdfunding or getting approached by developers in the city that wanted to turn + POOL into a private pool or something similar. Instead, we decided we should try to raise a million dollars. We threw a party at a bar and thought it was going to be so easy, but I think we maybe raised five grand. We needed to change our strategy. We had been told that if we wanted to raise real money in New York City, you have to be a nonprofit, because that’s what The High Line did. Philanthropy is where you can get the money for a project of this size. The other reason was that, to be a nonprofit, you have to be for the public good; it’s a way to protect the project, to make sure it’s always for the public. That was the moral imperative. I will say the caveat to all this, it was before any of us had any idea what we were getting ourselves into. But that was the intent.

AR: What, as you say, "did you get yourselves into," and what did you learn about non-profiteering in the urban realm?

DPW: As a way to raise money, I learned how ruthless it was. You put together lists of people: how much they’re worth, how much money you think you can get out of them, who has that contact, how we’re going to approach them, and what they’d be looking for in terms of naming or whatever. In some ways I appreciated the directness of it, but it was always couched in this very glossy, do-good language—it’s good for the city, it’s environmental, it’s helping underserved communities. And you could tell that was never the central impetus for why anyone would drop 50 or 100 grand.

It was really impressive to watch the people who could sell that well [on the board], who were amazing at turning that narrative really beautifully. But I think seeing how much of it was political, how much of it was influenced by power, the promise of a nonprofit for high-level donors is not that you’re getting a product or a service like you would be if you’re buying something from someone. You’re getting influence over the direction of that organization, and you’re getting influence over or a connection to the whole world that that organization is a part of. You’re buying the kind of power that a nonprofit promises, but you get to also feel good about it.

AR: I want to ask about the political and development contexts you raise in your statement because I imagine that when nonprofits, a public pool, and development collide, it’s gonna get messy.

DPW: We had been looking at a whole bunch of different sites for a long time. I think the dream originally was to go to Brooklyn Bridge Park, because it was still under construction and we had a pretty good relationship with the heads of the park. But for various reasons that didn’t work out. So we were testing a bunch of other sites, looking at water depth, and water quality of the site. The site that we ended up at, Two Bridges, was one of the sites on the short list. It’s right outside of Chinatown and owned by the Economic Development Corporation—basically the developer arm of the city—which meant that the mayor’s office controls this patch of water. At some point, we learned they approved the site.

As is my understanding, de Blasio ran on a platform of affordable housing. His strategy was to build a lot more luxury housing, and within that would be a percentage promised to affordable housing. There were a number of towers that are still slated to go right next to the One Manhattan project in Chinatown; some organizations in Chinatown officially started a lawsuit and paused these developments. [Wong believes developers are "waiting out until these advocacy groups get tired."] So there was always this sort of specter, that we’re right across the street from a very contentious site that there’s a lot of developer interest and a lot of pushback from the community.

We had to be very careful how we approached this situation. We’ve seen, for example, one of the big levers that allowed The High Line to go through: They hired a consultancy agency to study how much tax revenue something like The High Line would bring to the neighborhood by increased property values. And increased property values were so high that the tax revenues were very tempting, I suppose, to the city. So we knew that kind of play was important to getting the city behind it and to convince money to flow into the project. For the longest time, the + POOL just didn’t have that lever; we’re in the water, we’re not going into a neighborhood, we’re not really directly linked to housing. So I was like, cool, we’re a little bit protected from that method.

When we came into the Chinatown site, we’re right across the street from a site that would really benefit from us going there, both from an optics and recreation point of view, and from the potential of a catalyst for more development that the city could benefit from, as well. And obviously, the negative side effect it could have on the neighborhood is from a gentrification point of view. For a long time we were insulated from it. But there was also a changeover in leadership in the nonprofit that, let’s say, knew how to work those levers a little better.

AR: What I appreciated most in your statement was thinking about the issue of race in swimming. In Chicago, the 1919 race riots began when a Black teenager drifted over to a white swimming area in the lake and he was killed for that. There’s a lot to be said about racial equity in terms of who gets access to the pool, and how the nonprofit will be able to guide that vision.

DPW: Exactly. That whole history of swimming in the U.S. around race, exclusion, and violence—we talked about that before, we were all aware of that stuff but it was never taken seriously in the organization.

AR: Now that you have all of this perspective and hindsight, what does it take to make a public space happen? One that is truly public, equitable, and thoughtful to all potential residents who might want to swim at + POOL? 

DPW: I think architecture itself can only go so far. Ultimately, I feel like it’s down to the individuals who operate it or decide what the priorities are, where we’re going to get money from, and what kind of concessions we have to make to allow for certain kinds of access. It’s really about who is at that table, informing or pushing decisions one way or another, or continuing those mundane fights. You just need people who will make sure it’s guided in the right way. Because you’re always going to be pushed off track, usually by very mundane things.

AR:  Who needs to be at the table to make + POOL the pool for everybody? 

DPW: I think you need someone—ideally, multiple people—on the civic side. Oftentimes, politics try to steer a project in a different direction because civic and financing can come into conflict. You need to have people pushing in different directions. Really importantly, you need hyperlocal people on the civic side, people who know how the project is affecting the actual community that it is going into. For + POOL, it’s Chinatown. You need people who understand what it’s like to represent people who aren’t usually at these kinds of tables, who understand what it means to try to improve multigenerational, diverse, low-income, neighborhoods.

AR: I think what you’re talking about is a Community Benefits Agreement.

DPW: I think it would definitely be worth trying for my next step. I suppose I want to bring together a coalition of people within Chinatown—the good thing about Chinatown is there’s a lot of activism, there’s a lot of very adamant people who love and want to protect it. The difficulty in a neighborhood like this is everybody has very different opinions about what that means and what that looks like. So I think trying to build that group of people who can help put together that CBA is a very tangible next step. One of the things I learned from being on the inside of the organization, we would oftentimes end up trying to appease people who are trying to push the organization from the outside. You’d find the lowest lift to appease that group.

AR: What would you like the residents nearby the future + POOL site to know?

DPW: I would love for them to know that they can influence this project; this is their project, first and foremost, as much as it is the rest of the city’s, if not even more so because they’re the ones most directly affected by it, both good and bad. It means very little to be honest, but that the intent of the project was always one that was to serve the city and serve people, to provide a public space, and that’s why we ended up on the river, because there’s a lot of underutilized space there. I would hope that leadership in these communities felt like they had real legitimate influence on the civic projects that oftentimes get brought to them and planted in their neighborhoods, and then they just have to deal with it.

This is also one of the things I thought was really interesting early on: we had to be really transparent with the process. And that was one of the beautiful things. And that kind of idealism about architecture, I was like, Oh, this is the first time we’ve just shown everything, we’ve been really transparent. And if the public likes it, we keep going. And if they don’t, we shift gears. Once it became a nonprofit, that was totally flipped, right? It’s internal, and you only release the positives, you only have to paint this really rosy picture for fundraising. And you kind of drip feed the process because you think it’ll help you raise more money—you’re going to do certain things because this will bring in a certain donor or a certain partner. But public transparency really disappears.

AR: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you feel is important to say?

DPW: I still really love this project and I’m optimistic. It’s pretty unprecedented in its process, and when it becomes more precedented—with these more typical nonprofit issues—I like to think that it’s time to make it a little bit unprecedented again. So it feels like this is a start of another chapter in the project. I think there’s a ton of legitimate excitement over Governor Hochul’s commitment and the amount of money coming into it. I want people to know or believe that their voice and cultural processes still matter.

Top + POOL Rendering, 2024. Designed by Family New York & Playlab, Inc. Image by proto. Courtesy of Friends of + POOL

Related Reading:

An Almost 14-Year Timeline of New York City’s Hypothetical Floating Pool

Swimply, and the Public/Private Pool Divide