In Philadelphia, city pools bring relief while closed pools create frustration

At their neighborhood pool in West Philadelphia, Markyda Anderson’s little boys couldn’t wait to get back in. They had grown tired of playing in a nearby splash pad while lifeguards performed periodic checks on the chlorine levels. So when the break was over and swimmers were welcome again, they ran back and – splash, splash – went into the water.

“It gives the kids something to do — something positive,” says Ms. Anderson, a 38-year-old nursing assistant who cools off with Isaiah, 7, and Elijah, 3, at the Tiffany Fletcher Recreation Center in the city’s Mill Creek section. Without the pool, Isaiah said, “I’d stay in and play Fortnite on Xbox.”

It was scenes like this, in dozens of city-run swimming pools, that sent 71-year-old Joy Watson into a fit of rage for her own neighborhood of Overbrook Park, about a mile away. Next to her row house, the one with the Barack Obama mural on the side, the Charles Baker Playground pool has not been open since July 2019.

“They say there is a shortage of lifeguards,” Ms Watson said on Friday. “My question is, you have all those other pools open and you can’t change the lifeguards?”

In that sense, Philadelphia is no different from other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston, where a shortage of lifeguards has led to shorter swim hours or completely closed pools. That scarcity stemmed from the pandemic, which led staff to look for jobs elsewhere and disrupted the training of future potential employees. About a third of the country’s roughly 300,000 public swimming pools were affected last year, and 2023 will be just as bad or worse, according to the American Lifeguard Association, which runs training and certification programs.

With July on track to become the hottest month on record, lifeguard shortages and pool closures are particularly painful for many of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million residents who need safe, cool places and who live in parts of the city disproportionately affected by poverty, ill health and gun violence.

Mill Creek, where 97 percent of residents are non-white, faces major challenges, with residents’ health especially at risk during temperature spikes, according to the Philadelphia Heat Vulnerability Index, an interactive map produced by the city that outlines danger zones during extreme weather. According to city statistics, nearly half of the people in the neighborhood live below the federal poverty line and a quarter of adults do not have a high school diploma. One in five has diabetes, and hypertension, obesity and asthma are commonplace.

This year, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department launched a major campaign to get public pools ready, spending millions more than in the past and pledging to open 61 of the 70 pools for all or part of the season. Compulsory for the first time, the city is offering swimming lessons for all 6,000 summer campers. Most campers are black, and fewer opportunities for swimming lessons in low-income communities put black children at higher risk of drowning, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At the Fletcher playground, two dozen campers from the nursery splashed in the pool, jumped rope and played on jungle gyms. Formerly called Mill Creek, the facility was one of the first to open this year, on June 14, the first day of summer vacation. It also had a new name, in honor of Tiffany Fletcher, a 41-year-old park employee and mother of three, who was hit and killed by a stray bullet just outside the playground in September.

“This is not just an essential service; it’s a renaissance in the use of public spaces,” Bill Salvatore, deputy commissioner for parks and recreation, said of the push to open the pools.

Yet thousands of residents are waiting for that renaissance where it is most needed. The city has been working to distribute the lifeguards, but is still several dozen short of opening more pools. And at least four other pools that have yet to open due to staffing issues or long-term repair needs are in areas where residents’ health is at high or very high risk, according to the Heat Index. Temperatures in the city dipped to 80 degrees this weekend, but were predicted to reach 90 degrees by the end of this week.

On Friday, at the Hank Gathers Recreation Center in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, day campers and visitors played on swings, played basketball and shot through the splashpad, a series of three- and four-foot water fountains that spurted out of the concrete. A stone’s throw away was the freshly painted but waterless swimming pool, behind a closed fence.

Wannetta Williams, 56, who tutored children from a daycare, recalled her own youthful summers at other pools in Philadelphia, where, she said, she and her friends stayed out of trouble, learned to take care of the little ones and socialized as teenagers.

“They depend on the outdoors,” Mrs. Williams told the children. “They need this activity and fresh air.”

A planned pool opening date of July 5 had passed, due to the shortage of lifeguards, but Mr Salvatore said more staff were on the way. A “Philly Phreeze” winter pool in February, the first of its kind in the city, raised $500 and $1,000 lifeguard bonuses and helped more than 730 people sign up for surveillance and other work. The Gathers Pool, when it opens, may be one of those pools with extended hours for a few weeks after the typical Labor Day close.

In Overbrook Park, that’s no comfort to those who live near the Baker playground. Mrs. Watson, whose home with the Obama mural faces the park, and a fellow neighborhood activist, Aaliyah Small, 43, pointed to a corner where a 22-year-old man had been shot in the head just four hours earlier.

For Ms Small, chair of the Baker Playground Advisory Council, lifeguards are only part of the problem. While acknowledging that gun violence is a problem in the neighborhood, she also said opening more pools could help address that by creating necessary diversions for residents. People, she said, need to turn their negative thinking around.

“They look at these shootings and say, ‘What if it affects the children playing?'” Ms Small said. “What they should be saying is, ‘If we open the playground, it won’t bother them.'”

Javon Williams reporting contributed.