Ann Buttenwieser drew her inspiration for the Floating Pool from the public baths that dotted New York City’s waterfront in the 19th century, and then projected that vision into a contemporary amenity for underserved communities. After years of planning and development, in 1999 she found an equally enthusiastic partner in Jonathan Kirschenfeld, whose interest in waterfront use had led him to design a (yet-unrealized) 600-seat floating theater. Design of the project continued until 2004, when Kent Merrill, the naval architect working with Buttenwieser and Kirschenfeld, located a decommissioned river barge for sale in Louisiana. Shipyard construction on the Floating Pool began in Amelia, Louisiana in 2005, and after narrowly avoiding devastating damage from Hurricane Katrina, the barge made its 10-day trip to Pier 2 in Brooklyn in October 2006. The Pool docked there for retrofitting and final design until its opening on July 4, 2007 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. In 2008, the pool moved on to Barretto Point Park in the South Bronx, the only community district in New York without access to a public pool, where it will return for the next two summers.

Interview with Ann Buttenwieser, The Neptune Foundation
Founder of the Floating Pool

UO: What was the initial concept for the floating pool?
AB: In 1870, Boss Tweed, under the Public Works Department, created five floating pools. There was even a captain in charge. Each summer there was a parade – it was an event! – when the captain led a pool flotilla from the Bronx down to the sites for the opening. Then around the turn of the century, when we had five borough presidents all of a sudden, the pools were turned over from the Public Works Department to the Borough Presidents’ offices. By 1915 there were fifteen pools, with bottoms open to the river water, and slats to keep people from falling out. People felt that there were health benefits from being in the salt air and swimming in the salt water. You got better, you felt better.

These “floating baths,” as they were called, were placed around the city in the tenement areas – the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, the South Bronx, some areas of Brooklyn, I think there was one in the German district [in Yorkville]. They were created to provide a place for people without running water in their homes to be cleansed. They were pontoon structures – they floated on top of the water like a catamaran. The baths were completely enclosed by a rectangular structure that held dressing rooms. They were not anchored, they were attached to existing piers – recreation piers, commercial piers. They were stored in the winter in the Bronx at Classon Point, which curiously, is around the bend from where the floating pool was this past summer in the South Bronx – it was as if it came home.

In 1915, the Health Department checked out the river water in the floating pools. They put dye in a sewer on the Lower East Side and it came out in one of the pools at Battery Park, and turned the water pink! So they promptly closed them down. They retrofitted five of the pools, put a solid bottom in them and then filled them with city water now flowing from the Croton aqueduct. I have no idea what happened to the remaining pools. At some point all were taken over by the Parks Department. I don’t know when that was exactly, but certainly when Robert Moses was running the Parks Department they were under his purview. He took the last three that were still running and put them outside of Riverside Park when he was building the West Side Highway. It was sort of a sop to the community that was not able to get access to the waterfront.

The point of this was to reconnect New Yorkers with the water and the fact that they lived on an island city. … They could see the land, feel the water, and see the water.UO: When did you decide to bring floating pools back to New York?
AB: I was working at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, helping people like Roland Betts get his [Chelsea Piers] project started, and generally trying to help people get through the system. Jonathan [Kirschenfeld] called and said he had this idea [for a floating theater], and where did he have to go to get permits and such. I talked him through that, he got all the permits, and secured a space down at Battery Park but wasn’t able to raise the money to actually build it.

Meanwhile, in 1980, I wrote an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times about the floating baths. They printed it on Memorial Day with a Jacob Riis picture of one. I said, if the Times thinks this a good idea then it should be done. So from 1980 to 2000 – I was working in the Parks Department, EDC, and obviously doing waterfront stuff all that time — whenever I went to a community meeting or a meeting about the waterfront and everybody was talking about putting up an amphitheater (amphitheaters were de rigeur in waterfront design at the time), I said, “How about a floating pool?” Wherever I went I talked about this crazy idea of mine. It was motherhood. So when I was working at the Parks Department I convinced their Concessions Office to issue an RFP for a floating pool alongside park property. But the RFP was written in a way so that it would be financially impossible to do [it]. No developer bid on it.

In 2000 I quit my last job and my husband asked, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m going to build a floating pool!” The first thing I had to do was to get a charter for a not-for-profit, the Neptune Foundation, which enabled me to start raising money. Kent Barwick got me a grant to do a feasibility study and he said “You will need an architect to do it. Why don’t you talk to Jonathan Kirschenfeld?“ and I thought – Oh my God, he’s back!

So Jonathan did the feasibility study and we got into it right away, and I started raising money. We hired a naval architect, because we were now dealing with something that was outside of Jonathan’s expertise, and they worked together.

We figured it was going to cost $250,000 to buy a used barge. By the time we got drawings and were ready to purchase, the price of barges was just horrendous – the cheapest we could find was a million dollars! (I think that this was actually even before we had drawings. I think this was just when we set out to see what the cost would be.) So the naval architect and Jonathan sat down and said, ok what will it cost to build one from scratch? Certainly no more than that. So we decided to build a brand new one. We pursued that, which took six months or so, but when we went out to bid on steel, China had decided to build the world, and New York was in a building boom, so the price of steel was so high that the one million was now two million! So we went back to the drawing board and it just so happened that a lot of barges had been dumped on the market because single hull vessels were no longer allowed in commerce. We were finally able to buy one for $250,000.

UO: Did you want elements of the design of this pool to echo the 19th century baths in any way, or was the inspiration in concept only?
AB: No, I did not want it to echo the floating baths because I had actually gone to Paris to see the Piscine Delunay (which I’m not sure exists anymore, I think it may have been rebuilt). It was a similar concept with the pool in the middle and with the dressing rooms around it so you were entirely enclosed and you didn’t see you were on the water – you could have been anywhere. The point of Neptune’s pool was to reconnect New Yorkers with the water and the fact that they lived on an island city. We wanted it to be as open as possible, so people could be in the water in the water, so to speak, and be able to see out and understand that there was a view behind them. They could see the land, feel the water, and see the water.

UO: How did the design reflect issues of site selection and infrastructural requirements?
AB: The problem in New York is that despite the fact that everything is on the water, there is no such thing as connections to the upland. We were very lucky in Brooklyn because we went to the old Brooklyn piers and they all had electricity and sanitation and water connections, so it was no big deal. We could just hook up there. But try anything else, like Hudson River Park – it’s got a “historic” wall, which you are not allowed to penetrate. When they built it they didn’t put in infrastructure, There are electric wires now on the piers for lighting – but it’s a problem overall. In the Bronx we were very fortunate because the Department of Environmental Protection needed to expand its waste treatment plant, which required mitigation, so they paid for putting in the infrastructure for the pool. I think they got Con Ed to donate the electricity and its installation.

UO: What kind of jurisdictional issues did you have to battle with?
AB: If I hadn’t worked for the city for so many years I couldn’t have done it. There’s no question. Because I knew where the bodies lay. For example: The [New York State] Department of Environmental Conservation said, ”you are a structure” and therefore you have to get a permit from us. They fined the Neptune Foundation $20,000 for being in Brooklyn in 2007. On the other hand the Coast Guard said to us, “you are a vessel and you have to get certification from us.” And then when we were in Brooklyn I had to get a permit from the Empire State Development Corporation to be there, and then an agreement with the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy for them to run the pool. On and on and on. And there were insurance issues — “Oh we’ve never done this before. What happens if a kid falls overboard?” The Parks Department still feels that Jonathan didn’t put the fences up high enough.

UO: Are subsequent floating pools in progress? Do you have a desire to do more?
AB: I would love to do more. I do not have the ability to raise any more money – that’s the problem. I’m just hoping that the folks in Brooklyn will decide that they would like to have one as part of [Brooklyn Bridge] Park because there is such a wonderful community there and they are just dying to have that pool come back.

UO: What is next for the existing pool?
AB: It is going back to New Jersey for the winter, because the DEC permit requires it to leave New York State, but it will return next summer to the South Bronx. The permit is for three years there and is renewable. But what the city will decide to do then, I don’t know – the demand might be someplace else. (The pool was given to the city as a gift in June.)

UO: Do you plan on being involved in future site selection, after these three years in the Bronx?
AB: Oh I hope so.

UO: There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the waterfront, whether for leisure uses, greenways, public art installations, to name a few. You have watched the evolution of all this throughout your career. What are your thoughts on the direction of such developments? Do you see this increased attention as a direct result of the hard work of people like yourself?
AB: Yes, by people like me, and people like Kent Barwick (formerly of the Waterfront Alliance). Mine was sort of an area-by-area approach and his was really a regional approach. But we both fought tooth and nail to get things going. I did the original plan for the Hudson River Park in 1985 and there is still one section that isn’t funded and they are still building. Difficult issues arise endlessly on the waterfront. What should be there? Should it be housing? Should it be parks? How are you going to pay for the parks?

But certainly there was a turning point and I believe that was when Governor Pataki finally put money into the Hudson River Park and said “we are going to do this.” That was after an awful lot of pressure from the environmentalists, from the “parkies.” Once Hudson River Park was under way, I continued to work my way south. I was working for the Downtown Alliance to do a master plan for the lower Manhattan waterfront so we could connect Hudson River Park, Battery Park, Battery Park City, and then up the east side to the Manhattan Bridge. Again, it’s motherhood. Certainly one of Dan Doctoroff’s big projects was to unify everything that is going on between Brooklyn, the Brooklyn waterfront, Governors Island, and then Staten Island, and making it into a harbor park. So if someone was against all this now, it would be odd.

UO: You have discussed how, if we can clean up our waterways enough, amenities like the floating pool would not be necessary in the future. What are your thoughts on the ability of temporary space to condition the public to see a space as what it could be, and to be a catalyst for action and change?
AB: I think that the pool is really a catalyst for the demand that “you find some way to clean up parts of these waters.” The DEC permit requires the Parks Department and the city (I guess the DEP) to clean up a piece of the Bronx River so that people can actually swim in it. If the pool hadn’t come there then the DEC wouldn’t have required that.

Another thing that was cool about this summer is that – I don’t know if you realize this, but the pool was located between a waste treatment plant and fertilizer plant. The [treated] waste gets sent to the plant to get turned into fertilizer. The smells there can be pretty obnoxious. This summer, because the pool was there and the park is there, the people using both finally got together and, I believe with the NRDC, brought a lawsuit against the city and fertilizer plant to abate the smells. The pool was a catalyst for that. [They were saying,] “We are here now; you have given us this wonderful thing. Now make it usable.”

interview: Varick Shute
image research: Meg Kelly
conducted 9/11/2008