Ladies in the Harbor: A Woman and Her Floating Pool

October 31, 2006, Tuesday
By JAMES BARRON (NYT); Metropolitan Desk

So yesterday the floating pool lady finally got to watch the Floating Pool Lady arrive in New York.

The floating pool lady is Ann L. Buttenwieser, a former Parks Department official who had a brainstorm 25 years ago: Why not put a swimming pool on a barge and moor it somewhere along the city's 578 miles of waterfront?

The Floating Pool Lady is the barge. Standing in a terrace garden in Lower Manhattan yesterday, Ms. Buttenwieser watched the Floating Lady float by after it glided under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and past Governors Island. It is now more pool than cargo hauler, but it is still not quite ready for its next life as a destination for dog-paddling, backstroking New Yorkers.

It still has to sidle into Pier 2 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, where the last of the pipes and wires will be connected. And one more thing -- it must be filled with fresh water. It arrived full of rainwater from storms it sailed through on the way north from the Louisiana shipyard where its makeover began.

The pool is 25 meters long, or half the length of an Olympic-size pool. For swimmers who never learned the metric system, that works out to just over 82 feet. It will have seven lanes and be four feet deep. Also on board will be dressing rooms with bright-colored tops that look like outsize Legos.

It will not stay at Pier 2 once the work is finished. The Parks Department, which will operate it, has yet to decide exactly where it will go.

Ms. Buttenwieser was excited as the Floating Lady passed yesterday. ''It's like having a baby,'' she said, ''but there you only have to wait nine months.''

Ms. Buttenwieser, 70, was so committed to the idea of floating pools that she started a nonprofit organization, the Neptune Foundation, to make them a reality. So far, the foundation has raised $3 million of the Floating Lady's $4 million construction cost.

Yes, she was a swimmer in college, but her goal was to draw people to the city's underused waterfront. To design the pool she recruited Jonathan Kirschenfeld, an architect who once designed a floating theater. (It was never built, he said.)

As they explain it, wherever the Floating Lady ends up, it will be attached to four uprights that will hold it in place, sort of.

''If a fast ferry comes by and there is a certain amount of wake, it will go up and down,'' Ms. Buttenwieser said. But it will not tilt much -- seasickness is not expected to be a problem on the Floating Lady -- and the uprights will keep the Floating Lady from drifting away from its pier.

Her idea for a floating pool came along before the city turned a retired Staten Island ferry boat into a jail. There has been talk of floating bus depots, floating apartment buildings off Staten Island, floating lofts for artists off Harlem.

''From the city's point of view, the floating pool concept is a very good one,'' said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe. ''Building swimming pools is very, very expensive. And outdoor swimming pools, they have a short life in the summer, and you have to find lots of land for them, which can mean taking over park land that's used for something else. So a floating pool is an ideal solution.''

But the Floating Lady is not the city's first such pool. William M. Tweed, the infamous Tammany Hall boss of the 19th century, opened five floating baths, as they were called. But not even those were the city's first. Ms. Buttenwieser found that two dentists opened floating pools at the Battery in 1832.

By the end of the 19th century, more than 20 pools were moored around the city's edges. Women were allowed in the pools three days a week and half a day on Sundays. Men had their own separate three and a half days, and there were differences. The women wore bathing outfits; the men swam nude.

But the pools were little more than enclosures that let the swimmers paddle about in brackish river water. In a city that was short on bathtubs -- at first, anyway -- cleanliness mattered more than exercise.

Health officials soon began fretting because raw sewage was pouring into the river. Investigators proved that what went into the river went into the pools by pouring red dye into a sewer and watching the water turn red in the floating bath tied up nearby. The city retrofitted the pools with watertight tanks that held fresh water, and the pools were a fixture of city life until World War I.

Ms. Buttenwieser first had her eye on a garbage scow from the Department of Sanitation. But it sank before it could be turned into a pool.

Mr. Kirschenfeld, the architect, said that he and Ms. Buttenwieser had scouted barges from Singapore to South America before settling on one, which in its last life was known as the New Orleans. He said it cost $450,000.

They found that it was less expensive to begin remaking the Floating Lady in the South, cutting a rectangular, pool-size hole in the deck, for example. But the work, at a shipyard in Amelia, La., was delayed by Hurricane Katrina.

''We have another winter of work,'' Ms. Buttenwieser said. Her hope is to have the pool ready for next summer, but unforeseen delays could push the opening back to 2008. And men will have to wear swimsuits.

With the Floating Lady finally in New York, she said that her dream was ''two-thirds realized.''

''I always send out photographs that I take as our Christmas cards,'' she said. ''This year we're going to send out a floating pool picture and it's going to say, 'This is to announce our newest arrival, the first one to be christened,' because we're Jewish.''