Defining and Refining Play

In Man, Play and Games (1961 [1958]), Roger Caillois categorizes play into different functional categories, in terms of style and type. First, he denotes a spectrum of play from paidia, or childlike exuberance, to ludus, competition based on a standardized set of rules. Along this spectrum, he sets up “competition, chance, simulation [and] vertigo”—categories of developed forms of play behavior that include organized sports and races, gambling, make-believe, and even spinning in circles.

Caillois writes partially in response to a classic text on play: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Reference Huizinga1950), in which Huizinga writes that play is fundamentally “a contest for something or a representation of something” (13). Caillois, however, sees this definition as too narrow and calls for a more expansive understanding of play: “First, [Huizinga] sought an exact definition of the essence of play; second, he tried to clarify the role of play present in or animating the essential aspects of all culture” (ibid.: 3). Rather than functionalizing play or making order of its impulses, Caillois relates the “instinctive” play of the child to the amusements of the adult. He insists that, although children's play has a developmental function in making well-socialized adults of them—which is at the heart of most sociopsychological inquiry into play—the desire to play and the pleasure that results is not simply outgrown, nor left as a vestige of immaturity when its functional “fuel” is used up. Play on its own terms, offers Caillois, forms much of the heart of social life, and the coupling of paidia and ludus—exuberance and contest—reminds us that in each style of play resides the echo of the other.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, early theorists of play maintained that the function of play is to socialize children in order to make them into more civilized adults: for them, all play was best utilized when channeled into ludus. In a volume, titled Play, Allin (Reference Allin1902) describes play as “an activity of youth . . . an initiation into society. Habits are formed which later may be switched off and attached to other objects and aims needful in the social life of the adult” (59). This sort of thinking in developmental psychology and anthropology spilled over into activism for urban reform, including the playground movement, which thrived in industrial cities like New York and Chicago from 1880 to 1920 (Cavallo Reference Cavallo1981; Cranz Reference Cranz1982; Dargan and Zeitlin Reference Dargan and Zeitlin1990; Gagen Reference Gagen2004; Lubove Reference Lubove1962; Riess Reference Riess1989). Space would be dedicated solely to children as a site for constructive, educative play. In a 1915 symposium on municipal government held at Columbia University, New York Parks Commissioner Cabot Ward called for specific social goals in building the playgrounds:

The playground apparatus would produce “desirable qualities” in the citizenry: ludus channeled into structure and obedience.

The floating bath and then the municipal bathhouse (and eventually the pool) grew up in this same period resonating with the social values of reform through state space and programmed activities. In many North American cities, these were tied together. In Toronto, “the ‘free bathing program’ began . . . in response to the ‘boy problem’ that was influential in the construction of the parks and playgrounds and public bathing movements that saw immoral behaviour as stemming from dirty boys with idle time” (Murnaghan Reference Murnaghan2008: 18). Thus, in the early bathhouses where programming aimed to teach the hygiene habit, structured swim lessons also were provided in some periods (Paine Reference Paine1905: 11). Unstructured play was seldom to be found in an official capacity, yet this didn't mean it was nowhere to be found at all.

Reformers, understandably, were interested in making more places available to working people—adults and children alike—to bathe regularly for health. Tenement conditions were so crowded and dank that providing places to bathe with soap and a towel was an obvious priority from a public health standpoint (Rosen Reference Rosen1993). Further, the baths gained in popularity with attendance in the tens of thousands, helping to debunk the “absurd and foolish fallacy” that working immigrants were not interested in bathing (ibid.: 427). A 1905 account illustrates a morning at the river baths: “the slum streets pour a stream of haggard heat victims down toward the docks, East and West, to the floating baths. They are opened at five in the morning to welcome such as these, the ragged and heavy-footed people who must work without sleep when a heat wave blisters the city” (Paine Reference Paine1905: 6). This popular attendance at the floating baths was recorded, notably, four years after the first indoor bathhouses had already been opened.Footnote ³

But in his social history of pools in American cities, Contested Waters (2007), historian Jeff Wiltse demurs; he describes the construction of the floating baths as an attempt to rein in the riverbank-centered activities of working-class males who, until that time, “created a plebian and masculine swimming culture that violated Victorian norms. They swam in the nude, they swore, they fought, and they evaded authority” (9). Reformers, he argues, were eager to remove the working-class men and boys—both their boisterous temperament and their nudity—from public view. In her history of women's swimming, Lisa Bier (Reference Bier2011) concurs: “A great amount of police energy went into chasing naked men and boys away from piers and docks, lest they expose themselves to women of passing boats” (5). Reformers wanted bathing directed toward hygiene and, in turn, to be equated with order that would lead to a more solid moral temperament (Renner Reference Renner2008; Williams Reference Williams1991). At the baths that they envisioned, attendees were made to wait in line, time was marked in 20-minute increments by the banging of a gong; those who disobeyed were thrown out (Paine Reference Paine1905: 9). Concurrently, fines were now imposed for swimming at the river's edge. But the result was not always so tidy: inside of the baths, “public officials responded by aggressively battling working-class boys for control of these public spaces, demanding that the pools be used in an orderly manner for serious purposes” (Wiltse Reference Wiltse2007: 37).

This is not to say that concessions to play were never made in the bathing infrastructure of New York City.Footnote ⁴ Images like figure 1, which are common, show us a relaxed environment in the river baths, and swimming pools would come to be included in the design of many indoor baths during the early twentieth century. Even advocates for municipal baths, such as sanitary engineer William Paul Gerhard, recognized that “it is an indisputable fact that in the summer, and particularly during heated terms, people take a bath in the river or at the seashore, not from a desire to become clean, but for the sake of enjoying the practice of swimming, or for the cooling, invigorating and exhilarating effect of such a bath” (Gerhard Reference Gerhard1908: 27).

Still, a spirit of social reform prevailed; as sport gained popularity among the middle classes in the early twentieth century, the rationale for providing pools came to include swimming for fitness and strength,Footnote ⁵ expressed through citywide swimming competitions and water performances. A notable architectural detail in the shape of the pool in the early years tips us off to the change: “A swimming basin is usually oblong in shape, but sometimes it is circular or its plan may be a rectangle with one or both ends semicircular” (ibid.: 65). Competitive swimming, with its standardized metrics for distance, required the rectangle that now seems commonplace, but in the ovo-rectangle we see the evolution from giant bathtub to racetrack. Where the enthusiasm to provide baths strictly for hygiene had slowed largely through the rise of indoor plumbing,Footnote ⁶ ludus was brought in to boost the rationale for these spaces, and paidia was left to places less easily surveilled.

New York City's 11 large outdoor pools opened in the summer of 1936 under a regime of public recreation, a new kind of play that coincided with the burgeoning leisure time that was becoming available to more Americans (Currell Reference Currell2005; Nasaw Reference Nasaw1993). Historian Galen Cranz, in her 1982 history of urban parks in America, notes that the “term ‘recreation’ . . . was the watchword of the era, since unlike ‘play’ it seemed to exclude no activity or age group. . . . Correspondingly, parks became recreational facilities, the term ‘facility’ being equally neutral and all-encompassing” (103–5). Partly, this shift toward play for all ages was driven by federal policy: recreation facilities would become about 10 percent of the WPA's total expenditures providing, by the close of 1937, “3,700 recreational buildings, 881 new parks, 1,500 athletic fields, 440 swimming-pools, 3,500 tennis courts, 123 golf courses and 28 miles of ski trails” (Dulles Reference Dulles1940: 349). The architects of the WPA, and its associated institutions, were concerned with intervening in the structure of social life in a form that tended toward orderly ludus, demonstrated through their training of sports instructors to run games and tournaments, promoting folk dancing in contrast to popular dance halls, and offering swimming lessons. Yet the enormous New York City pools built in 1936 offered an environment based in paidia, with exuberant play at the heart of daily activity that we see in photos (figure 2).

FIGURE 2.

Astoria Park Pool Source: New York Historical Society

What, then, was the source of shift in priorities, from ludus back toward paidia? The priority placed on building pools at all, as opposed to other projects with WPA dollars, certainly had to do with the preferences of Robert Moses—he had been a competitive swimmer, and wanted to see New Yorkers in an organized setting in the water, even for recreation. (The 1930s and 1940s would also see a rise in swim lessons and leagues for young people through the Parks Department pools.) Indeed, Moses had no compunction about deploying his authority to prioritize a particular kind of project just because he liked it: “[b]ecause of his fascination with water in general and swimming in particular, Moses gave each of the pools . . . his personal attention. . . . Despite the WPA requirements that only the cheapest materials be used, each pool turned out to be a municipal marvel of the first magnitude” (Caro Reference Caro1975: 512–13).Footnote ⁷ Also, beach bathing and culture had become quite popular in the intervening years (Bier Reference Bier2011; Nasaw Reference Nasaw1993; Von Borosini Reference Von Borosini1910), and the new outdoor pools provided more ready access to beach-style recreation for New Yorkers in their own neighborhoods. In comparison with commercial areas, such as Coney Island, the city pools were considered both more “wholesome” and more accessible, as the fees were low (and free for children during designated times) and could be reached by many New Yorkers on foot or a short bus ride. Finally, the pools were open in the summer months when school let out, and city officials from many departments were interested in simply having young people “off the streets and out of trouble”Footnote ⁸ —if this meant exuberant, flirtatious behavior under the watchful eye of the lifeguard, so be it. As a nod to the primary purpose of ludus, the outdoor pools built in New York during the 1930s and since have almost all been about four feet deep—just deep enough for an adult to swim competitively,Footnote ⁹ but mostly designed for the activities we see today in the water: dipping, chatting, and splashing. The confluence of beach culture, local access, and increased surveillance of young people inside the walls of the pool loosened up the restrictions on play in and around the pool.

Even after pool construction, however, the conflict between young people and law enforcement over river bathing continued for decades. Among a number of New York City Parks Department memos on the issue from the late 1930s we find, for example, that on the evening of June 24, 1938—a full two years after the huge, beautiful WPA pools had opened—“there were at least twenty young men swimming naked in the River at 86th Street, in full view of motorists bound in both directions” (Jennings Reference Jennings1938). To interpret this conflict, we must recall that time spent in the water offers vastly different frameworks for meaning making among different groups. Public health experts and city officials tried to keep people out of the rivers, which carried sewage, industrial waste, and blood from slaughterhouses, and where people regularly drowned, but the children of Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s recall time spent in the water fondly. “We could all swim like rats. . . . We’d lay on our backs and we’d float up to 42nd street with the tide. Then we’d stay up there on the pier till nine or ten o’clock, when the tide turned and we’d float back down. There were gangs of kids floatin’ on the river. . . . We loved the dirty, greasy water” (Kisseloff Reference Kisseloff1989: 501). Even with the unstructured play that the city pools offered, resembling paidia more closely than anything offered previously, there was often a small fee to pay, clothes to be checked, and footbaths to walk through. This flotilla of children retained a degree of freedom that the pools couldn't match as they rode the tidal strait up and down the length of the island—even in spite of the filthy water—and some resisted letting it go.

Building Space, Building Publics

In the contemporary landscape of New York City, only 12 percent of the built places for social swimming and bathing are owned by the municipality, including the 32 outdoor pools that operate for only three months out of the year. The majority of social bathing places regulated by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene belong to private institutions: gyms, hotels, spas, mikvehs (Jewish ritual baths), Korean baths, banyas (traditional Russian baths), YMCAs, and the like.Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, this has always been the case; the first floating baths in 1870 also opened among a broad ecosystem of public baths,Footnote ¹¹ including private river baths, that catered to various ethnic communities for ritual and communal life, some offering “water cures,” and serving numerous social functions.

This larger ecology of bathing spaces draws out an important issue: the municipal pools and baths were most widely utilized by—and directed toward—the poorest of all New Yorkers. Those in the middle and upper classes had already made swimming and bathing part of their regular routine from the middle of the nineteenth century (Renner Reference Renner2008), having gotten access to indoor plumbing long before the city mandated it in the tenements: “With the beginnings of a sewer system in the 1850s, the Croton-supplied bathroom became a fixture in city dwellings” (Koeppel Reference Koeppel2000: 287). They also had grown accustomed to attending beachside resorts on holiday, and perhaps bathing recreationally in socially oriented bathhouses. A June 13, 1874 article in the New York Times notes that “[a]ll who can afford to pay for a bath prefer the private establishments as being more commodious and more comfortably fitted up.” In turn, conceptions of the structure with which bathing spaces ought to operate were much more rigid for the poor, who depended more heavily on the state for services and access to public space inside of crowded neighborhoods.

Until New York City opened its first municipal bath in 1901, attempts at providing indoor baths explicitly for poor people had only been done by charity groups. Indeed, the “first successful indoor public bathhouse in the United States,” the People's Baths, “opened in New York City in 1891” supported by a coalition of charities, and a number of other charity baths followed in the 1890s (Glassberg Reference Glassberg1979: 10). When the city opened the first municipal bath in 1901 with tax dollars (a policy catalyzed by a 1895 state law calling for the provision of baths in cities with populations of more than 50,000) that which had operated as charity became the public bath, and this indicated provision for the poor in order to civilize.Footnote ¹² In two moves, municipal public spaces for bathing at least, but often in other contexts, too, became conflated with the lowest class of New Yorkers, a legacy we live with today when there is often difficulty finding “public money” in our budgets to support public space that is ostensibly for all to use.Footnote ¹³

In their account of the rise of public sidewalks in late-nineteenth-century Los Angeles, Ehrenfeucht and Loukaitou-Sideris (Reference Ehrenfeucht and Loukaitou-Sideris2007) sketch the process by which durable paving materials were invested with legal definitions of rights-of-way in order to produce a new urban subject: the pedestrian. “The pedestrian's unobstructed mobility became the justification that underlay other activity restrictions, and the pedestrian became the public for whom the sidewalks were being provided” (17). Space, action, and subject are co-constructed here through particular advances in law and materials engineering. Of course, people walked in the city all the time before the advent of the sidewalk, but with this new type of space came a designation, with grounds for rights making and a standard of safety to which walkers were entitled, as well as new sets of rules and restrictions: pedestrian traffic must keep moving, peddling must take place during designated hours or on sidewalks of certain widths, and so forth.

In baths and pools, we can identify a similar style of co-construction. That is, an attempt on the part of reformers, both in city government and adjunct to it, to “make public” in municipal space the activities of swimming and bathing that were already occurring in venues such as the riverbank or the private bathhouse. As with the pedestrian and the sidewalk, municipal social bathing, with its focus on order through hygiene and then sport, was achieved through particular infrastructural capacities and choices, such as building the bathhouse from the latest in durable, washable materials (Glassberg Reference Glassberg1979) and the maintenance of the physical structures over many years.

Public space, as Don Mitchell notes, “is the product of competing ideologies about what constitutes that space” (Reference Mitchell2003: 129). Space made public by the state—in this case, in the water—in order to promote a regulated, disciplined public, especially among poor people and immigrants, thus exists in tension with an ideal that public space ought to be enjoyed by all people on an equal basis, rather than being deployed to provide fewer services and more rules for the poorest people. Regulation and surveillance accompanied the rise of municipal bathing infrastructure; particular definitions of health, sport, and leisure thus defined how play ought to operate in public space and, in turn, who was a qualified member of that public. From the riverbank “urchin,” the floating pool and the bathhouse would produce “the bather,” bounded in a cubicle of space and a limit of showering time. Realizing that the bath for cleaning was not enough to maintain demand, structured identities of sport and cleanliness filled in the space, corresponding to a healthy standard of middle-class citizenship that looked kindly upon “the swimmer.” Thus, in swimming and bathing infrastructure, attempts at separating the conjoined twins of paidia and ludus come up again and again as we hash out different notions of what public life is through space.

In current literature on public space and the public sphere, many academics and designers call for play to be taken seriously as a means to shape and repurpose elements of the built environment; often play is analyzed as a tool for political intervention in the urban context. Iveson (Reference Iveson2007) parses descriptions of public space into the topographical—the public spaces that could be colored in on a map, and the procedural—“any space which is put to use at a given time for collective action and debate” (3). In so doing, he brackets the question of the importance of property ownership in public space, and opens the conversation to the temporalities of the potential for public life. Much urbanist literature on play in public space takes a “procedural” tack, less interested in the places designated for public play as those where urban denizens deploy play or playfulness as tactic as acts of artistic expression or social protest. This may be because, while playgrounds and sports fields flourish, each with their own particular purpose, very little unprogrammed space exists for exuberant play among adults.

Many of those who practice these styles of urban interventionist play, as well as those who write about them, cite the influence of the Situationists of Paris in the late 1960s and their revolutionary artistic practices including the derive: urban meandering as an aesthetic form that disrupts the proscribed modes and channels of modern urban design. Others emphasize DeCerteau's Walking in the City as a call to rework the coercive shape of the city (Shepard and Smithsimon Reference Shepard and Smithsimon2011). Shepard (Reference Shepard2006), for example, is concerned with playful methods of street activism that expose the rigidity of social structures, “encompassing a range of affects and outcomes, including joy, social eros, liberation, and policy change” (2). Others theorize practices of time-bound playful intervention in public spaces, such as the flash mob, in which play is theorized as a style of “enacting democracy by creating events that reside outside of the forms of leisure afforded by capitalist culture” (McClish Reference McClish2012: 159–60). Still others (Dodge and Kitchin Reference Dodge and Kitchin2006; Garrett Reference Garrett2011; Paiva and Manaugh Reference Paiva and Manaugh2008; Pinder Reference Pinder2005) examine urban exploration or “place hacking” as a way to uncover a creative dimension of urban living outside of the rules of the everyday.

Stevens (Reference Stevens2007), also thinking through the lens of Caillois, offers the Ludic City as a place where public life can be enriched through playing in and through urban spaces. For him, “It is the play of adults which can lead to a reconsideration of the ways in which urban space might stimulate and facilitate unexpected and impractical behavior, and how space can be utilized for escapes from serious meanings and uses and to critique the normal social order” (27). His is a call for public space to be reworked through play, though not explicitly to build municipal space for play.

The interventions that these scholars cite are based in a free and joyous approach to the city, an urban sphere that will expand with possibility when possibilities are enacted. Yet all race and class groups in cities do not necessarily enjoy the same opportunities to intervene creatively in public space without reprisal or attracting the eye of law enforcement. This suggests that public spaces designed for play are still needed for those who cannot gain access in other ways, and brings us back to the question of what—and whom—public space is meant to enact.

Paidia in Action: Brooklyn, Summer 2012

On a hot July afternoon at the Kosciuszko Pool—affectionately known as K-Pool—in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, teenagers play a popular game in the water: body slamming. In a typical round of play a teenage boy, or group of boys, will chase after a teenage girl in a sort of swim-run. When one catches up, from behind her back he will wrap both of his arms around her midsection and, with hands locked tightly, will lift her up a few feet into the air and thrown her back in the water sideways. The girl will often laugh and scream, feigning an escape from the boy—who is likely a good deal stronger than her—perhaps assisted by her friends, who are caught up in the same game. Usually the boy (and it is almost always a boy) will be part of a larger group of male friends who control the space at the center of the pool, coalescing and breaking apart from other groups, taunting and shouting and chasing in a tangle of teenagers. Their peers who don't want to be involved will usually stick to the edge of the pool, while smaller children will occasionally imitate the game, but in a less specifically gendered and less aggressive way—often they are not strong enough to even lift their partner all the way out of the water.

During the summer of 2012, I observed this game many times each week at K-Pool as part of a larger ethnographic project. Each time I sat at the edge of the pool and watched, legs dangling in the water, I would ask myself, who actually wants to play this game? In a casual conversation with girls probably 11 or 12 years old—younger than those I usually saw playing, but still eager to be involved—I expressed that the game looked pretty scary to me, pretty aggressive. “We’re just playing,” they insisted, as they crowded together beneath shared towels on the few plastic lounge chairs available on the deck of the pool, and besides “you don't have to play.” At this site, lifeguards generally let the game go on as long as nobody gets thrown too close to the cement edges of the pool or too close to patrons who obviously do not want to be involved. Everyone seems to think this is good fun, or at least tolerable behavior: paidia as flirtation, shows of strength, and hilarity.

At the far end of K-Pool from the entrance, a lap-swimming area is separated from the section dominated by teenage play by a rope, a “no man's land” 10 feet or so wide, and then another rope. In this separation, ludus is physically separated from the explosive energy of paidia: ostensibly a practical solution for different users of the space at the same time. The consequence, however, is also that this is the line where the pool is racially segregated. Although black attendees—who are the majority at K-Pool in general—can sometimes be found in this area, the few white adults at the pool make up most of the lap-swimming scene. I, pale and freckled, am motioned or escorted toward the lap-swim area by lifeguards and Parks security on many visits, as I wander around the pool's edge looking for a good vantage to watch the action in the main part of the pool. Although not much of a lap swimmer, sometimes I used the opportunity to get a little exercise; yet looking back toward the entrance from the spacious environs of the lap lanes, the color line was stark, particularly with the yawning empty space set up between to ensure that paidia wouldn't disrupt ludus. This separation can be interpreted a number of ways. A pool full of white youth would also likely opt for splashing and flirting over the monotony of distance swimming. Hence in many municipal pools, time is divided up, with periods like early morning lap swim or “adult swim” to break up regular play hours in order to allow for different uses. Still, the division here is plainly racialized, and cannot be explained away simply as a difference in interest.

The oft-repeated “black people just don't swim” is not the case,Footnote ¹⁴ yet it is true that black youth do not learn to swim in the numbers that white youth do, and that black (and Latino) children in the United States, especially boys, die in drowning accidents at 3.2 times the rate of white children (Irwin et al. Reference Irwin, Drayer, Irwin, Ryan and Southall2008: 24). For a host of reasons including, and especially, a history of legally enforced segregation at pools (Wiltse Reference Wiltse2007), generations of parents and grandparents who cannot swim because of the history of segregation, and the present-day lack of access to pools and to lessons, black children are largely excluded from the sport of swimming, as well as from pools, especially in cities in the summer. Thus, the tension between paidia and ludus is once again demonstrated, this time in swimming ability that is largely racialized; that stark difference appears here in the accommodations attempted in and through public space.Footnote ¹⁵

At 6:45 PM, K-Pool closes for the day, marked by a long trill of whistles from the lifeguards on duty, at which point another game erupts. This time, all of the young people lift themselves out of the edge of the pool and jump in the water, cannonball style, over and over for a full minute, laughing and yelling. The lifeguards shrug—one tells me that this ritual only goes on here. He has never seen it at any other pool, and it could be quite dangerous if someone were to slip on the slick paint at the pool's edge, but no one has so far, so the game persists. Like body slamming, this horseplay is permitted inside of a set of norms that everyone involved seems to understand, no matter how chaotic it might look to an outsider.

At McCarren Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, about two miles away, none of these games go on. There, the wrong kind of contact between swimmers or an overly enthusiastic leap into the water provokes the lifeguard's warming whistle and the threat of being thrown out of the pool for the day. No one chases, throws, and would dare cannonball into the pool at the closing whistle. A disembodied voice periodically addresses the public from loudspeakers mounted on the main tower of the bathhouse, reminding swimmers that “horseplay is not permitted.” What could be so different in a municipal pool run by the same Parks Department just a few miles away from K-Pool, with ostensibly the same rules in place?

The difference hinges on location—McCarren Pool is in the long-gentrifying neighborhood of Williamsburg—as well as a series of highly publicized incidents in the weeks after the reopening of the pool after a $50 million renovation and 28 years of vacancy. McCarren Pool was one of 11 pools opened in the summer of 1936 by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, with WPA funds, but the pool closed in 1984 due to a combination of crumbling infrastructure, and the New York City fiscal crisis. Subsequent attempts at reopening the pool in the 1980s were beset by local political conflict as “working class whites of the area engaged into neighborhood defense in order to prevent the influx of Latinos and African Americans into parts of Williamsburg and Greenpoint” (Chronopoulos Reference Chronopoulos2013).

The 2012 renovation was eased through the mayor's office by the North Brooklyn Open Space Alliance (NBOSA), a conservancy with powerful local business leaders on its board. The night before McCarren Pool reopened, NBOSA held a $150-per-head fundraiser on the pool's deck, with Brooklyn's finest food and drink on offer, and a 10-piece salsa band that nobody danced to. The next morning, June 28, 2012, the Parks Department held their own ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the renovation and reopening of the pool for the public. The event, held on one of the first truly hot days of summer, was attended by Mayor Bloomberg, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, and hundreds of children eager to get into the water. The opening was widely celebrated by press, blogs, and community members who showed up in numbers to attend the free pool.

But just one day after the official ribbon cutting, on June 29, about an hour before closing, a fistfight erupted when a group of teenage and young adult patrons attacked the lifeguards after repeated warnings to stop doing backflips into the four-foot-deep pool (New York Times 2012b). The entire pool was cleared, and reopened the following afternoon with heavy security. The following Monday, another fight broke out between young patrons on the deck; a police officer was then attacked as he tried to intervene, landing him in Bellevue hospital with a broken wrist. This time, when the pool was reopened, parks security guards were accompanied by reinforcement police officers both inside the pool as well as on the long security-check line on the hot sidewalk outside.

Shortly after these events, the pool was closed once again on a hot afternoon after feces were spotted in the water (Gendar and Hutchinson Reference Gendar and Hutchinson2012). Patrons also began to report thefts from lockers (New York CBS Local 2012).Footnote ¹⁶ Though unrelated to the fights, these incidents amplified the already negative media attention that had been gaining steam from the previous weeks’ fights. A frenzy of bad press spun out from outlets as varied as the New York Post (Calder Reference Calder2012) and the local NPR affiliate, WNYC (WNYC Newsroom 2012b). The series of incidents and unease were often told as a violent residue of the racial tension between Polish and Puerto Rican communities that had accompanied the pool's (then) permanent closure in the early 1980s (Shapiro et al. Reference Shapiro, Colvin and Dreier2012).

In the following days and weeks, different media outlets took different stances on what had actually been happening at the pool, and whether or not it was significant in a larger way, or just a passing disturbance. While many called the initial fight a “melee,” and tied the different incidents together, the New York Daily News published an editorial a month later entitled “Don't Believe the Hype—McCarren Pool Is Safe, Calm and Keeping Brooklyn Cool” (New York Daily News 2012a), in which they asserted that the pool, and all the city pools, were generally safe. “As a pool that newly serves recreation-deprived communities, McCarren has proven invaluable in drawing 76,458 bathers in four weeks. Compared with that number, the six busts hardly represent a wholesale breakdown of civilization.” WNYC's Brian Lehrer interviewed Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe on the issue; the commissioner “chalked up the rash of violence to ‘isolated incidents’ and said it was an example of ‘young people doing dumb things on a hot day’” (WNYC 2012a). Among these attempts at mediating reports, however, the stories of violence and mismanagement were provocative and contagious, if exaggerated.

In an unrelated incident, on July 11, a young man was viciously attacked by a group of teens in the park across the street; the headline read “McCarren Pool Violence Spreads” (Hartman Reference Hartman2012), and the author claimed that “knowing that the last thing the McCarren Park Pool needs is more trouble, a gang of teen hooligans thoughtfully committed their horrific acts of violence elsewhere in the park.” This language offers the sense that the pool was somehow generative of violent tendencies among young people, which were now oozing out of the front gates. Indeed, it recalls the language that Sarah Burns invokes in her incisive recounting of the false arrest and imprisonment of young black and Latino men in The Central Park Five (Reference Burns2011), in which “the language and images of these stories, particularly those on the front page, seeped each day into the collective consciousness of the city” (68), feeding fears through stereotypes of class and race.

From that point on play was monitored closely, as the fear of youthful exuberance spilling over into violence was palpable. The deputy chief of operations for parks in Brooklyn was moved from his regular office in Prospect Park to a small poolside office, shared with maintenance and security staff. At least 20 NYPD officers were present in and around the pool at all times including, for a time, riot police—because, per the official explanation, “patrol officers simply don't have the special training riot police have to deal with the huge crowds” (Curanaj Reference Curanaj2012). This aggressive style of law enforcement has become a mainstay of New York City policing, as we have seen in the struggles—particularly in communities of color—over “stop and frisk” techniques.

When I mentioned the fights at McCarren in casual conversation with many Parks Department employees, they almost uniformly responded that the fistfights, though regrettable, are pretty standard fare for the first few weeks of pool season at all pools (echoing Commissioner Benepe's interview) and they tend to cool off after that. In an interview with a Brooklyn Parks official, I am told:

Indeed, this official's mention of “even Betsy Head,” a pool in a very poor, mostly African American section of Brooklyn, enunciates the race and class delineations that some Parks officials take as commonsense ways of describing different sites.

Taking a slightly different angle, lifeguards at K-Pool explained that McCarren was a “hot” place to be, “like the opening of a new movie, and everyone wants to be there.” Concurring in his blog at The Atlantic, cultural commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote: “Maybe I’m jaded but if I re-open a pool in New York, on a hot day, to much fanfare, I expect a crowd, I expect kids, and I expect beef. It is by no means shocking that some kids decided to rush a lifeguard instead of listening to him. You need cops there” (Coates Reference Coates2012). So the common wisdom offers that what went on at McCarren can't be helped, and goes on at just about every pool; further, many pools in poorer, black and Latino neighborhoods report even higher levels of violence throughout the summer to little or no media attention. In turn, strict enforcement of the rules by Parks employees, backed up by the police—meaning throwing offenders out of the pool, and perhaps closing it for the day—is the swiftest solution.

But the hole in this logic, of course, is that the same kind of action that counts as “misbehavior” at one pool is understood as “play” at other pools, and is dealt with quite differently. In a further interview with the same Parks official, he offers a hint that there are in fact different rules based on the population of the different pools:

In a number of casual conversations with the police officers on duty on the deck at McCarren Pool, the language is far less coded than this talk of “IT professionals” (meaning middle class and likely white patrons): one tells me that the enforcement of rules has been much stricter since the early fights simply because “it's a wealthy white neighborhood and people aren't putting up with it.” “It's just fighting,” another offers, and he's happy to be at the pool for the rest of the summer because he's fairly certain he won't be seeing much more action.