Encounters with McCarren Pool, 2001-2006

In 2001 a group of more or less like-minded people of which I was a member lived close together in a wholly ungentrified part of Williamsburg. Many of us seemed to live by the tenuous and unexamined belief that we would bounce into the world and through sheer force of destiny become those rare kinds of very accomplished people for whom success exists outside the conventional channels of ladder-climbing.

It didn't occur to me to realize my folly in not believing in destiny for anyone but myself. I was under the spell of possibility. I trusted thoroughly in the edifying power of a bottle of wine and a rooftop.


One night during this period, one particular friend and I walked in the general direction of home after some last call or another. It was a summer night in which the heat had sunk unremittingly into the pavement and from that position continued its assault. In such a setting, one takes her time walking home, enough time for her friend to hatch an idea; she knew of a hole in a fence through which one could access an abandoned swimming pool. We got some beers from a rule-bending bodega clerk and set off for the former McCarren Pool. After a brief brush through some pleasantly anti-urban thicket, we found the hole in the fence and pushed through.

Those who have been there since know that it is a sprawling space. But imagine it in the dead of night, flooded with moonlight, untouched for years, plants growing through cracks in the concrete at the floor some 20 feet below you. Imagine your feet dangling over the edge of the diving pool and looking up at a black sky and sipping a beer that even at 5am is refreshing in its contrast to the still-lingering heat. Imagine a palpable sense of the ghosts of thousands of immigrant children splashing around on an August afternoon. Imagine growing up in Kentucky and then moving to New York and finding yourself finally amongst convivial friends and sharing this moment with one of them. Imagine the feeling that you had discovered a place amongst all this that no one else knew about.

For whatever reason, in the soothing shadow of a crumbling swimming pool built in 1936 for the sweltering, struggling, Depression-era masses, it seemed like anything at all was possible. We returned there several times over the next year or so.

Possibility, it turned out, was limited. Years went by. I visited McCarren Pool again in 2006 with a new set of friends, this time in full daylight and as part of a thousands-large crowd, because there was a free concert playing there and because my old set of friends had disintegrated.


Sneaking in there those first times, what I never imagined was how quickly I myself would become a ghost. The me that snuck into an abandoned swimming pool in Brooklyn no more existed than that abandoned space, now teeming with people.

I was now 29, and I felt very, very old. And when one is feeling old, one thinks about how many more things one should have done; one thinks about wasted time; one thinks about regret.

I don't trust people who say they have no regrets. I regret things as little as paying $100 for a pair of shoes that turned out to be ill-fitting and in conflict with nearly every piece of clothing I own. I regret medium-level things like the time when I was ten that I teased my new neighbor who'd just moved to Kentucky from Japan, poor girl. And I have large-scale regrets as big as having majored in journalism, and being so stubbornly averse to self-promotion, and other things that are better left out of the public realm. To not admit regret is to think yourself perfect and/or deny the past. Having no regret means that you have never apologized for anything, and it especially means that you have never wished you had apologized for something.

So there is regret mixed in with my memories of growing into adulthood. The girl who looked up at the moon and down into the crumbling pool saw a wounded perfection. I either regret not having known better, or having squandered the outlook which enabled that perspective.

Photo at top courtesy of this talented stranger.