East River Swimming Hole Promised for Last Year Will Test This Year and Debut Next Year
A prototype of the 2010 proposal for a floating dock surrounding a cross-shaped swimming hole with a safety net fastened to its underside, to be anchored in the East River adjacent to Lower Manhattan, appears likely to launch this summer—but don’t plan on doing the backstroke there anytime soon. Dubbed “Plus Pool,” the project is written +POOL, and this summer’s first iteration is called POOL1.
Public health officials have ruled that POOL1, designed to capture and filter the flow of the East River and discharge newly sanitized water in its wake, will operate without swimmers this summer, to test the effectiveness of its filtration system in real-world conditions. If all goes according to plan, POOL1 is now slated open to the public in 2027.
Almost from the day this proposal was announced, Lower Manhattan community leaders advocated for it, and pressed City officials to approve its launch at a local site. They most often pushed for a mooring spot in the East River, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, but also discussed locations alongside the shore of Governors Island, and in the Hudson River between Pier 26 and Pier 40.
City and State officials instead decided in 2024 to locate the facility alongside Pier 35, between Rutgers and Clinton Streets. At the time, they promised to open the project in 2025, but regulatory approvals delayed that goal.
By last summer, a custom-built barge that will enclose the +POOL prototype was completed at Bollinger Shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It was placed on the deck of a cargo freighter and shipped to Newark, where the inner workings, including the filtration system and pool shell, are being installed.
While this work was proceeding, approval was needed from a range of government agencies. Permission was required from the Army Corps of Engineers to bore into the bottom of the East River, where the anchoring system will be tethered to bedrock (80 feet below the mudline). Next, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (responsible for the Rutgers Tunnel, which carries the F Train beneath the East River directly under the site planned for +POOL) had to agree that this boring wouldn’t endanger its infrastructure. That underwater work was completed in April.
The project also requires six different permissions from the City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Among other changes, this will necessitate a chlorine hygiene system, to be used only in extreme circumstances, such as when a major storm temporarily overwhelms nearby sewer systems and causes untreated effluent to be dumped directly into the East River. The agency also insisted that POOL1 be operated for a full season without swimmers, as a further precaution. It is scheduled to be towed into place, just north of the Manhattan Bridge, to begin that process this month.
Assuming that all remaining approvals are obtained by the end of this swimming season, POOL1 will be towed to a shipyard, where it will be outfitted with additional features (such as showers and locker rooms) prior to opening for the public in the summer of 2027. Once that milestone has been achieved, the +POOL team plans to begin raising funds to implement their original vision, of a 9,000-square foot cruciform pool.