Highbridge Play Center

History and architecture

The Highbridge Play Center is one of a group of eleven immense outdoor swimming pools opened in the summer of 1936 in a series of grand ceremonies presided over by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Park Commissioner Robert Moses. All of the pools were constructed largely with funding provided by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of many New Deal agencies created in the 1930s to address the Great Depression. Designed to accommodate a total of 49,000 users simultaneously at locations scattered throughout New York City’s five boroughs, the new pool complexes quickly gained recognition as being among the most remarkable public facilities constructed in the country. The pools were completed just two and a half years after the LaGuardia administration took office, and all but one survives relatively intact today.

While each of the 1936 swimming pool complexes is especially notable for its distinctive and unique design, the eleven facilities shared many of the same basic components. The complexes generally employed low-cost building materials, principally brick and cast-concrete, and often utilized the streamlined and curvilinear forms of the popular 1930s Art Moderne style. Each had separate swimming, diving and wading pools, and a large bath house with locker room sections which doubled as gymnasiums in non-swimming months.

Concrete bleachers at the perimeter of each pool complex and rooftop promenades and galleries furnished ample spectator viewing areas. The complexes were also distinguished by innovative mechanical systems required for heating, filtration and water circulation. Sited in existing older parks or built on other city-owned land, the grounds surrounding the pool complexes were executed on a similarly grand scale, and included additional recreation areas, connecting pathway systems, and comfort stations.

The team of designers, landscape architects and engineers assembled to execute the new pool complexes, in addition to hundreds of other construction and rehabilitation projects undertaken between 1934 and 1936 by New York’s newly consolidated Parks Department, was comprised largely of staff members and consultants who had earlier worked for Moses at other governmental agencies, including architect Aymar Embury II, landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke and Allyn R. Jennings, and civil engineers W. Earle Andrews and William H. Latham. Surviving documents also indicate that Moses, himself a long-time swimming enthusiast, gave detailed attention to the designs for the new pool complexes.

The Highbridge Play Center incorporates a portion of the elevated site in Highbridge Park. This area was formerly occupied by a reservoir constructed in 1870 as part of New York City’s Croton water supply system. A short distance west of the bleacher section of the pool complex stands a related component, the tall ashlar water tower built in 1872. Designated a New York City Landmark in 1967, the water tower dominates both the distant and immediate landscape and, by virtue of its relationship to the play center’s pools, evokes the historic configuration of the tower with the reservoir.

The unique arrangement of the Highbridge pools – an exceptionally large wading pool and an adjacent single combined swimming and diving pool – may well have been determined in part by the earlier history of the site. The distant views of the Harlem River valley area from the pool complex and adjacent areas are among the most striking vistas in New York City.

The unusual prominence of the ashlar construction is a distinguishing feature of the Highbridge Play center design. It is utilized for long stretches of the retaining wall extending along Amsterdam Avenue, the tall podium which forms a monumental base for the main entryway, and for the flanking dogleg approach stairways. Perhaps inspired by the construction materials employed for the water tower, and possibly incorporating some preexisting ashlar wall construction, the double stairways provide a ceremonial pathway up to the main entrance.

The curved slightly projecting portico section of the entry is distinguished by two large fluted cast-concrete piers which, together with the massive flanking brick piers, carry a tall concrete architrave. The portico is offset and framed by the cubic shapes of the entry block and courtyard rising behind it. Together with the other WPA-era park improvements, the Highbridge Play Center complex was clearly a major achievement of the New Deal in New York City.