МакКаррен-парк в Бруклине: История и современность

Public park in Brooklyn, New York
The easternmost block contains the McCarren Play Center and the Vincent V. Abate Playground. For several years, the baseball fields have hosted tournament play for the Hasidim; weekend afternoons provide T ball and softball games for organized area youth groups; Latino families and friends often utilize the fields to play soccer and volleyball into the late hours of the night.

The bathhouse is on the eastern sidewalk of Lorimer Street between Driggs Avenue and Bayard Street. The inside walls of the courtyard and arches contain a mural by Mary Temple, Double Sun, which depicts shadows of trees. Although the mural was painted in 2016, the space was intended to be occupied by an artwork from the bathhouse's completion in 1936. There are two identical pavilions to the north and south of the main bathhouse entrance, oriented on a north south axis parallel to Lorimer Street. The northern pavilion houses the men's locker room while the southern pavilion houses the women's locker room. These pavilions each have a brick facade, a flat roof, and archways facing the central courtyard. Above both pavilions, a second story is set back from the east facade, originally serving as a viewing pavilion. There are "comfort stations" attached to the extreme ends of each pavilion, which face the pool to the east. Several design features were installed in the bathhouse during the 2012 renovation of the pool. The bathhouse contains wooden planks that were salvaged in 2010 from the Riegelmann Boardwalk on Coney Island. Wire mesh baskets, rescued from storage, were placed on the bathhouse's ceiling.

East of the bathhouse, McCarren Park contains an enclosed elliptical pool area that is aligned north south. The pool area is composed of a main swimming pool that was built as a rectangular pool. There were also two smaller, semicircular pools for wading and diving, one on either end of the main pool, though these are no longer in use. The diving pool was to the south of the main rectangular pool, but has been infilled with dirt. The area under the pool contains numerous tunnels, According to an 1854 account from the Brooklyn Eagle, the main tributary to McCarren Park formed the boundary between Williamsburg and Greenpoint. The New York City government acquired land for McCarren Park from 1903 to 1905. By 1930, a pool was also being planned at McCarren Park. In 1928, the route of the New York City Subway's Crosstown Line was announced, with a tunnel running under the park. That tunnel opened in 1937.

In 1934, mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia nominated Robert Moses to become commissioner of a unified New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. At the time, the United States was experiencing the Great Depression; immediately after La Guardia won the 1933 election, Moses began to write "a plan for putting 80,000 men to work on 1,700 relief projects". By the time he was in office, several hundred such projects were underway across the city. Moses was especially interested in creating new pools and other bathing facilities, such as those in Jacob Riis Park, Jones Beach, and Orchard Beach. He devised a list of 23 pools around the city, including one at McCarren Park. The pools would be built using funds from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal agency created as part of the New Deal to combat the Depression's negative effects. Eleven of these pools were to be designed concurrently and open in 1936. Moses, along with architects Aymar Embury II and Gilmore David Clarke, created a common design for these proposed aquatic centers. Each location was to have distinct pools for diving, swimming, and wading; bleachers and viewing areas; and bathhouses with locker rooms that could be used as gymnasiums. The pools were to have several common features, such as a minimum length, underwater lighting, heating, filtration, and low cost construction materials. To fit the requirement for cheap materials, each building would be built using elements of the Streamline Moderne and Classical architectural styles. The buildings would also be near "comfort stations", additional playgrounds, and spruced up landscapes. Construction for some of the 11 pools began in October 1934. The previous month, a new playground had been completed at McCarren Park. efn|The pools opened in the following chronological order: Hamilton Fish Park, Thomas Jefferson Park, Astoria Park, Tompkinsville Pool, Highbridge Park, Sunset Park, Crotona Park, McCarren Park, Betsy Head Park, Colonial Park, and Red Hook Park. This was the largest gathering out of the eleven pool openings held that year. The McCarren Play Center was mostly complete at the time of its opening, but all the finishing details had been applied by the 1937 season.

By the 1970s, McCarren Park and other city parks were in poor condition due to the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis. NYC Parks commenced a project to restore the pools in several parks in 1977, including at McCarren Park. These projects were not carried out due to a lack of money, and by March 1981, NYC Parks had only 2,900 employees in its total staff, less than 10 percent of the 30,000 present when Moses was parks commissioner. In 1982, the NYC Parks budget increased greatly, enabling the agency to carry out $76 million worth of restoration projects by year's end; among these projects was the restoration of the McCarren Park Pool. Unlike the other ten city pools that opened in 1936, McCarren Pool was not restored. Residents had opposed the renovation, preferring that it be closed instead, as they claimed the pool had become a hub for drug dealing and prostitution. The pool was closed after the end of the 1983 season, and when contractors tried to perform a renovation in 1984, protestors chained themselves to the complex's gates. The pool complex quickly became blighted and covered in graffiti. The bathhouse buildings were broken into and vandalized, until they were sealed up sometime around 1989. A car was also driven into the dried up pool. Phyllis Yampolsky, a local resident whom NYC Parks had hired to ensure the structure's demolition, had reconsidered her position after seeing the structure. Yampolsky later said that neighborhood leaders saw her as "an enemy of the people" after her change of sentiment. The next year, the ballfield received a $560,000 renovation. Meanwhile, as part of the 2005 rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the City appropriated $1 million in capital budget funds for restoration of the pool. In 2004, choreographer Noémie Lafrance requested permission from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to use the derelict pool as a performance space. Lafrance chose the space as she resided nearby and wanted "this space for community use for other performances and for it to be used as an experimental space where people can develop site specific ideas." Lafrance was able get to permission by raising funds, as well as receiving a donation of $200,000 from Live Nation. The first public event in the pool, a dance performance called Agora, choreographed by Lafrance, was held by Sens Production that summer. During early 2007, many in the community expressed a preference that the pool be returned to its historic use as an active recreational facility, with a smaller space dedicated to cultural and concert events. In April 2007, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that a $50 million reconstruction of the pool would move forward, funded as part of the City's PlaNYC long term planning initiative. The site continued to be used as a large concert venue until 2008. The plan presented to the LPC in September 2008 called for a performance space to be included alongside a new pool, an ice skating rink, a cafe, a community center, and an exhibition center. The LPC approved the renovation plan on September 9, 2008. Final design renderings were completed in February 2009, and renovation work began that December. The work included removing graffiti, repairing the bathhouse and pool surfaces, and restoring the bathhouse. The pool reopened on June 28, 2012, although local residents expressed concerns that the reopened pool would attract crime. The project was conducted by Rogers Marvel Architects and cost $50 million. That year, a draft of a report commissioned for the Parks Department detailed the poor conditions of the bathhouse, including moisture accumulation. NYC Parks planned to restore the bathhouse starting in mid 2021. Following an influx of asylum seekers to New York City, in 2023, city officials converted portions of the recreation centers at McCarren Park and Sunset Park into temporary shelters.