Wading Pools, Splash Pads, and the Public of Children in New York City, 1925 - Present.

Naomi Adiv, University of Toronto

Wading pools, splash pads, and the public of children. While summer cooling has long been a concern of public health officials in big (post) industrial US cities, New York City has a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards investing in its aquatic spaces. While the grand pools built under Robert Moses in the 1930s – and others from later eras – still serve millions of New Yorkers each summer, the city has not built a wholly new outdoor pool since the 1970s. This ambivalence is further reflected in building aquatic spaces for very small children. In the 1920s and 30s, around 30 wading pools were built for children across the city, all now decommissioned. The Lindsay administration of the 1960s introduced the spray cap program which made safer the long-standing practice of opening fire hydrants for cooling on hot summer days; this program disappeared in the 1970s and then resurfaced in 2007. Since the 1990s, 850 splash pads and water play areas have been built across the five boroughs. This is, in some ways, an obvious solution: the splash pads are relatively inexpensive to build; they do not require personnel to supervise them; and one needn’t know how to swim to participate. This paper considers the extent to which children have been considered as a meaningful public for investments in health-through-infrastructure in different eras. Urban space for children, such as the case of the playground movement in the Progressive Era, is well studied for its deployment of public infrastructure to discipline children – particularly of immigrants and the working class. However, the question of building aquatic spaces for the public of children can offer insight into who is accounted for in the shared spaces of the ever-hotter city, and how those investments are rationalized in public discourse.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 53. Structures and Infrastructures of Childhood