‘Deep End of the Pool’ | Local resident commemorates East Point's segregated swimming pools with art installations
Hannah Palmer's 'Ghost Pools' uncovers the muddled history behind the sad yet eventual erasure of the city's public pools.
EAST POINT, Ga. — Have you ever been asked out of the blue, ‘Do you know how to swim?’
On the surface, that can be a fairly innocuous question to be sure. However, the answer to that question can be quite bogged down with conjecture and presumption.
Especially when you have to also consider the natural follow-up question to that inquiry, or at least how it applies to the widest swath of the American population.
‘Did I grow up around swimming pools?’
It was a similar curiosity that prompted long-time East Point resident and ‘Ghost Pools’ creator, Hannah Palmer to initially investigate the true reason behind the complete and total absence of public swimming pools in the city.
And what she discovered was that there wasn’t some singularly insidious conspiracy behind the defunding and demolishing of pools here in East Point, it was something even worse – systemic.
Also owing to the fact that these pools and the surrounding real estate didn’t just become abandoned dilapidated husks of yesteryear and nostalgia, both pool sites - Spring Ave and Randall Street were deliberated obliterated from the landscape – as if they never even existed.
When asked about her opinion on the unsavory history of the public pools here in East Point, Palmer defines the sad trajectory of public swimming as – a case study.
“I just would like to present the facts of how these pools were funded, constructed, programmed, litigated, desegregated, defunded, and ultimately destroyed,” affirms Palmer.
“It has been an absolutely profound learning experience,” she tells Vox Pop ATL.
“I hope that people understand that water is not the criminal they are an accessory to the crime. They are not the perpetrators,” implores Ann Hill-Bond, Oral History Facilitator for Ghost Pools.
“Bringing back to public memory, the history that was lost, and it takes it away from academia and policy and people and lean into it to say how can I change this for the future generation?”
Featured during his oral history conversation with the crowd, East Point native, Fire Chief Corey Thornton could vividly recall his memories of the segregated pools and even described his recollection of those feelings of discrimination and exclusion as – painful.
Another awful dynamic of the ‘separate but equal’ swimming areas was not only their geographical separation but their size and years of operation.
The Spring Ave pool which was located on what is currently the grounds of the East Point Historical Society and Museum in Ward A, costing approximately $100,000 to construct was exclusively for the White residents of East Point.
The size of the Spring Ave pool was 175’ x 75’, which is roughly under half the size of a regulation NFL football field. That pool operated from 1932 until its last summer in 1982.
While literally on the other side of the tracks in Ward B, the Randall Street pool was a fraction of the size at 75’ x 35’ in the East Washington neighborhood, and cost $50,000.
Intended solely for the Black East Point community, this pool wasn’t built until twenty years after the Spring Ave location in 1952 and closed the same year in ‘82.
Another notable point of audience interaction was a crowd-sourced bulletin board polled attendees about their own personal histories with public swimming.
Labeled with the simple question, ‘How did you learn to swim?’
Utilizing colored dots to indicate the when, where, and how of their initial connection to swimming, guests anonymously answered the following five options regarding the how:
- River, Creek, Lake Beach
- Public Pool
- Private Club
- Residential Pool
- Haven’t Learned Yet
Palmer’s initiative and tenacity to tread the murky waters of East Point’s fraught history with public swimming spaces certainly sparked a long-overdue conversation amongst the community.
A conversation that perhaps may even lead to more and more conversations about what residents could strive to create in the East Point community for the upcoming generations.
As a parting thought, just for context, as of Summer 2023, it has been 41 years since there was a public pool in the city of East Point.
Let that realization sink in for a moment.
The closest OUTDOOR public swimming pools relative to East Point are as follows:
Tracey Wyatt Recreation Complex
2300 Godby Road
College Park GA 30349
South Bend Pool
2000 Lakewood Ave., SE
Atlanta, GA 30315
(P.S. Savvy TV buffs might recognize this particular swimming hole from the third season of the Netflix series ‘Stranger Things’)
Those of you who may have missed the public art installations this past summer can still experience a somewhat diminished yet impactful version of each ‘ghost pool’ at their respective locations.
You can still find the blue outline of what was once the Randall Street pool in the overflow parking lot at the John D. Milner Athletic Complex.
The installation for the Spring Ave pool (sans the cool night lights) is still intact on the grounds of the East Point Historical Society and Museum.
To learn more about future multimedia art installations like ‘Ghost Pools’ around the greater metro Atlanta area, visit the Flux Projects website, and for more info about the artist, Hannah Palmer, click here.
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