Of all the Brooklyn public pools Red Hook Pool (technically the Sol Goldman Pool at the Red Hook Recreational Center) is my favorite. First of all it is huge, Olympic size. Now, this may not seem like it matters, but if you’ve ever gone to family swim at the Prospect Y (before the new pool!) or tried to get yourself and your kid from one side to the other of last summer’s Brooklyn Bridge pop-up pool, small sucks. If you actually want to do more than immerse yourself, if you actually want to swim, or (gasp!) teach your kid to swim, you need some space, an open stretch of water to let yourself and your kid stretch out a bit.
While the locker room at any facility may seem beside the point, it can set the tenor of your whole experience. Maybe you can ignore a particularly gross one as you run in, stash your stuff and head to the pool. But, as you emerge from the water, cool and peaceful, the last thing you want is to walk into a waking stress dream. You can’t ignore slimy showers and cramped quarters when you are trying to change a kid out of a wet suit, which is basically as tricky as peeling a grape. A giant grape. Red Hook’s locker room (at least the ladies) is a converted gym lined with lockers. It has a high ceiling with a few frosted windows, so the place is remarkably light and airy. With so much open space, you don’t feel as if your fellow swimmers are about to fall into your lap in their altogether.
The real draw at the Red Hook Pool is the wading pool. It is essentially a water park. With misters lining the giant poo, a large peninsula at the center with brightly colored sprayers that one can sit on like thrones and space to run around, any kid is going to be busy. There are even bleachers if, for some insane reason, you don’t want to hang out in the water. What I like most here is that I can swim my girl around in the main pool until I’m exhausted; then let her go nuts in the wading pool, while I bask in the fabulousness that is New York in the summer. It is in these moments when I think, being a parent is the greatest thing in the world. Then someone spots a floater and we all have to get out for an hour (this almost never happens, really).
