D.O.T. Dips Its Toe In Dumpster Pools

Photo by Antonia Belt

Back in June, Jocko Weyland, one-third of the trio behind Brooklyn’s much-hyped dumpster swimming pools, attended a dinner event at a Lower East Side arts space on the second night of the New York Bicycle Film Festival. There, Mr. Weyland got to meet a real New York City celebrity—Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn, whose pro-cycling, pro-pedestrian, pro-public-space agenda has made her something of an urbanite rock star.

“I’m not usually one for fanning out at this late age,” said Mr. Weyland, 42, “but after hearing her speak I was like, ‘I’ve gotta meet this woman!'"

When he finally got his turn, (Mr. Weyland offered the rather hip analogy that trying to talk to Ms. Sadik-Kahn at a bike event is like trying to talk to Thurston Moore at a Sonic Youth concert), he took the opportunity to tell her about the dumpster pool project, which has turned a junky lot near the Gowanus Canal into something of an urban oasis, complete with cabanas, bocce ball, grills and, of course, three fully functional, chlorinated, lifeguard protected, 8- by 22-foot dumpsters-turned-pools.

At the time, the site—the location of which Mr. Weyland and his colleagues, David Belt and Alix Feinkind, at the futuristic SoHo-based urban design firm, Macro Sea, are keeping secret for security reasons (or at least trying to!)—was still under construction. They’ve since been hosting private parties and film screenings, and it's safe to say the pools have become the latest cool-whacky thing (as in “Look at this cool whacky thing!”) to infiltrate the New York blogosphere.

But before all that, when Mr. Weyland mentioned the project to Ms. Sadik-Kahn, she was enthusiastic, and pointed him toward her director of strategic communications, Dani Simons, to discuss it further, Mr. Weyland recalled.

“This sort of re-imagining of public space is really in keeping with what we’re trying to do,” said Ms. Simons, who we bumped into while visiting the pools on a recent Thursday. It was a muggy evening, and Ms. Simons had just taken a dip to cool off. “Perfectly crisp!” she said of her swim.

The idea of dumpster pools joining pedestrian plazas and temporary street closings as part of the D.O.T.’s ongoing reinvention of public space seems unlikely, at best. (Then again, at one point so did the idea of hordes of people maxing on lawn chairs in the middle of Broadway.)

We're still waiting on a comment from the D.O.T., although a spokeswoman for the department confirmed that Wendy Feuer, the D.O.T.’s assistant commissioner for urban design & art, had paid a visit to the pools over the weekend and is interested in helping set up a panel discussion at the site as part of the D.O.T.’s Urban Art program.

Mr. Belt, also 42, who as a developer has worked on an array of major construction projects nationwide, including Bear Sterns' headquarters and the Manhattan Bridge retrofit, has bigger plans for the pools, which will be up and running through the end of August. He said he wants to incorporate them into Macro Sea’s larger adaptive-reuse project, which aims to transform the country’s blighted strip malls. (He said you could build your own for around $1,000.)

“We’d love it if the city could provide space to make, like, a lo-fi country club,” said Mr. Belt. “It would be great if we could really blow this out.”