Floating Pool Scheme for Brooklyn Bridge Park Gaining Traction

A proposal to build a permanent floating pool is gaining traction as its designers attempt to raise funds, via Kickstarter, to test filtration methods needed to build the project.  Watch their pitch video after the jump.
 

Brooklyn Eagle: Dong-Ping Wong from the firm Family New York, and Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin of PlayLab thought of the idea during last year’s blazing hot summer. They collaborated with engineering firm Arup New York to design the pool, which they call “+Pool.” ….

This is not as easy as it sounds because different cleanliness standards exist — one for natural swimming areas like beaches, and a stricter standard for public swimming pools. +Pool falls into a new, never-before regulated area because it is basically a floating “giant strainer” dropped into the river, Wong said. Water filtration membranes are built into the walls of the pool to filter contaminated river water into clean, swimmable pool water.

As part of the testing phase, the team has launched a Kickstarter (a popular fundraising site) web page to raise the money needed to build and test a model of the filtration method. +Pool’s designers are asking the public to pledge $25,000 by Friday, July 15. By last Thursday, roughly 80 backers had kicked in $7,000. Just one day later, more than $10,000 had been raised, donated by 185 backers.

“We’re excited at the reception this idea has gotten from the public, engineers and organizations. It’s very rare — the pool has generated its own interest from the ground up,” Wong said.

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  • Fritz

    What happened to the pool on a barge which was here in 2007?

  • Sad Neighbor

    The barge pool is now permanently housed in the Bronx. It would be great to have another pool in the area…in the meantime the Red Hook Pool is lovely… and it is not hard to get there.

    How serious are they about this pool…i have heard rumors that they were even supposed to open it near the Atlantic Avenue park section…
    Heard lots of rumors about a waterfall pool too…

  • north heights res

    The unmitigated racism and elitism of commenters never ceases to
    floor me. Like Coney Island? Heaven forbid! Dark-skinned people! Poor people! Loud people! Not in Brooklyn Heights!

    “Let’s keep the park for the people who live here.” Then, EHinBH, I hope that you’re prepared to fully fund this exclusive enclave, and expect to have your ID checked if you dare to venture to parks in other parts of the city.

    Appalling.

  • nabeguy

    Couldn’t have said it better myself, nhr. I’m not sure if EH is a nimby or an oimby based on the mixed message in the post. So EH, do you want the pool only in your backyard or not at all?

  • Gerry

    EHinBH has a valid point.

    We need a pool around here!

    There is NO Aquatics Center in downtown Brookyn and we need one a BIG pool that is well run opens at 5am and closed at 12 midnight.

    I thought that Nabeguy had moved to Great Neck so his daughter could go to a public middle school?

  • WillowtownCop

    I hope they will have certain 18+ times for adults to swim laps when the pool isn’t full of @#$% children.

  • bklyn20

    The “wrong element” theories are the reason why luxury housing is favored over recreation for this park — because “if you build it, THEY won’t come.”

  • Cranberry Beret

    EinBH, please go live in the woods where you don’t have to share anything with 8 million other people. You don’t want a pool, you don’t want a middle school because they’ll bring a “bad element.” Sheesh.

  • Gerry

    EHinBH makes valid points.

  • Arch Stanton

    Gerry, he sure does if your a racist bigot.

  • Sad Neighbor

    Has anyone been to the Red Hook pool…we all swim in peace and harmony and it is also a public pool…EHinBH should visit that pool

  • IB Farley

    Isn’t there a “YMCA” with a pool on Atlantic Avenue near Court Street? The location used to be a public parking garage that somehow got into the hands of 2 Trees Management which built a multi-purpose apartment building there? How did that happen?

  • IB Farley

    I forgot to mention that, to my knowledge, the public parking garage on Atlantic Avenue was formerly City Owned.

  • malanga es malanga

    “Brings a bad element to the hood.” Yikes! At least EHinBH is using one of the preferred codewords for what he’s really trying to say. Perhaps he can use these next time, instead of “a bad element”:

    “urban people”
    “people from other areas”
    “suspicious elements”
    “darker people”
    “ethnics”
    “project dwellers”

    (all examples taken from Webster’s Discriminatory and Misogynist Dictionary and Desk Reference Guide 2011)

  • Andrew Porter

    Outside agitators!

    For references, ask Bull Connor, Muamar Quadafy, etc.

  • Lazy

    @bklyn20 – bullsh*t! As you yourself have stated in the past, the alternative to housing would be to build some sort of for-fee recreation center. WHat do you think will keep poor black people out of the park more, a) having to walk past a couple of luxury residential buildings or b) having to pay an arm and a leg just to play a pick up game of basketball.

    If you want to advocate against having this park more accessible to people of various social and income groups, I guess that’s your right, but don’t pretend that your charging people for the projects $20 an hour to play basketball is helping them.

  • bklyn20

    Jeez, Lazy, keep your shirt on. There are MANY, MANY other ways to fund the park besides a for-pay rec center. I’m not proposing charging people to enter the park. And if we’re discussing a rec center, it could have a sliding fee scale.

    In addition, more recreation, even NOT for pay, will draw people to the park and to the concessions there. Bryant Park makes $$$ from their temporary ice rink, and skating is free. They charge reasonable rates for skate rentals, and the skaters brought to the park then spend money on other revenue-generating businesses in the park.

    Isn’t housing flunking as a mode of park financing? 1 BBP is significantly empty, and the building just got a big chunk of money removed from their fees. The “eyes in the park” should be rolling by now.

  • Elmer Fudd

    May-our Bloomberg wants more luxury housing built there…. so his rich buddies can get richer. So what if nobody else wants to buy in.

    And if housing takes ‘park’ land away for recreation… it will help keep the daffy black ducks out. Yeah!

    (We can only hope a fully-loaded tourist helicopter crashes into one of the 30-story towers on a cold and windy night. Or anytime for that matter.)

  • Lazy

    @bklym – PLease stop pretending that you know anything about the finances of Bryant Park (or anything really). The cost of operating the ice skating rink far exceeds the ice skate rental revenue. The only that even makes that whole thing come close to breaking even is a large donation from a corporate sponsor.
    Only people like you think that housing is flunking because that’s what you wan to believe. 1 BBP has only sold about 2oo+ apartments during the worst economic recession in 3 generations. Does that mean that noone will ever buy housing again? Or maybe housing is cyclical market and we happen to be at (or near) a bottom right now and that’s to be expected at some point. And if having taxes go down a bit means that housing has failed as a revenue source, then what about the larger city? Through out the nation, local property taxes are the main source of revenue for school systems. Throughout the country revenues from real estate taxes (and all revenue sources) has gone down during the recession – does that mean that our schools need to have alternate revenue sources too? What about our fired department? Let’s create a CAH for them too!!!!
    You live in a fantasy world that you created that is not evenly remotely related to the fact based world that the rest of us live in.

  • bklyn20

    Why can’t BBP get funding for some kind of recreationl facility from a major sponsor? That was one the the proposed alternatives to housing. Bryant Park has Citbank, so why can’t BBP reach a similar arrangement?

    Skate rentals are not the only revenue sources at the Bryant Park ice rink — I explained that in my post. As for housing as a failed park finance scheme — luxury housing is doing well elsewhere in Brooklyn, just not in the park. From Crain’s a few months ago:

    Downtown Brooklyn’s residential growth
    Downtown, slated for office space, got a residential boom

    By Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
    February 27, 2011 5:59 p.m

    Early last year, Michael Weiss began attending tenant board meetings at the Brooklyner, Avalon Fort Greene and a handful of other luxury residential towers in downtown Brooklyn. In October, Mr. Weiss, director of the MetroTech Business Improvement District, threw the group’s first neighborhood block party on Bridge Street, with live music, rides and food. He is now organizing a community stoop sale on Lawrence Street that’s scheduled for May.
    “We’ve got to keep our focus on new residents,” Mr. Weiss said. “They’re essential to our area’s growth.”
    True, but that wasn’t the intention when the Department of City Planning approved a comprehensive redevelopment plan for downtown Brooklyn in 2004. What it envisioned was a commercial district full of glittering office towers. But downtown has become the borough’s fastest-growing residential neighborhood, and local officials are adjusting.
    “We were supposed to get the third-largest business district in the city [behind midtown and lower Manhattan],” said Robert Perris, manager for Brooklyn’s Community Board 2, which includes downtown. “What we’ve gotten is a high-rise residential neighborhood.”

    Many projects are filling up quickly. Dklb Bkln, a 36-story, 365-unit rental building on DeKalb Avenue where one-bedroom apartments can fetch almost $2,800, is now 97% occupied, according to a company spokesman. Similarly, only seven of 246 condos remain available at be@schermerhorn, on Schermerhorn Street; two-bedroom units there have sold for as much as $829,000.
    “One of the components of a healthy downtown is having a 24/7 community with a vibrant residential sector,” said Joe Chan, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. “We’re delighted.”

    Of course, housing has no place inside a park, and I know that you vehemently disagree with me and many others on that. But it appears that 1 BBP is in a different cyclical market than the rest of the neighborhood.

  • Lazy

    bklyn20 – two main things that were incorrect in your last post:
    1) The revenue from the ice skate rental AND corporate sponsorship helps offset the cost of running the ice skating rink. THat means that the ice skating rink is, at best, revenue neutral. You are proposing that BBP use recreation to raise funds to operate the rest of the park. That means that revenue neutral is not good enough. It needs to be revenue positive to pay for the costs to operate the rest of the park. You consistently in almost all of your posts, make this mistake and also only look at revenue that uses bring in and conveniently forget that many of these sources have operating costs that sop up most or all of the revenue that they generate.

    2) Actually since the economy has picked up, sales at 1BBP have been relatively brisk, selling at about $850/SF and at a rate of about 10 units a month. You don’t know anything about the real estate market and don’t do any research, so you shouldn’t comment about how well any particular real estate project is doing.