+ POOL Rendering. Designed by Family New York & Playlab, Inc. Image: Family New York. Courtesy of Friends of + POOL
New Yorkers will have to wait a little longer for the self-filtering floating pool in the East River. Initially slated for a pilot this summer, the +POOL team announced on X on Wednesday that while construction is nearly complete, ongoing work on the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience project will delay testing of the prototype until at least 2027. More than 15 years in the making, the project reached a major milestone in summer 2024, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and former Mayor Eric Adams selected Pier 35 as its official location.
The nonprofit +POOL first proposed a self-filtering floating pool in 2015. Since then, the group has worked with the city’s Economic Development Corporation and local stakeholders to create a plan, analyze the city’s water quality, and identify the best location for the pool, as 6sqft previously reported.
In May 2021, +POOL received approval to move forward with plans for a floating pool on the south side of Pier 35 on the Lower East Side. In January 2024, Hochul and Adams committed $16 million to the nonprofit to help bring the project to fruition.
Then, in August 2024, when Hochul and Adams announced Pier 35 as the official location, the +POOL team said that the structure could be ready by the summer of 2025. After further delays due to ice floes, blizzards, and seaweed, the project is delayed again.
Original renderings of the project depicted a 110-by-36-foot, plus-shaped floating pool equipped with a filtration system designed to clean raw river water to an “acceptable microbiological standard for swimming.”
According to +POOL, the city’s ongoing work on the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience (BMCR) project, which is installing a series of flood-prevention measures to protect the Two Bridges area from a 100-year storm surge into the 2050s, has further delayed the project’s deployment until at least 2027.
In a post on X, the group said the sewer line that +POOL is permitted to connect to is being replaced as part of the BMCR project and will not be completed until the fall. Because +POOL requires a sewer connection to discharge wastewater produced by the regular backwashing of its filters, the pool’s pilot cannot proceed until the new sewer line is complete.
For now, the completed prototype sits at the Erie Basin Bargeport in Red Hook, where it will eventually be transported to Pier 35 in the East River, according to Gothamist. The nonprofit said it has secured all required approvals from city, state and federal agencies for the upcoming testing phase.
“Our primary responsibility, as stewards of such a large-scale, publicly funded project, is to pivot when necessary to support the needs of our city and state partners, investors and the people of New York,” Kara Meyer, managing director of Friends of +POOL, said in a statement, as reported by Time Out.
“While this shift comes at a cost to the organization and the project, those realities will feel insignificant when we are living in a New York City that has advanced infrastructure to protect from storm surges while opening up safe public river access for healthful recreation.”
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