'It was a great time.' Erie's Chestnut Street pool was beloved for 80 years

The Chestnut Street pool was the place to be for generations of Erie residents each summer.

Built just after the turn of the 20th century, the outdoor community pool was frequented by thousands of children and adults annually.

"It was a great time," said Bob Zawadzki, who was a regular at the pool after his family moved to a home on lower Chestnut Street, within hearing distance of the shouts and laughter of pool patrons, in 1948.

"It kept us out of trouble, and maybe got us into a little trouble," Zawadzki said, especially with his mother when he left towels behind. "She always said that our towels were disappearing."

The pool closed four decades ago due to poor repair, bayfront development plans, and health and liability concerns. Today, there's a parking lot in its place on the Erie Water Works property on the north side of the Bayfront Parkway.

'A popular resort for bathers'

Erie Water Works built the pool and a frame bath house with 35 dressing rooms, called "cabinets," in 1902. The facilities, including benches for spectators, opened to the public that summer.

"The public bathing pool at the foot of Chestnut street was filled with water Tuesday for the first time," the Erie Daily Times reported on Friday, July 18, 1902. "It proved to be a popular resort for bathers, both young and old. A great number of little boys and girls were in the water all afternoon and in the evening the pool was again filled with men."

The pool was 75-by-155 feet. Pool regulations published on July 25, 1902, gave its depth: "All bathers unable to swim should enter the water at the south end, where it is two feet deep, or in the middle, where it is four and a half feet, and never at the north end, where it is seven feet deep."

At the deep end of the pool, according to a July 18, 1903, report, "spring boards are fixed for those who are fond of diving, and they are kept busy most of the time.

"In the center of the pool is a fountain which forms another source of amusement for the bathers."

The pool was made of rough concrete that roughed up swimmers through the years.

"If you didn't come home with bloody knees, you hadn't had a good time," Zawadzki said.

Pool hours originally were from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays. Saturday hours were soon added.

A "bathing master" supervised swimming each morning and from 1:30 p.m. until closing. "All children must bathe between these hours," according to the pool regulations.

Anyone wishing to learn to swim could "make the necessary arrangements" with the bathing master. In later years, the pool had its own swim club.

'Blame it on Hitler'

The Chestnut pool was closed during World War II for security reasons, because of its proximity to the city Water Works.

"Blame It on Hitler," the Erie Daily Times proclaimed on July 18, 1942. "War has Cut Off Swimming for Thousands of Youngsters."

Children whose family had an automobile could get to the peninsula to swim. For others, the fountain in Perry Square was the only place to wade and splash on hot summer days.

Want to go for a swim?: Here are the public, outdoor pools in Erie County

Bay swimming was discouraged because of poor water quality and undertow. It also was unguarded.

And that was a bigger threat to public safety than the prospect of a German attack, according to an Erie Daily Times editorial a year later, when the pool remained closed.

"There are sufficient guards around the waterworks area to detect any sabotage," according to the July 29, 1943, editorial. "They can carry these military restrictions to hysterical lengths and the closing of the swimming pool is an example of being extreme."

And with the pool closed, "We can expect to hear almost daily: 'Another little boy was drowned in the lake.'"

The pool did not reopen until the war in Europe ended, in 1945.

'The cops came and took our clothes'

By the mid-1950s, the pool was so crowded that swimmers were divided into shifts.

"When one group is in the water, the other group is forced to await its turn," according to a July 26, 1954, Erie Daily Times report.

Also by the 1950s, the fountain in the center of the pool was gone. Left behind may have been "the strange wooden box" described by Erie historian David Frew in an article for the Jefferson Educational Society in 2020.

"That structure was characterized by longitudinal boards so that climbing it required wedging one's toes between boards and climbing while trying not to slip on the slime that collected on the platform," Frew wrote. "Sometimes, just when a kid had almost accomplished the final step up to the top of the box, one of the mean kids who was already up there would kick or shove him back into the water."

The pool was mainly used by children who were segregated by gender but not by race. A July 11, 1955, Erie Daily Times photo showed Black and white children at the pool.

"It was a quiet segregation here. There were no signs saying, 'Whites only,'" said Mary McConnell Watson, who regularly walked to the pool in the 1950s, from her home on the bluff overlooking the Water Works. "Blacks and whites didn't often do things together then, but at the pool, it never came up."

Boys and girls swam separately. Regulations for decades had allowed boys and men in the pool on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday and restricted girls and women to Tuesday and Thursday. And in 1950, girls rebelled.

"Six young girls of the Fourth ward reached the heart of Mayor C.K. Pulling today when they appealed to him to use his influence in getting an extra day of swimming for them at the Chestnut street pool," the Erie Daily Times reported on June 30, 1950.

It worked. Girls gained a third swimming day on Saturday.

In 1956, adults mounted their own suffrage campaign, so they "could cool off without benefit of small fry."

Their effort failed, according to pool schedules published in later years. But adults generally got their laps in late at night.

"After pool watchers went home, adults went in," Zawadzki said. "There was a set closing time, but that doesn't mean that people obeyed them."

Or obeyed rules to keep noise down in the evening.

"If we were too noisy, the cops came and took our clothes, and we had to walk to the police station (at West Seventh and Peach streets) to get them," Zawadzki said. "It was a cat and mouse game almost every night."

'Pool will have to be disposed of'

City Council in 1954 considered the construction of as many as four more pools to ease the overburdened Chestnut pool, at McKinley Park at East 23rd and East Avenue; Wayne Park at East Seventh and East Avenue; Frontier Park on West Eighth Street and Seminole Drive; and at Sigsbee reservoir, at West 26th and Sigsbee streets.

None of the pools were built.

In 1961, the city again looked at building other pools, this time to replace the Chestnut pool.

"Action along this line is being pushed because of the fact the Chestnut St. pool will have to be disposed of in order to provide access to the bayfront property to the west of the Chestnut St. Filtration plant — an area for which the Port Commission has plans," according to the Erie Daily Times on July 31, 1961.

The pool survived, but in 1983, the environmental impact study for then-proposed bayfront highway construction concluded that it would have to close.

Still the pool remained open, but with its future in doubt, city officials balked at spending money on repairs or replacing dressing rooms and diving boards that had aged and been removed.

In 1985, the pool was closed due to poor repair, city liability insurance issues and health concerns.

"It wasn't built to be chlorinated and cleaned like pools are now," Zawadzki said. "I remember Stan Prazer of the water department testing it almost every hour and putting chlorine in, but the pool couldn't recirculate it. Water just came in from the bay and went out again into the bay."

After it closed, the pool was used for a time as a holding pen for walleye raised by the Sons of Lake Erie, Zawadzki said. It was demolished by 1990.

Through the years, only a kind of unofficial pool below the Glenwood Park dam provided another option to the Chestnut pool. Today, the only pool in a city park is at Rodger Young Park at Downing Avenue and Buffalo Road.

"Most of the pools in the city now are private, for members," Watson said. "It would cost a lot of money to build public pools. But I think that it would be money well spent."

Contact Valerie Myers at vmyers@timesnews.com .

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: 'It was a great time.' Erie's Chestnut Street pool was beloved for 80 years