A floating pool is coming to the East River — but New Yorkers won’t be able to swim in it anytime soon.
The idea has been pitched for more than a decade by the group +POOL and gained traction earlier this year when Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams announced they were working to select a site for the project along the waterway. The city and state put up a combined $16 million for the bathing area.
On Wednesday, the team from +POOL gave a tour of the approved site for the pool, located off the Lower East Side near Pier 35. They showed off an unassuming barge fitted with a filtration system that they hope will one day make their vision possible.
The filter system marks the most tangible step forward for the pool, which was first pitched to the public through a Kickstarter campaign in 2013. The +POOL team has since held fundraisers, galas and launched public relations campaigns. Those drew skepticism over whether the pool would ever become a reality.
“City bureaucracies are not set up for visionary programs like this one,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, a former city transportation commissioner who joined the board of +POOL in 2022.
Hochul in January said New Yorkers could swim in the floating pool as early as the summer of 2025, casting the idea as part of a larger initiative to bring more swimming education to the city.
But New Yorkers shouldn’t hold their collective breath for an opening next year.
The +POOL team said on Wednesday that if the filters are proven to work, workers will be able to set up a 2,000-square-foot pool next summer — far smaller than the 9,000-square-foot space previously promised by Hochul. The team expects to test out the technology on the smaller platform before expanding the structure, but still has no firm timeline for when it will open to the public.
The filters, which pump river water into a set of strainers before sterilizing it with ultraviolet light, are necessary to make a pool stationed on the river safe for swimming. Engineers from +POOL said the pool wouldn’t use chlorine.
“Effectively what we’re doing is taking drinking water treatment technology and applying it to a pool,” Daniel Rosenberger, a water engineer working with +POOL, said. “New York City’s drinking water is treated with UV systems like the one that we’re putting in.”
Entry to the pool would be free, said +POOL’s Managing Director Kara Meyer. She said her group wants to keep the planned pool open longer than the city’s public pools.
“We want to do a six-month season if we can,” she said. “I think it will take New Yorkers a little while to embrace colder temperature water.”
Still, members of the +POOL team warned that there were plenty of hurdles to turning the barge full of filters on the East River into a floating paradise.
“It’s hard to convey how hard it is to get all these levels of government to agree to something like a crazy idea like a water-filtration pool in the East River,” Sadik-Khan said.