There’s something in Chicago’s water, and I’m not talking about E. coli.
Each summer, warming temperatures bring a surfeit of swimming-related activity that, this year in particular, builds momentum toward a larger movement around aquatics.
The Chicago River, once home to the city’s refuse and at least 97 abandoned cars, will welcome swimmers for the second annual River Swim in September. The lakefront will host water polo games all summer long, with park district lifeguards keeping watch more closely than the referees.
And along Michigan Avenue, Carole A. Feuerman’s Monuments of Stillness remind us that swimming is an art form, where strength must be balanced by symmetry and skill. Feuerman’s sculptures cause us to pause and wonder how something so stationary can feel like it’s moving.
For the last four summers, while swimming off Promontory Point in Hyde Park, I’ve watched another monument of stillness rise above the water — the Obama Presidential Center, which opened in time for Juneteenth.
I don’t know if the Obamas are regular swimmers, but I do know that Michelle’s father, Fraser Robinson, literally personified the intersection of swimming and art.
In 1951, he earned his junior lifeguarding certification, the DuSable Dial reported. According to a school yearbook, he competed as a proud DuSable High School Sea Horse.
In 1953, he won an art scholarship, according to an archived Chicago Daily Tribune article. I wonder if he was mentored by celebrated artist Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, who spent decades at the school.
Mr. Robinson went on to work as a water filtration plant pump operator, helping to maintain the infrastructure that ensured people in the Chicago area had access to clean water.
On Father’s Day, I wonder what Michelle Obama has thought about her quiet, steadfast father’s prowess in the pool as a member of one of the only Black swim teams more than 70 years ago.
Kids need a ‘feel’ for water
Fraser Robinson would have understood that to truly excel at swimming, one must develop a “feel” for the water, like an artist’s touch with a paintbrush or a writer with the written word. Some swimmers have it innately, while others need to be taught that the arc of your arm as it enters the water is as important as the strength built from weighted reps repeated in the gym.
The good news is, everyone can learn to swim, provided there are open pools and qualified educators.
The bad news is that Chicago’s current aquatic infrastructure struggles to meet the needs of communities that would benefit most. In lakefront neighborhoods on the Far South Side, I count fewer than five year-round Chicago Park District facilities that offer limited learn-to-swim opportunities when they are fully staffed and operational.
The dearth of open year-round pools and the depth of historic exclusion of Black communities from public swimming spaces have resulted in a dangerous public health issue. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children ages 1 to 4. Black children ages 5 to 9 die of drowning at rates 2.6 times higher than white children; it’s 3.6 times higher for Black children ages 10 to 14.
The park district and outliers like the Salvation Army Kroc Center in West Pullman are doing the Lord’s work by offering low-cost swim lessons for youth and adults, but it is not enough.
When aging facilities cannot be maintained or safely staffed, pools close, reducing crucial aquatics programming. As a result, Chicago children cannot learn to swim at the same rate as their suburban peers who have access to top-tier, well-funded facilities.
Like shuttered churches, vacant pools leave a vacuum in neighborhoods that desperately need them.
Pools are like a desert oasis
During hot summer months, a well-maintained community pool is a civic resource akin to an oasis in a desert.
Neighborhood children find salvation from the heat in a cool environment where they are supervised and cared for by their communities. The elderly enjoy relief in water’s weightless support, emerging stronger and more mobile after a good swim. Teenage lifeguards benefit from the economic mobility provided by a skilled and well-paying job.
Sharing pool space fosters intergenerational friendships, a testament to swimming’s ability to connect us to something outside our increasingly isolated selves.
For a city that sits so proudly on the lake, civic leaders must prioritize investment in aquatic infrastructure that will buoy the health, wellness and safety of communities in need.
I might be out of my depth as a former park district lifeguard and small-time swim coach suggesting something as significant as a state-of-the-art natatorium on the South Side to centralize aquatics and elevate swimming as a discipline, but Chicagoans have always been told to “make no little plans.”
A world-class natatorium with high-caliber, year-round aquatics programming in a community historically excluded from the sport would be an empowering project. Pools are not easy to engineer or simple to manage, but that should not prohibit us from investing in the profound promise of the water.
Maisie O’Malley is the co-founder of Chicago Dogs Aquatics.