On April 3, 2019, a fire destroys our home.
A woman leaves a candle burning in a windowsill. The curtains catch fire. The flames spread to the roof then, fueled by gusting winds, engulf the apartment building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The six-alarm fire takes hundreds of firefighters 24 hours to extinguish. More than 150 people lose their homes.
On Thursday morning, five years after the fire, I make a pilgrimage to Sunset Park and find the building unchanged: a blackened stone husk, roofless and windowless, surrounded by scaffolding, uninhabited and uninhabitable. A banner says: For Sale.
The front door is barred, so I imagine the interior: dank rooms reeking of mold, smoke, and putrid food, colonized by cockroaches and rats rampaging amid the wreckage of our lives, the things we lost in the fire. We lost beds and couches, tables and chairs, nightstands and bookshelves. We lost shirts and shorts, suits and skirts, socks and underwear. We lost toys, board games, and stuffed animals. We lost birth certificates, wedding photos, and journals.
We also lost the pool.
Yes, there are public pools in New York City.
In fact, there are 53 public pools in the five boroughs, including 16 outdoor pools. And the Sunset Park pool is among the largest, literally Olympic-sized, with a capacity for more than 1,600 swimmers. And unless you live nearby, it’s relatively unknown, unlike, say, the similarly sprawling McCarren Park pool in Williamsburg, the hipster haven turned bourgeois bohemian paradise turned global tourist destination.
Once, Sunset Park felt like our backyard and the public pool felt like our pool.
Now, squinting in the summer sun, I stare at the skeleton of our former home.
Then I turn my back on the building, cross the street, and enter the park to swim.
Sunset Park Serendipity
Five years after the fire, the park feels refreshingly familiar. Pigeons scrabble on the stone steps. On a bench, a woman speaks Spanish on a cell phone. An Asian man smokes a cigarette. In the playground, kids swing on swings and slide down slides. Teenagers play basketball on the courts and handball on the walls. Dogs sprint off leash on the grassy hill overlooking the East River, the Manhattan skyline, and the Statue of Liberty, where my friend Jason recently swam with the Navy SEALs.
I recall park regulars: the guy who jumped rope daily wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt; the guy in the fedora who danced on the wall; the indigenous woman who sold hot dogs and empanadas in a cart by the makeshift volleyball court.
At the splash pad, I spot a group of toddlers in bright yellow vests. My heart twinges. When we lived here and our son was a toddler, his pre-school teachers took him to the park wearing those same yellow vests for safety. And he and I spent countless hours in this exact spot, soaking ourselves in the sprinklers and fountains to beat the heat.
Suddenly, I see a familiar face. Her hair is tinged with grey, but her face is the same. She’s the head teacher at the bilingual nursery school our son attended from age two to four. Now she’s in the park taking a new group of kids to the splash pad.
We hug, greet each other in English, then switch to Spanish, as I did at the Dominican bakery for breakfast and will do later at the Colombian cafe for lunch. She says she thinks about our family often and asks about our son.
I show her family photos on my phone. She marvels at how much our son has grown. When she knew him, he was basically a baby. Now he’s a boy. I tell her we’ve adopted a puppy, a rescue dog from Puerto Rico, who also speaks Spanish. She laughs.
We chat for a few more minutes, then say goodbye. Our serendipitous encounter is simultaneously sweet and sad. She and her fellow teachers were the first people we trusted to take care of our son. Beyond teaching him to speak and sing in Spanish, they loved him like family. And we loved them like family.
While she corrals the kids to go back to school, I turn the corner to swim in the pool.
Salvage
April 2019. Three weeks after the fire, we return to the apartment to salvage our possessions.
The building is a crispy carcass, surrounded by scaffolding. During the fire, the roof collapsed and fell on the sixth floor. The air still smells noxious.
We arrive clad in hooded hazmat suits, hardhats, and face masks—all white. We also wear plastic goggles and blue latex gloves. We look like cops in crime dramas at murder scenes. We snap selfies, smiling. Gallows humor.
Before we enter the building, we sign waivers absolving the owners of liability in case of injury, illness, or death. We acknowledge the risk of toxic chemicals, falling debris, and collapsing infrastructure. We sign away our lives. So do all the other tenants who have come to salvage their possessions.
We enter the lobby, dark without electricity. We climb the stairs, since the elevator is not working. On the fourth floor, we go down the hallway to our apartment. Outside the door, a firefighter stands guard. We thank him. He grunts.
Our apartment is a crime scene. The walls are singed with smoke, with gashes in the sheet rock from firefighters’ axes. In several spots, the collapsing ceilings have been propped up with scaffolding. The furniture—couches, tables, chairs—is piled in the center of the living room in a giant heap that nearly reaches the ceiling. The bathroom is trashed, the floor strewn with bottles, tubes from the medicine cabinet. The floors are wet. Everything we touch is soaked.
We have only one hour, so we work quickly. Jess and her mom fill trash bags and boxes, which I shuttle down the stairs and outside to the curb, where my friend Lee is waiting. Our son is ten blocks away, with my dad, at our friend Brigit and Jonathan’s apartment. Brigit writes Young Adult novels. Jonathan is a voice artist who records audio books for famous authors. Their daughter attends the bilingual daycare with our son. Serendipitously, they’re spending two weeks in Los Angeles and generously offered us their apartment while they’re away.
As I race up and down four flights of stairs, I’m sweating, overheated by the hazmat suit and the face mask, goggle lenses fogging.
In the lobby, I witness a Chinese woman crying and screaming at the Colombian super who lives in the basement with his wife.
We salvage a complete set of turquoise flatware—large plates, small plates, salad bowls, pasta bowls, and coffee mugs—a wedding gift from my mother’s best friend.
We salvage mismatched sets of silverware: forks, knives, spoons.
We do not salvage: the framed photos of our wedding on the foyer; the framed illustration of a giant woman stepping across the Brooklyn Bridge; the “Hermano” photo of street art in Buenos Aires snapped by my friend Max. We do not salvage the framed postcard of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, where King was assassinated.
We do not salvage the clothes in our closet.
I salvage several boxes of notebooks, journals, though they are sopping. I do not salvage many more boxes of notebooks in the closet, inaccessible because of scaffolding.
I salvage a dozen unframed photos, wet and curling and attached to a DIY wall display that Jess made from white string and black dog clips.
We do not salvage beds, mattresses, blankets, or pillows.
We do not salvage any of our son’s toys or stuffed animals.
I salvage my passport and my college diploma.
I do not salvage any books from the shelves in the living room or bedroom.
I do not salvage Lauren Groff, Elena Ferrante, Jhumpa Lahiri.
I do not salvage Gabriel García Márquez, Alejandro Zambra, Roberto Bolaño, or Valeria Luiselli.
I do not salvage Chaucer, Beowulf, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats.
I do not salvage the New Jerusalem Bible, the Oxford Study Bible, or the King James Bible.
I do not salvage the Nelson Japanese-English dictionary or the leather-bound Merriam Webster English dictionary, my prize for winning the high school writing award, or the Portuguese-English dictionary purchased in Lisbon on our babymoon.
I do not salvage 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
I do not salvage Good Night, Good Night Construction Site.
I do not salvage We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.
I salvage my race medals from marathons, half-marathons, 10Ks, and 5K.
I salvage my electric guitar, which I bought as a teenager and played for years in rock bands. The body is gashed, the silver pickups are rusted, and the white lacquer is stained black with smoke. It reminds me of Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire on stage, kneeling solemnly before the burning instrument, prayer-like, wiggling his fingers, coaxing the flames to burn.
After we finish salvaging, while we’re loading the suburban mom mini-van with boxes and trash bags, I spot Emily, our neighbor down the hall. She has also salvaged her guitar.
We pose for a photo with our guitars, half-smiling, squinting in the sun, casting shadows on the sidewalk and the black trash bags of our possessions at our feet.
Emily wears a black jacket, dark jeans, and bright blue sneakers. I wear a grey hoodie and t-shirt, courtesy of my friend Dan who owns a silk-screening business. His son is my son’s classmate. After the fire, Dan gave us clothes from his warehouse. His wife, gave Jess a carton of cosmetics and skincare products, samples from the women’s health and beauty magazine where she works as an editor.
Emily fingers an A chord with her left hand on the neck. I finger a C major chord. With our right hands, we pretend to strum the strings.
Contested Waters
Thursday, 11 AM. I’m first in line for the public pool in Sunset Park. Waiting behind me are two Latino families, two Asian families, one Black family, and a white couple with a baby. Behind the padlocked entrance gate, a park employee sweeps the ground with a broom and dustpan.
“I’ll open soon,” she says. “I’m just waiting for NYPD.”
Ten minutes later, the squad car arrives. Two uniformed police officers enter the pool. A few minutes later, the gate opens.
The park employee asks me to open my backpack for inspection, then asks to see my bathing suit and combination lock. I comply. She waves me through to the pool.
I change in the locker room, shower in the outdoor shower, then walk onto the deck.
The pool is massive—and empty. I feel grateful, fortunate, and slightly embarrassed. How many other people in New York City are swimming right now?
I approach the lap lanes, but as I’m about to enter the water, a whistle tweets.
“You can’t swim there,” the lifeguard says. “There’s no lifeguard on duty.”
Annoyed, I ask when a lifeguard will be on duty. She shrugs and points to the tent on the far side of the pool, where the cops and other lifeguards are sitting in the shade.
I walk the perimeter, then ask a lifeguard when the lap lanes will open.
“Not today,” he says. “Staff shortage.”
Seriously? I’ve read about the lifeguard shortage: citywide, statewide, and nationwide. But this is the first time it’s impacted me directly.
Undeterred, I return to the pool section beside the lap lanes.
Again, the whistle tweets. “Hey,” the lifeguard says. “You can’t swim there either.”
Apparently, the lack of lifeguards means half of the pool is closed.
I’m angry. Beyond mere inconvenience, the pool closure gnaws at my social conscience.
It seems unjust that a public pool like Sunset Park—in an ethnically and economically diverse urban neighborhood with a large immigrant population—gets short shrift.
Meanwhile, in more affluent and, let’s face it, homogenous communities, like the suburbs where my family moved after the fire (and after the pandemic), the public pools are fully staffed and fully open.
Also, these suburban oases are restricted to residents who can afford to live in the area—and may also have a backyard pool, like my friends, or belong to a health club with pools, like we do, or a country club, like some of our more well-heeled neighbors do.
Basically, unequal access to pools is a symbol of national inequality and inequity, as chronicled in the book Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.
“From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.”
Comedian Trevor Noah puts it more bluntly. In Where Was I, Noah ranks swimming as number four on the Top Five Things White People Love, ahead of museums, and behind “being flabbergasted.” In a hilarious and scathing riff, Noah skewers swimming as a symbol of privilege, and its flipside, injustice.
Wiltse and Noah are right: swimming has a dark past and a problematic present. And if we want a “more just future”—to borrow a phrase from psychologist Dolly Chugh—expanding access to pools, open water, and swimming would be a great place to start.
But right now, all I can do is swim.
So I swim.
The water is cool and shallow—only three and a half feet deep. On the floor, the turquoise paint is peeling. Since this isn’t an official lap lane, there’s no black line on the floor, so to help me swim straight, I hew to the rope that cordons off the closed section. In the center of the pool, I swim over a massive black leaf in a circle—the NYC Parks Department logo. I swim the width of the pool, which is 50 yards, the same length as the town pool where I trained this summer in Adult Swim camp.
For a while, I swim alone in my improvised lane. Soon, other people join the party.
A middle-aged woman swims leisurely freestyle. An older man swimming halting breaststroke crashes headfirst into me. We stop, lock eyes, then resume swimming.
A teenage boy swims beside me: fluid form, graceful flip turns, furious pace. During a break between laps, we chat. I ask if he swims on a team. No surprise: He does. What stroke and event? 1500 free, he says. A miler, I say. Impressive.
I do not say I recently swam one mile across the Hudson River, probably in twice the time he would need to swim the same distance. I do not say my family and I lived across the street until a fire destroyed our home, that if you look between the tree branches, you can see the burned building.
None of that matters now.
What does matter: We are alive. We are here. We are swimming.