Midnight for My Oasis

Living in New York City can be amazing or amazingly frustrating. Sometimes one episode encapsulates both simultaneously. That happened today, when I was part of a group of regulars who showed up for a last lap at our local swimming hole on the day before it was to close for renovations.

We never made it in the water.

First, the amazing part: The fact that the place exists at all. I'd lived in Harlem almost two years before discovering there was a beautiful community pool hidden less than a mile from my apartment.

After moving uptown, I discovered I could walk to the weekday summer lap swimming at Central Park's Lasker Pool. But what about the other 10 months, when Lasker returned to its Clark Kent alter-ego as a skating rink? (I hate running, barely tolerate elliptical machines. I bike and swim. I prefer lakes, but the city won't let people swim in the Central Park reservoir. Yet.)

The pool I thought was the closest, in Riverbank State Park [right], built as trade-off for the Hudson River sewage plant beneath it, took me almost as long to commute to as it did to swim my mile. It had difficult hours and closed randomly for things like thunderstorms and private classes.

Then a fellow Lasker diehard touted the Harlem YMCA, so I checked it out, but the pool was in a cramped room and on a different floor than the locker rooms, and the lapswimming hours required a spreadsheet.

I found the 1925 gem Hansborough Recreation Center  by stumbling on another blog -- 40 Pools, in which a "New York-based pool tourist" named Hannah Bergeson celebrates her 40th birthday by swimming in 40 different pools, along the way creating a kind of consumer guide for people like me. Membership to the city's municipal pools is just $150 a year, a fraction of what health clubs, gyms, or the JCC would charge. I headed north to check it out.

The exterior (above) wasn't promising, the entryway was a little dilapidated, and the locker room had seen better days.

But on the other side of the locker room door....

Good Swimming/Bad Handwriting

My late mother was part amphibian; she preferred a Best Western with a pool to a Ritz without one. And so I spent my brother's wedding weekend in a horrible Best Western in Seattle. My late Dad swam a mile every morning before going to work.

And as much as we try to rebel against where we come from, I, too, am happier in the water than out of it.  I prefer a lake, but when you're in New York City, where a fire hydrant sometimes is all you have, a pool shimmers like a mirage on the desert.

A friend once invited me to lunch poolside on the roof of the Soho House [left]. It was gorgeous, but like most hotel pools, also small and highly self-conscious making -- like swimming on stage for people whose main concerns are suntanning, immersion, or peacocking. I knew I was never going to pay a membership fee to swim laps that are shorter than a Mack Truck.

A few years ago my girlfriend and I

Moving (Part 1)

Many people find moving traumatic. But I was never one of those people.

Growing up, I was the opposite of an army brat: my family only moved once my entire childhood -- and that was to a house a few blocks away, which was larger, so we didn't have to throw anything out.

When I went to college, I spent two years in dorms, then got my own place for two years. After I graduated, I lived with my parents while kickstarting my journalism career, rented a few NYC apartments, then bought a place and remained there for 12 years.

Then my marriage ended, and my living situation became....entropic.