Folks attempting to escape the record heat at one of the city's public pools on Friday and continuing through the weekend witnessed a particularly violent scene. As Geoffrey Croft with NYC Park Advocates reports, 15 people were arrested at public pools in all five boroughs. The majority of the incidents involved fighting or disorderly conduct, and at one of location two responding NYPD officers received injuries. In addition, a 36-year-old man was arrested for "forcible touching/sexual abuse" of a woman at Fisher Pool in Queens, a female was arrested for cutting a 15-year-old girl with a knife at Kosciuszko Pool in Brooklyn, and two switchblades were found at the bottom of Thomas Jefferson Pool in Harlem.
Two Staten Island pools, West Brighton and Tottenville, were also momentarily shut down over the weekend because of "disorderly conduct." At Hamilton Fish in the Lower East Side on Thursday we were greeted with thorough bag and body searches and admonitions to "leave if anyone's here to cause trouble." Outside Tony Dapolito pool in the West Village, a crowd of around 300 people clamored outside the entrance on Friday afternoon, and a police officer with a bullhorn urged us all to "stop pushing and form a line." This was shortly after the city announced that the public pools would remain open until 8 p.m. to help alleviate overheated citizens.
The line to enter the pool at Tony Dapolito Park in the West Village around 4:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon (Christopher Robbins / Gothamist)
We contacted the Parks Department to determine if the pool attendance this weekend had markedly increased, how they plan to address overcrowding and the recent spate of crime occurring in the city's public pools, and are still awaiting comment. It's worth noting, as Croft does, that, "New York City ranks dead last for a high density city in the amount of public pools."
