TAMPA — To reach the remnants of this 5-year-old’s happy place, turn right out of his great-grandmother’s scuffed front door. Follow the sunbaked city street west past his school.
Turn left at the Family Dollar. Go beyond the old greyhound race track to a sea of empty, asphalt parking and a locked gate. His friends aren’t there, nor his favorite lifeguards. Just a faint whiff of chlorine remains, along with that slide he loves, dry and unused.
Summer crowds will soon pour into Tampa’s 11 other public pools, seeking relief from the thick Florida heat.
Not here, in Rai’heem Mcneil’s neighborhood of Sulphur Springs, five miles north of downtown, where most of the 6,000 or so residents are Black and median household incomes are half the amount citywide.
For weeks, his family visited their pool each Saturday, fingers crossed. Each time, they found it drained dry. Then on May 16, city officials confirmed their fears: The pool requires “extensive repairs,” and would not reopen around Memorial Day as expected. It is indefinitely closed.
The news was another setback for an area whose identity as a vacation destination is now confined to faded photographs. Nearly three-quarters of children here live in poverty. There is no large grocery store and many streets are missing sidewalks.
But there was, at least, a pool.
Communities of color have shouldered the brunt of pool closures across Tampa in recent decades. In Sulphur Springs, the announcement arrived six days before schools shut for summer.
The news reached Rai’heem as he sat cross-legged on his great-grandmother’s floor.
“No swimming?” he asked, pausing from wiggling a loose tooth.
She shook her head.
A safe haven closed
Before it shuttered in November, when staff noticed cracks in the deck, the Sulphur Springs Pool was one of the city’s busiest. Kids escaped the unpredictable city streets, seniors the lonely quiet of empty homes.
For 24 years, the pool offered comfort in a place that has reaped little reward from Tampa’s recent boom.
The pool held more than water. It held promise: respite from rising bills, relief from scorching summers, the chance to learn to swim in a state that has long led the nation in child drowning deaths.
“It was beautiful,” said Charlie Adams, president of the local neighborhood association who was 9 at the pool’s grand opening in 2000. He saved up change earned from cutting grass to buy a pair of swim trunks.
“It was a safe haven,” said Adams, 33. “I don’t want the next generation to miss out on that.”
Nationwide, pandemic-exacerbated lifeguard shortages and rising costs have bedeviled local governments. Pools increasingly exist behind closed gates, funded by club fees or homeowners’ dues rather than tax dollars. Hillsborough, one of the nation’s fastest growing counties, operates none.
In Tampa, poorer communities have shouldered more than their share of closures.
In West Tampa, the Baldomero Lopez Pool has been locked up since 2007. Across town in Seminole Heights, the Angus R. Goss Memorial Pool closed in 2009. Both resemble forgotten graves, filled in and grown over. Both were named for war heroes.
Two other pools closed in 2009.
Two years later, Interbay Pool opened in an affluent South Tampa neighborhood. Reopening Williams in East Tampa took four years and public outcry.
“Sulphur Springs deserves better than this,” said Inge Hildreth, 88, among a tight-knit group of seniors who gathered as often as they could for water aerobics and to socialize. For city leaders, she had a plea: “Don’t forget about us.”
“All we have”
Rai’heem’s great-grandmother, Undrethia House, said Sundays are for church.
“In the summer, every other day is for the pool,” she added. “Too hot to do anything else.”
Rai’heem nodded. He’d stay in the pool as his fingers puckered and eyes stung, racing his cousins and splashing off the slide. “I’d like to do that again,” he said.
House is worried about summer when young people are without school and its structure. So too is her daughter, Katherea Torres, 41, who made it her mission to deliver kids to the pool, her trunk loaded with towels for those who had none.
Making her rounds, she didn’t have to honk. The kids were ready curbside. They piled into her dented silver Toyota Corolla, a donation from someone at her church.
”Maybe someday God will bless me with a minivan,” she mused.
She brought plates of pasta, chicken and chips, and toiletries so she could deliver kids home clean, smelling of soap.
”The pool is all we have,” she said. “What are we supposed to do without it?”
“How many kids are going to be heartbroken?” she said. “How many kids are going to be in danger, in the streets with nothing else to do?”
There are three city pools within a 10-minute drive from Sulphur Springs. But they are inaccessible, Torres says, for many who lack reliable transportation — just like the region’s sugar-sand beaches that grace the tourist brochures.
A tourist destination, spoiled
Before there was a pool in Sulphur Springs, or much of anything, visitors flocked from all over in the late nineteenth century for its mineral springs. Bathing there amid the green tangle of mossy oaks helped ease disease, or so the lore went.
When the city later built a streetcar, the springs were its northernmost terminus. There was an alligator farm and a 40-foot slide. Florida’s Coney Island, they called it.
Not that Rai’heem’s family could have participated in much of the bustle back then. A slur-filled sign banned Black and Hispanic people from the springs, residents remember.
As the years passed, the dozen or so sinkholes that funneled water into the spring were polluted and paved over.
The nearby hotel and arcade, the state’s first indoor shopping venue, was demolished for parking. The social club disbanded. The interstate expanded. A state report later called Sulphur Springs “a prime example of the serious degradation that can occur in the absence of planning and protection.”
Some of the pain of this month’s news lay in its echo, residents said: The springs closed for swimming in 1986. Now, the pool next door is locked, too.
An uncertain future
The city has long been monitoring underground movement related to the nearby springs that could be damaging the pool.
“It’s a great location,” said Tony Mulkey, director of the city’s parks and recreation department. “It’s also what causes the challenges.”
Engineers identified the pool’s voids and missing reinforcement underground in 2019, according to records. Although $1.6 million has been earmarked for the pool’s repair, none has been spent.
City officials say this is because they are working to understand the problem.
“Why build a pool deck before knowing if the pool is salvageable?” said city spokesperson Adam Smith.
During budget talks last year, the pool was mentioned repeatedly as a looming capital expense to be covered by Mayor Jane Castor’s proposed property tax hike that was later squashed by the City Council, according to city staff.
The pool wasn’t drained for closer inspection until March, four months after it was closed.
“We were nervous,” Mulkey said.
Staff discovered underground spring water was flowing into the pool.
A study completed earlier this month by an engineering consultant found anomalies in the ground below the center of the pool and warping in the concrete reinforcement, according to the 8-page report. Further testing was recommended.
“Ultimately, we’re going to need a new pool,” Mulkey said, with an estimated price of $10 million. When, where and how has yet to be determined.
In a recent interview, Castor said she could not confirm whether her administration would set aside funds for the pool in the budget she will propose in July. “We’ll have to see,” she said.
Meanwhile, a sign outside Rai’heem’s school issued a reminder:
Summer vacation started Friday.
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