L.A.’s Public Pools Are Crumbling

In a place synonymous with the backyard swimming pool, Los Angeles’ 59 public pools have never been in worse shape.

As summer approaches, six of the city’s pools are too decrepit to open and more than 20 others are so plagued by bad pipes, crumbling concrete or other problems that officials fear they will have to close or be replaced in the next few years unless something is done.

Los Angeles once boasted one of the nation’s best public aquatics systems. Esther Williams, the smiling star of synchronized swimming movies, used to wile away the summer afternoons as a child in a city pool in South Los Angeles. Millions of other residents did the same over the years, officials said.

But many of the city’s pools have not kept up with the ravages of time. Thirty-four of them are more than four decades old. Some were built as long as 85 years ago.

All in all, about $180 million is needed to fix them, according to a report provided to Los Angeles City Council members Tuesday. In bleak budget times, officials said they did not know where the money would come from.

Many of the affected pools are in the city’s poorer neighborhoods where backyard pools are few and trips to the beach can be hard to manage.

“I can’t share with you just how desperate some of these areas are for pools,” said Councilman Ed Reyes, whose Eastside district has one pool that will not open this year and two others that could be forced to close in the next few years.

Besides the six pools that will sit unused this summer, officials said seven others are in such poor shape that an event as small as a child vomiting after swallowing too much pool water, or a “fecal accident,” could force closure for a day or more while the filtration system catches up.

Officials said age was the primary culprit.

“Things get old and need to get replaced,” said Lydia Ritzman, city aquatics supervisor.

In recent years, with Los Angeles facing budget shortfalls so severe that it is eliminating jobs and struggling to figure out how to pay police salaries, redoing pools that open only three months out of the year has not been a high priority.

Officials have made quick fixes for the ailing pools. But for the most part, the city has foregone the major rebuilding work necessary to bring them up to modern standards.

“We all want to make it work,” said Councilman Tom LaBonge, who himself learned to swim in the Griffith Park pool. “Every child should have the opportunity to swim in the city of Los Angeles.”

It is a commitment the city made nearly a century ago, long before Southern California became known as the home of the backyard pool. Records from 1912 indicate that municipal leaders thought that swimming facilities would help put their fledgling city on the map: “Los Angeles, like Chicago, should have such pools,” officials wrote. Shortly after that, three wading pools opened.

But the city’s swimming pool craze did not really get going until after the Los Angeles Aqueduct began bringing water from the Owens Valley in 1913. By 1921, Los Angeles boasted four public pools in the city limits, plus two more in city-owned campgrounds.

In 1932, swimmers from around the world came to the Exposition Park Intergenerational Community Center to compete in the Olympics. That pool reopened last year after a major renovation and now gets about 200 visitors a day.

Life without swimming would be “not so fun,” said Julie Leslie, 6, as she splashed with other children in the Exposition Park pool.

“You want to go in the water, and you want to swim, and you want to go in the deep part,” she said.

The pools that will be closed this summer are Gaffey Pool in San Pedro, Northridge and Lanark pools in the San Fernando Valley, Harvard Pool in South Los Angeles, Echo Park pool near downtown, and E.G. Roberts Pool in the mid-city area, which is expected to open in August after a renovation.

Pools that will be open on a “day to day” basis include the Downey, Lincoln Park and Costello pools on the Eastside, and the Cheviot Hills pool in West Los Angeles, along with the Reseda, Ritchie Valens and Sylmar pools in the valley.

Last year, more than 1.3 million people visited city pools and officials were expecting a similar number this year.

Los Angeles County, which operates 28 public pools, plans to open them all, officials said, but hours could be limited as the county grapples with its own budget problems.

Since 2000, city pools have been free to children, seniors and people with disabilities. Then-Mayor Richard Riordan announced that plan by donning a swimsuit and throwing himself into the Highland Park pool.

Los Angeles spends about $600,000 a year on pool chemicals and other supplies, while salaries for lifeguards and other pool personnel run about $9 million.

City Council members do not yet have a concrete plan for coming up with the money to fix the pools, but they say they are determined to find a way to do it, perhaps through public-private partnerships, or with bond money.

As a child growing up in a poor neighborhood in Pacoima, Council President Alex Padilla said he and his siblings spent whole summer days at the Ritchie Valens recreation center, where the pool was the main attraction.

“It kept me out of trouble,” he said. “And I want to do what I can to maintain that for the kids in my district.”

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Times staff writer Erin Ailworth contributed to this report.