Ann L. Buttenwieser, a former Parks Department
official, had the great idea 25 years ago of putting a swimming pool
on a barge and mooring it somewhere in the city’s 578 miles of
waterfront. Yesterday it became a reality. This from the New York Times.

Standing in a
terrace garden in Lower Manhattan yesterday, Ms. Buttenwieser watched
the Floating Lady float by after it glided under the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge and past Governors Island. It is now more pool than cargo
hauler, but it is still not quite ready for its next life as a
destination for dog-paddling, backstroking New Yorkers.

It still
has to sidle into Pier 2 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, where the last of the
pipes and wires will be connected. And one more thing — it must be
filled with fresh water. It arrived full of rainwater from storms it
sailed through on the way north from the Louisiana shipyard where its
makeover began.

The pool is 25 meters long, or half the length
of an Olympic-size pool. For swimmers who never learned the metric
system, that works out to just over 82 feet. It will have seven lanes
and be four feet deep. Also on board will be dressing rooms with
bright-colored tops that look like outsize Legos.

It will not
stay at Pier 2 once the work is finished. The Parks Department, which
will operate it, has yet to decide exactly where it will go.

Ms.
Buttenwieser was excited as the Floating Lady passed yesterday. “It’s
like having a baby,” she said, “but there you only have to wait nine
months.”

Ms. Buttenwieser, 70, was so committed to the idea of
floating pools that she started a nonprofit organization, the Neptune
Foundation, to make them a reality. So far, the foundation has raised
$3 million of the Floating Lady’s $4 million construction cost.

Yes,
she was a swimmer in college, but her goal was to draw people to the
city’s underused waterfront. To design the pool she recruited Jonathan
Kirschenfeld, an architect who once designed a floating theater. (It
was never built, he said.)

As they explain it, wherever the
Floating Lady ends up, it will be attached to four uprights that will
hold it in place, sort of.

“If a fast ferry comes by and there
is a certain amount of wake, it will go up and down,” Ms. Buttenwieser
said. But it will not tilt much — seasickness is not expected to be a
problem on the Floating Lady — and the uprights will keep the Floating
Lady from drifting away from its pier.

Her idea for a floating
pool came along before the city turned a retired Staten Island ferry
boat into a jail. There has been talk of floating bus depots, floating
apartment buildings off Staten Island, floating lofts for artists off
Harlem.

“From the city’s point of view, the floating pool concept
is a very good one,” said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe.
“Building swimming pools is very, very expensive. And outdoor swimming
pools, they have a short life in the summer, and you have to find lots
of land for them, which can mean taking over park land that’s used for
something else. So a floating pool is an ideal solution.”