Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States

The Sunset Play Center is one of a group of eleven immense outdoor swimming pools opened in the summer of 1936 in a series of grand ceremonies presided over by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Park Commissioner Robert Moses. All of the pools were constructed largely with funding provided by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of many New Deal agencies created in the 1930s to address the Great Depression. Designed to accommodate a total of 49,000 users simultaneously at locations scattered throughout New York City’s five boroughs, the new pool complexes quickly gained recognition as being among the most remarkable public facilities constructed in the country. The pools were completed just two and a half years after the LaGuardia administration took office, and all but one survives relatively intact today.

hile each of the 1936 swimming pool complexes is especially notable for its distinctive and unique design, the eleven facilities shared many of the same basic components. The complexes generally employed low-cost building materials, principally brick and cast concrete, and often utilized the streamlined and curvilinear forms of the popular 1930s Art Moderne style. Each had separate swimming, diving and wading pools, and a large bath house with locker room sections which doubled as gymnasiums in non-swimming months. Concrete bleachers at the perimeter of each pool complex and rooftop promenades and galleries furnished ample spectator viewing areas.

The complexes were also distinguished by innovative mechanical systems required for heating, filtration and water circulation. Sited in existing older parks or built on other city-owned land, the grounds surrounding the pool complexes were executed on a similarly grand scale, and included additional recreation areas, connecting pathway systems, and comfort stations. The team of designers, landscape architects and engineers assembled to execute the new pool complexes, in addition to hundreds of other construction and rehabilitation projects undertaken between 1934 and 1936 by New York’s newly consolidated Parks Department, was comprised largely of staff members and consultants who had earlier worked for Moses at other governmental agencies, including architect Aymar Embury II, landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke and Allyn R. Jennings, and civil engineers W. Earle Andrews and William H. Latham. Surviving documents also indicate that Moses, himself a long-time swimming enthusiast, gave detailed attention to the designs for the new pool complexes.

Designed by Herbert Magoon, the Sunset Play Center is set within the 24.5-acre site of Sunset Park, located in the neighborhood of the same name and developed as a park at the turn of the twentieth century. Displacing a small lake, play areas and pathways, construction of the Sunset Play Center resulted in a major redesign of the eastern half of the park in order to accommodate the immense new swimming, diving and wading pools complex, bath house, linking pathways, and adjacent play areas. The earlier attractive battered masonry wall, which forms the perimeter of the entire park, was breached on the Seventh Avenue side to accommodate a monumental flight of steps leading up to the play center’s main entrance.

The play center officially opened on July 20, 1936 and became the sixth WPA pool to open throughout New York City and the first to open in Brooklyn. The design of the bath house entrance is one of the most distinctive features of the Sunset Play Center with its giant corner piers that frame the one-and-a-half-story rotunda. The unusual shape of the rotunda, with its stacked cylindrical brick walls, hints at the remarkable lobby awaiting bathers inside. The standard play center building materials are used here in a particularly distinctive way: decorative bonds and patterning of brick appear at a number of locations, while cast stone diamond shapes and bricks placed in a chevron pattern form a 1930s interpretation of a classical entablature above the grand entranceway and across the entire building. The alternating brick piers and black-painted steel windows (that once were matched by black-painted bricks below) give the impression of a colonnade, which is especially evident when the stacked dogtooth brick piers are lit by the sun.

- From the 2009 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

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