Any New Yorker can tell you that a hot summer day plus a Dumpster usually equals a gag-inducing wall of stink and not much else. Leave it to Brooklyn to turn this truth on its head, with a new way to keep cool and reuse industrial equipment – a Dumpster swimming pool.
The private pool, located near the Gowanus Canal, is built on a rented industrial lot which has also been partially transformed, complete with cabana and grilling space. Although the invite-only status and secret location (until the Daily News got their hands on it, anyway) started an immediate buzz among the chic-seeking Brooklyn hipster crowd, developer Macro-Sea insists that the project is more an exercise in urban renewal than an exclusive destination.
The three-man company came across the idea while scouting a project in Georgi. They credit the original Dumpster pool to Curtis Crowe, a musician in Athens band Pylon. Developing the Brooklyn pool as a prototype, Macro-Sea ultimately hopes to reclaim more wasted urban space by taking the idea to strip malls across the country.
After the initial recoil, the idea makes some good green sense by re-purposing unloved byproducts of industry like Dumpsters and industrial lots. The whole idea seems pretty viable for any community to undertake: it took only 12 days to put the pool together from the day the donated Dumpsters arrived to its opening on July 4. Donated labor, cheap furniture and about $1,200 of water brought in from New Jersey kept the cost relatively affordable, as the developers found that people were more than willing to work for free for the right to use the final product.
The transformation from refuse receptacle to pool party involved sealing the container, filing down the inside edges, filling the bottom with sand for safer landings and installing a filter and liner. Not exactly an unskilled job, but still totally possible for use in other locations. And that’s exactly what you’ll need to do if you want to take a Dumpster dive of the refreshing kind. Macro-Sea president David Belt intends to keep the pool private and says he’ll shut the experiment down if it gets over-crowded.
Source: BecauseAction.com
