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Dumpster Pools: Just Add Water (and Chlorine)

by Jordan Yerman | August 19, 2009 at 09:52 am

482 views | 3 Recommendations | 2 comments

Dumpster pools: the perfect solution to the summer-heat blues. In Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, a few clever people have converted three Dumpsters into urban-sized swimming pools. By lining the trash bins with plastic and duct tape, and adding filtered, chlorinated water, Jocko Weyland created an inner-city oasis. The pools are free, but invitation-only.

I used to live right near the Gowanus Canal, around the corner from this brilliant project. Sure could have used a Dumpster pool during some of those 40C summer days...

The idea of swimming in a trash container grosses you out? Think again. They're clean. The bins are lined with thick sheets of plastic, and the water is chlorinated and filtered, just like what goes in an inground pool.

Weyland and Macro Sea, the real estate developer who helped with the project, got the idea from Curtis Crowe, an Atlanta-based musician who pioneered the Dumpster pool concept.

While basic in its DIY concept, there is a lot of make-it-happen going on here: reinforcing, sanitizing, sandbagging, and keeping the pool area semi-private.

While the project is conceptually simple — get a bunch of trash containers, clean and seal them, fill with water, jump in — there were a lot of details to finesse.

Dumpsters tend not to be inherently water-tight, as the specimens behind my building prove, with their leaky puddles of hell-knows-what dripping toward the center of the alley.