Dumpster Pools: Just Add Water (and Chlorine)

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...

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.

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.