Moores Park Pool

2023 UPDATE: Michigan lawmakers allocate millions to restore Lansing's historic Moores Park Pool - July 6, 2023 - WKAR

2021-22: The Moores Park Pool is closed indefinitely until repairs can be done.

The People’s Pool: Lansing’s Committee for a Sustainable Moores Park Pool

There was a kick-off meeting to develop sub-committees for the group on February 17, 2020. This committee is open to any Lansing-area resident who wants to find solutions to restoring the Moores Park Pool. Please visit the Facebook group to join.

History

Moores Park Pool has stood since 1922, at the eastern edge of Moores Park. It was funded using funds from the J.H. Moores estate, the Lansing developer who made the park and pooled a reality, citing the importance of such places in the community. It opened in the hot summer of 1923 and was dedicated on September 1, 1923.

The "J. H. Moores Memorial Natatorium" is significant as the prototype of the "Bintz Pool" patented by Wesley Bintz. Mr. Bintz was the City Engineer at the time the pool was commissioned.  He resigned in the same year to devote his career exclusively to swimming pool designs. His pool was designed as an oval, entirely above-ground structure containing lockers, showers, pumping, and filtering equipment below the deck. This type of pool found wide acceptance across the United States, and hundreds were built in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, but it is now one of his last remaining pools being used.

On the 25th anniversary of the pool's opening in 1948, the city recreation department director estimated that half a million people had used the pool. Many of our neighbors will remember the high usage that continued into the 1960s and '70s when long lines of children waited on benches in front of the pool for their "shift's" turn to go in.

Celebrations of the pool were held again on the 50th and 75th anniversaries. During all these years, the use of the pool has been free to the community and continues to be free.

In 1981, the pool received over $450,000 worth of renovations to correct structural and code defects. At that time, the pool's deep end was reduced from its original depth of 12 feet to 7 feet, and diving was no longer allowed.

The pool was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 4, 1985.

Additional updates of the pool in 1997 reduced the deep end to 5 feet and added heating equipment and several play structures.