On a warm summer day, bikes pile up on the sidewalk outside Bluejacket Pool, the centerpiece of a cozy neighborhood on the western corner of Overland Park.
Jennie Punswick has been taking her six kids to this small outdoor pool for 18 years. Her son used money from his first communion to buy popsicles at the concession stand. Now, she sees former neighborhood kids bringing their children to Bluejacket.
“I remember all of the swim lessons that our kids took here and sitting with women that are now my best friends,” she said.
But she and more than 800 of her neighbors said goodbye to Bluejacket Pool this month. The 51-year-old pool — leaking 1,500 gallons of water every hour — has closed.
It’s the third pool to close in Overland Park since 2013. The city has four pools left for a population of nearly 200,000 people. Within the next 10 years, the city plans to also retire Stonegate Pool.
Instead, Overland Park is turning towards bigger and fancier regional pools to replace the ones it’s closing.
Smaller public neighborhood pools are falling away, victims of higher costs — replaced by mini water parks that aim to offer a dip to more residents with fewer tax dollars.
That marks the latest cycle of the region’s evolution of pools. It started with large, utilitarian pools for the (white) public. Then, desegregation gave rise to exclusive country club and other private pools along with some public neighborhood pools.
Now, the consolidation of smaller pools into bigger aquatic centers makes treasured and more modest gathering spots like Bluejacket artifacts of another age.
What’s next for Bluejacket Pool and other Overland Park pools?
Bluejacket Pool has been set to close for about a decade, since Overland Park created its parks master plan and concluded that its collection of pools needed a revamp.
Four out of seven of the city’s pools — Roe, Marty, Bluejacket and Stonegate — were nearing the time where they’d be too expensive to repair. Three have shut down. The fourth, Stonegate, has about 10 more summers.
In the meantime, Overland Park is beefing up two of its remaining pools. The master plan also proposed a new, grander aquatics center south of 151st Street, but that project hasn’t moved forward yet due to a lack of demand.
Young’s Pool will get an improved play area for kids and bigger bathrooms and locker rooms to increase capacity.
The city’s master plan calls for new aquatic features, such as a lazy river and new slides at Tomahawk Ridge Aquatic Center. The new aquatics center in the south is recommended to have similar features.
The city is still figuring out what to do with some of the closed pools. The pool at Roe Park was replaced with a sprayground, and Marty Pool will be replaced with a renovated park.
Bigger — but fewer — Overland Park pools
Some neighbors of Bluejacket Park aren’t ready to give up their community pool, and they’re taking their fight to Overland Park City Council.
A community group called Save OP Pools is encouraging people to email their city council members and to fill out an aquatics survey presented by Overland Park to help decide what to do with the park after the pool closes.
“What’s so great about this pool is that it’s a community pool,” Rachel Shuck said. “We come here several nights a week, and we pack peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eat dinner here and swim, and it’s just easy.”
She worries that those regional aquatic centers are going to be more overwhelming and crowded. That’s why she handed out fliers for Save OP Pools at the Bluejacket final splash bash.
But if Overland Park wanted to open Bluejacket Pool next year, it would cost about $35,000 in repairs. That includes basic maintenance, as well as the cost of all the water and chemicals the pool would leak over the course of the year.
The city could patch the leaks, but that would only be a temporary fix because the leaks are “all over,” Parks and Recreation Director Jermel Stevenson told the Community Development Committee earlier this year.
If Bluejacket can’t be saved, Shuck would like to see it maintained as a community gathering space of some kind. She said the city could create a shelter with bathrooms.
“I don’t want there to be a splash pad, but if we have to have something, a splash pad would be nice for those that live in the community,” she said. “I really hope it’s a pool. But if it can’t be, hopefully some of that other stuff can come to fruition.”
The switch from small community pools to larger regional aquatic centers is a part of that Overland Park master parks plan.
The plan also recommends that public schools in the area make their swimming pools more available for neighbors to use.
Stevenson said in an email that by building larger regional pools, the city can serve more residents with a wider variety of amenities.
It’s also easier to maintain and staff one big facility, as opposed to a variety of smaller pools with different repair timelines and setups.
That trade-off is all the more appealing when some of those smaller neighborhood pools have fewer people showing up to swim, and they tend to cluster in overlapping neighborhoods.
Overland Park isn’t the only city taking this approach.
Regional aquatic centers have become three times as common among medium-sized cities over the past five years, according to Danielle Doll, a spokesperson for the National Recreation and Parks Association.
The number of cities with an outdoor pool have remained largely unchanged in that same time period.
Emily Schaffhausen, who lives in Lenexa but takes her kids to Bluejacket Pool where their friends live, isn’t opposed to having a bigger pool. But she doesn’t want Overland Park to get too carried away with upgrades.
“It’s almost more stressful for a mom with little kids because you’re like, ‘Where is everybody?’” she said. “I would love to have maybe a slide, a couple diving boards, a rock wall or basketball thing, but not where it’s out-of-control huge.”
The decline of public pools
It wasn’t long ago that the United States dumped millions of dollars into public swimming pools. But that changed in the 1950s, when the country desegregated pools, prompting white communities to create exclusive private club pools.
That led to a hollowing out of public swimming pools, which were slowly replaced with private pools, said Jeff Wiltse, a history professor at the University of Montana who wrote a book about the legacy of segregation on public pools.
Kansas City’s Swope Park Pool was built in 1941 with a grant from the Works Progress Administration that was created during the Great Depression to provide jobs beef up infrastructure. The federal government pitched in $400,000 (worth nearly $9 million today).
At the time, the pool was segregated. Black swimmers were relegated to the smaller Paseo Park Pool, near 18th & Vine streets. That pool was so crowded that kids would only swim for half an hour at a time to make sure everyone got a turn.
In 1954, after three Black Kansas City residents sued the city over its segregated pools, the courts forced the city to integrate its pools.
But some white swimmers didn’t like having to share the pool. And once Swope Park Pool was desegregated, they stopped coming.
They opened private pools in country clubs and homeowners associations instead — many of which prohibited Black members. And over time, those private HOA pools replaced public swimming pools.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, if they wanted to obscure why they were doing it, they could say, ‘Well, you have to be a resident to join,’” Wiltse said. “A lot of clubs explicitly wrote into their bylaws that membership was limited to white people, and that was legal.”
The U.S. Supreme Court concluded in 1973 that a private pool club in Maryland was illegally discriminating against a Black homeowner who was rejected for a pool membership. That made it harder for those private clubs to keep their pools segregated.
But the legacy of segregated private pools — and the resulting decline in public pools — persists today.
Overland Park has four publicly funded pools but at least 10 private pools owned by homeowners associations, mostly in the wealthier south of the city.
That factors into how the city decides where pools are needed and where there are already enough options for residents.
Stevenson said the city’s master parks plan considers the availability of those private pools run by country clubs and homeowners associations. It also considers whether the other surrounding cities have any public pools available.
For example, Flat Rock Creek Pool in Lenexa could also serve people who live near Bluejacket Pool, whereas most of Olathe’s public pools aren’t easily accessible to residents of southern Overland Park.
Punswick said that whatever happens, she hopes that the outpouring of love for Bluejacket Pool will at least guide Overland Park’s plans for its aquatics looking to the future.
“A lot of the neighborhoods south of us have big, beautiful neighborhood pools,” she said. “We don’t. We need this. This is an important fixture of our neighborhood.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
