For Davis, Bruce Beach and its environs evoke a personal connection to the past: His great-grandfather helped build Pensacola Lighthouse, located within the city’s nearby naval air station. Whenever he’s at Bruce Beach, he says, “I can see the lighthouse, and I can know that my ancestors are still shining on me.” Today, Davis sees how the revitalized waterfront can represent a bright future for Black Pensacolians then and now: “I only imagine how the young African-American youth would go there for the summer and dream about what they could become.”
A similar sentiment comes through at a new pool more than 1000 miles north of Pensacola in New York City: After several decades of advocacy from community organizations and city groups, a massive new recreational space opened earlier this year: the Davis Center at the Harlem Meer, located in the northeast corner of Central Park, is returning vital public facilities to local residents, particularly the predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in and surrounding East Harlem. The center is open year-round, with programming designed to bring New Yorkers together through fitness, art, music, wellness, and education. And this summer, a core element of its mandate was facilitating swim lessons and other aquatic activities—offerings that residents had long been requesting.
Candace Senior, who helps lead aquatics programming for NYC Parks, was especially thrilled to oversee the implementation of those plans earlier this year. Senior’s history with the water stretches back decades: She began teaching swim lessons with the NYC Parks Learn to Swim program back in 2012, work that took her all around the city. Senior recalls learning to swim when she was only four years old, which made her an anomaly. “I feel like a lot of minorities, my friends in my age group, didn’t have this opportunity to pay for lessons or to have this access [to] free learn-to-swim programs,” she says. “They don’t have the resources.” To Senior, the Davis Center is now one of many needed correctives.
Around the country, racist histories still inform which parts of many, many beaches are most accessible to Black people. As in Pensacola Bay, those waters are typically more dangerous than surrounding coastlines—just one reason that racial disparities in drowning deaths remain persistent. And in urban centers, recreational spaces with pools are all too often underfunded or abandoned, which means learning opportunities like those available at the Davis Center can be incredibly rare or prohibitively far away. Indeed, for many families living in uptown Manhattan in neighborhoods like Harlem, having to trek all the way to a public pool on the Lower East Side or another borough made the prospect of taking swim lessons, even free ones, untenable.
But with the Gottesman Pool now open at the Harlem Meer, East Harlem residents have more convenient options for programming that’s at once life-saving and community-building. Seeing that shift happen uptown, where I myself spent my own first years in New York, I was struck by a sense of deep appreciation. As Senior notes, all New Yorkers deserve to access resources that help keep us safe in the water—no matter what part of the city we call home.
