Some may recognize this house on Lytle Street, which has been in the news lately as a potential tear down to make room for an expanded park on Johns Street. Some town residents have called for the house to be preserved, noting its historic value.
Fewer people know that the wading pool in the park next door to it on Johns Street is the last of its kind in Princeton, and may well be torn out in favor of a spray garden. As recently as the 1980s, Princeton had wading pools in all the neighborhood parks. They were part of a program in which each park had its own summer camp counselor. Parents didn't have to chauffeur their kids around to various summer camps, because the kids could simply run out the door down to the neighborhood park and play under the supervision of the counselor stationed there. Kids in the various parks competed against each other in sports. And when it got hot, they'd climb into the wading pool and splash around.
Technically speaking, the Johns Street wading pool isn't actually the last one in town. Ben Stentz, head of the Parks and Rec Department, tells me there's one buried in tiny Pine Street Park. He goes on to say:
"I believe there were wading pools at Grover Park, Harrison St. Park, Pine St. Park, Mary Moss Park and a few others... I’ve heard stories that there were 6 or 7 of these pools at one point in time."When Harrison Street Park was being renovated five or so years ago, some of us lobbied to save the wading pool, which at that time was surrounded by an ugly metal fence. The idea was to remove the fence, fill the pool with soil and make it into a "raised bed bog garden".
If the Johns Street park wading pool is demolished, we'll be saying a final goodbye to a more sustainable, neighborhood-based lifestyle, when cars were less needed and kids had free-range childhoods. Nature helped with the child rearing, and "Be back for dinner!" was summer's motto.
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