Sunset Play Center bath house
4200 7th Avenue | Sunset Park | built 1936
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1935
WPA workers break ground on the Sunset Play Center, with a bath house planned for 4,850 bathers
In August 1935 plans for the Sunset Play Center are filed with the Department of Buildings, and WPA workers have already broken ground on the site. The design calls for a swimming pool of Olympic size with diving and wading pools on either side, and a one-story brick bath house whose central rotunda rises a story and a half. The bath house is meant to hold 4,850 bathers.
- 1936
Mayor LaGuardia lights the Sunset pool at its opening and a Metropolitan Opera singer performs the anthem
The Sunset Play Center opens on July 20, 1936, as the sixth of the city's eleven WPA pools and the first in Brooklyn. After Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia switches on the underwater lights, Julia Peters of the Metropolitan Opera Company sings the Star Spangled Banner. Attendance is disputed: an estimated 3,500 people by one count, and 50,000 according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
- 1936
The bath house entrance pairs giant corner piers with a rotunda of stacked brick cylinders
Among the most distinctive elements of the design is the Seventh Avenue entrance. Giant corner piers frame a one-and-a-half-story rotunda whose stacked cylindrical brick walls hint at the lobby inside. To make room for a monumental flight of steps up to the main entrance, the designers breach the masonry wall that forms the perimeter of Sunset Park.
“The design of the bath house entrance is one of the most distinctive features of the Sunset Play Center with its giant corner piers that frame the one-and-a-half-story rotunda.”
- 1936
Herbert Magoon, Robert Moses's hand-picked architect, is credited with the Sunset bath house
The design of the Sunset Play Center is most commonly credited to Herbert Magoon, a young staff member whom Robert Moses had earlier hand picked for the Jones Beach bath houses, which opened in 1929, after liking his austere but nicely detailed proposals. The landmark report adds that Joseph L. Hautman prepared the majority of the plans and construction drawings kept at the Olmsted Center Archives in Queens.
“Joseph L. Hautman prepared the majority of the architectural plans and construction drawings on file at the Olmsted Center Archives in Queens.”
- 1984
A dedication ceremony reopens the Sunset Play Center after two summers of reconstruction
With an estimated $5.8 million budgeted in 1979, work begins at the Sunset Play Center in late 1982 or early 1983. For the next two summers the complex is closed while the bath house, pool and comfort station are rebuilt and a new filtration system goes in. A dedication ceremony on August 8, 1984, marks the end of the restoration and the pool's reopening to the public.
- 1988
A sunburst spray fountain is installed in the old wading pool as new immigrant communities become the main users
In the 1980s Sunset Park receives an influx of Asian and Latin American immigrants, who have since become the predominant users of the pool complex. In 1988 a sunburst spray fountain is installed at the center of the former wading pool, and the diving pool is later filled in as a volleyball court. Two murals made by students of school district 15 hang in the bath house lobby above the entrances to the locker rooms.
“…the installation of the sunburst spray fountain at the center of the former wading pool…”
- 2007
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designates the Sunset Play Center a landmark after hearing eleven in support
At the January 30, 2007 hearing, eleven witnesses speak for designating the Sunset Play Center, including Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and representatives of the Municipal Art Society and the Historic Districts Council; no one opposes. The commission designates the bath house, pools, bleachers and filter house on July 24, 2007. The site had first been heard in 1990.
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