Swimming hole found at city park
The Washington Park pool as it appeared in the late 1930s.
The Washington Park pool as it appears today, with Dunn Avenue behind the fence
At first glance, the big hole in the ground in the current Mystery Photo seemed to be an empty swimming pool. But something didn’t seem right. The deep area is not sloped to a shallower depth, and the rocky hillside in the background doesn’t look like poolside landscaping.
We asked our readers for help. There were some wild guesses; someone thought it might be the dam at No. 4 Reservoir, and another caller thought it might be the lower level of Citizens Library. A couple callers suggested Canonsburg Park Pool, and Roger Gaydos wrote an email stating: “My research seems to show the photo to be a filtration pit for the new Canonsburg Park swimming pool. The pit would have been constructed in the 1930s prior to the swimming pool itself being constructed shortly thereafter.”
We reached out to Canonsburg historian James T. Herron, who told us the Canonsburg pool opened July 4, 1935, but the topography in the photo does not match that of the pool’s location.
The majority of responding readers think that the picture is of the pool at Washington Park, and the cars in the background are parked on Dunn Avenue.
”I remember steps coming down toward the pool,” said Bill Fleissner. “We lived on West Prospect and used to take the trolley from Krause’s Drug Store out to the park in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”
One reader remembers watching the Washington Park pool being built. Sarah Fowler Johns, 91, said she watched her father, contractor Richard Thomas Fowler, supervise the construction in 1928. “I was 4 years old then, and I learned to swim when I was 5,” she said. “That end of the pool was nine feet deep, so I had to be careful there.”
The worker repairing the seams in the concrete gives perspective to the old photo, allowing us to estimate the walls of the pool at about 10 feet.
A visit to the pool last week raised as many questions as it answered. Although the topography matches, with Dunn Avenue today being in the same place as the road on which the cars are parked in the old photo, the depth of the pool is different. The pool today is only five feet deep on that end. The deepest part of the pool is where the diving boards are located, in an extension of the L-shaped pool.
Was the layout of the pool changed over the years? Mrs. Johns thinks the pool was a rectangular shape when she was a girl. Could the current diving area have been added sometime later?
Observer-Reporter archives lack information on the history of Washington Park. We’d like to change that, and we encourage our readers who might have such information to contact us at 724-222-2200, extension 2400.
Observer-Reporter.