Allie Bacharach loves the water.
“I’ve been swimming since I could walk,” she said.
She now participates in organized swimming and sits on the board of SplashForward, a nonprofit advocating for access to sustainable aquatic facilities.
Over the past six years, Bacharach, who lives in Green Lake, has directed that passion to something else: municipal planning and renovations.
After years of planning and delays, Seattle is renovating Green Lake’s historic community center, which houses the Evans Pool. In addition to the renovation, the city plans to construct a brand-new aquatics center.
Swimmers like Bacharach, who use the Evans Pool, are vying for the new pool to be larger to meet the demands of the increasing Green Lake population. There are currently no public pools larger than six lanes open year-round in Seattle. For many swimmers, six lanes is not enough. And they see the expansion as an opportunity to mitigate crowding and expand programming.
After scrapping plans for a renovation in 2022, the city council decided to allocate funding for the Green Lake Community Center after all. It is now planning a full-scale renovation. The novel aquatics center will be built northeast of the existing building, replacing the current playground. It will feature a lap pool, a second recreation pool, and a community room. The exterior of Evans Pool will remain, but its interior will be repurposed as part of the renovated community center.
Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss oversees District 6, which includes Green Lake, and said the multi-use space has, well, many uses.
“The Green Lake Community Center rebuild and expansion has a place for many different people, right?” he said. “We've got everything from pickleball to chess to childcare to swimming. And what we all know is that there's a greater need for the Green Lake Community Center.”
But renovating a decades-old building is far from simple. The pool was built in the 1950s, and the building’s heating and cooling infrastructure is precast in concrete, which means the water temperature fluctuates rapidly, Strauss said.
The HVAC investments made over the past decade “are already failing,” Strauss said. “The whole building needs a complete refresh, and that includes the pool.”
Bacharach, the swimmer, has followed plans for the renovation since the city was in the pre-design stage in 2020. Last November, Seattle Parks and Recreation held public meetings and sent out an online survey to gather input on the projects and show early design mock-ups of the new aquatics facility and pool. Bacharach said the department did not provide enough information on the dimensions of the new pool in those mock-ups.
“It's just, like, some boxes of a pool. You can't even tell how big it is,” Bacharach said. “I was able to count, based on some indicators of just knowing pools. It was a six lane pool that they're replacing it with.”
Evans Pool currently has six lanes, which Bacharach thinks is too small. That is pretty typical for public pools, which usually have six to eight lanes. Meanwhile, competitive facilities, community pools, and Olympic pools often have eight to ten lanes.
Evans Pool typically reserves three lanes for lap swimmers while the rest of the pool is open for recreation. Bacharach said those three lanes fill up quickly, especially during lunchtime when people come in to swim on their breaks. She almost always swims with a few other swimmers in the lane. At worst, five or six swimmers crowd in.
“I've had people tell me they've swam with eight people in a lane,” Bacharach said. “I have a fellow swimmer who told me that she's twice gotten a concussion because she's a really fast swimmer and [there were] eight people in a lane and [she] ran into somebody,” Bacharach said.
A bigger pool would allow for more lap lanes to be open while swim lessons are happening, and make room for sports that require more depth such as water polo, Bacharach said.
The plans for a six-lane pool prompted Bacharach to spearhead a petition to advocate for a larger pool. Titled “Expand and Enhance the Green Lake Pool Rebuild,” it has garnered close to 2,000 signatures and is calling for a larger pool that would “enable an aquatic facility to meet current and future aquatic needs.”
Strauss, the Seattle councilmember, has since had meetings with Bacharach and others who signed the petition. He holds that this discussion is part of the process to decide what the center will ultimately contain.
“I want to clarify things for the public, which is, we are at the point where we have figured out what the footprint of the building is, but we have not designed the interiors, and so the mock-ups that are in the public are for first blush,” Strauss told KNKX. “Like, here's what a possibility is, and what do you think. And so the process of public engagement with us, putting out designs of what it could be, but not what it must be, is doing its job.”
This construction project is complicated and expensive for a few reasons. The portion of the building that houses Evans Pool was designated a historical landmark by the city in 2021, effectively protecting it from demolition, so its exterior will be preserved.
Another factor is that all of this construction will take place on unstable soil that used to be a lake bed. Strauss framed these complications as an issue of opportunity cost.
“The cost drivers for Green Lake Community Center are the unstable soil conditions and the landmarking of that building, and that's why I say we could build a pool at another location in our city and get twice as many lanes by building a bigger pool, right? Same dollar, double the amount of pool. And the parks department wants to honor the fact that community members have become accustomed to swimming at Green Lake,” Strauss said.
To Bacharach, the issue of not getting a bigger pool extends beyond the concerns and needs of the aquatics community. Bacharach said relying on Green Lake and Lake Washington isn’t ideal; there are algae blooms and other issues that come up in warmer weather.
“Even though we have this great lake and we have Lake Washington, these are not areas that you learn to swim in,” Bacharach said. “Pools are going to become more and more important. For one, just to get out of the hot sun, and two, to swim in these open body waters, you don't want a 2-year-old swimming in an area that's a lake. You want them to learn in a pool first where it's really safe, they know where all the shallow end is, you can see the bottom.”
Bacharach’s dream design is a 10-lane, 25-yard-by-25-meter pool. But she said even an eight-lane pool would make a massive difference. The city said that the project is still taking shape, but that it is too early to decide what is possible.
“We are really very early in our design process and engagement, we had a 20% increase of funding less than three months ago,” said Jessica Murphy, director of planning and operations at Seattle Parks and Recreation. “We have plans to come back out this summer to share how we've incorporated the community feedback and what we've heard in relation to our constraints.”
The city is bringing on a design contractor and working through the feedback they received from community engagement efforts in November. Murphy said there will be opportunities for further community input, and that there will be updates on the process this summer.
Construction is slated to begin in 2027 and the community center is expected to close for a year and a half.
The public can follow the project at the Seattle Parks and Rec website.
