At Busy South Bronx Pool, an Unlikely Team Keeps the Peace
Crotona Pool’s manager, Kevin Walker, calls everyone out of the water at the end of the morning session. The Bronx pool has up to 1,400 visitors a day.
James Harrigan, 21, an ex-gang member who is one of a group of young pool volunteers, raised a flag he made.
He is known by the name tattooed on his left arm: Scorpio. He favors diamond earrings and designer sunglasses. He takes pills to control his angry outbursts, and sometimes carries a pistol, a .22 or a .45, depending on his mood.
On this day, on the street outside the Crotona Pool in the Bronx, where hundreds of children wait to get inside, he wears the earrings and sunglasses, but does not have a gun.
“Don’t move!” he shouts when a boy in navy trunks tries to tiptoe to the front of the line of sugar-fueled children, some wrapped in SpongeBob SquarePants towels, others wearing neon flip-flops. The boy gets back in line.
Scorpio, who is known by this name, is Terrance Carpenter, 26. He is one of a dozen or so young men who volunteer unofficially each week at the pool, which sits amid an area long fractured by hostilities among gangs like the Bloods, the Crips and the Latin Kings. Some of the volunteers are gang members, but others have turned their backs on crime.
Crotona Pool was one of several huge public pools to open in 1936 in New York. Built by Robert Moses with financing from the Works Progress Administration, they were heralded as some of the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.
But the pool, like the park it abuts, went into steep decline starting in the 1960s, as middle-class residents fled the surrounding neighborhoods — Morrisania, Crotona, East Tremont, West Farms — and poverty and violence took hold. Today the area has come far from its worst days, thanks in part to a citywide decline in crime and in part to the efforts of residents. The young volunteers, some of whom have contributed to their neighborhood’s violence, now seek to help keep the peace, at least in the neutral zone of the pool.
The volunteers have no enforcement powers; their duties are not clearly defined. But at the enormous pool full of excited — sometimes overexcited — children and teenagers, they provide extra ears and eyes for the officials charged with maintaining order. When the children violate the no-diving rule, they scold them. When horseplay gets too rowdy, they tone it down. When they see loiterers looking for trouble on the streets outside the pool, they swagger over to ward them off.
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