Swimming Pool Milestones

Last August, I clipped a "Swimming Pool Timeline" out of the Los Angeles Times, because it had some fun trivia in it. Now that the weather's turning cold, it's nice to imagine the faint smell of chlorine, and picture the eerie glow of under-water lights shining through an aqua-tinted pool full of water. Want to know about pools? Here you go:

In 1920, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (the Brad and Angelina of their day) married and bought a Beverly Hills manse which they gussied up to Hollywood royalty status. The place was called Pickfair, and it hosted parties with guests like Chaplin, Valentino, Einstein, Amelia Earhart--IOW, all the celebs of the day. Read more about them in this article by Will Wright.

Such a palace demanded a pool, of course. Pickfair's pool was one of the largest in the world: 55 feet wide and 100 feet long. Sand was brought in to form a beach. The Times claims that this was the first private residential pool in Los Angeles.

In the 1990s, subsequent owner Meshulam Riklis and his wife, Pia Zadora tore down most of the original mansion, which had decayed, but the well-built pool remained intact.

The current owners (Unicom International) have removed their Pickfair webpage, but more pictures of old Pickfair are viewable here.

Not to be outdone, William Randolph Hearst in 1924 put in the first pool of his estate, Xanadu. . . excuse me, San Simeon. It was T-shaped. Hearst soon was enlarging and changing it, and after three iterations, ended up with the Neptune pool, which is what you see on tours. The Neptune pools is surrounded by a faux Greco-Roman temple, complete with statues and marble columns. In the 1930s, when it was finally finished, it spanned between 58 and 95 feet in width, and was 104 feet long.

Read the pdf brochure of Hearst's Castle here, or visit the California State Park website.

Architect Richard Neutra was responsible for some of the pools in Los Angeles. In 1929, Dr. Philip Lovell asked Neutra to design him a house that would enhance the health of its inhabitants. Neutra put a pool where a terrace should have been (most unusual back then) at the Lovell Heath House. He also added an exercise yard and a water purification system. Read more about the Lovell Health House here.

In 1935, Neutra teamed with designer Isamu Noguchi to install the first kidney-shaped swimming pool. The site was the Joseph von Sternberg home in Los Angeles, but the pool, sadly, was not built.

According to the Times, the first kidney-shaped pool actually built came in 1948, in Sonoma, California.

By 1947, there were 11,000 swimming pools in the US. In 2007, there are about 1.1 million, and 60 to 75 % of them are in Southern California.

19,659 gallons of water evaporate from a typical uncovered pool every day, according to Los Angeles' Water Dept.

On the other hand, if you've ever seen the movies Z-Boys or Lords of Dogtown, you know that even empty swimming pools serve a purpose. They give skateboarders a place to practice.