Parks Dept.: We Must Demolish Tony Dapolito Rec. Center, but Will Rebuild the Pool & Mural
The department says that repairing the crumbling landmarked building is functionally impossible, revealing the news at a Feb. 5 Community Board 2 meeting. The Keith Haring mural, along with the outdoor pool, will be relocated.
| 17 Feb 2025 | 12:18
The NYC Parks Department has maintained that it must demolish the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, pictured above, because of structural issues. The agency said it will reconstitute its outdoor pool and save the Keith Haring mural. (
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A crack in the ceiling of the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center’s gym. (
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The Tony Dapolito Rec. Center’s swimming pool, with its famed Keith Haring mural, was closed for repairs in 2019. After public outcry over the Park Dept.’s plan to demolish the center, the agency now says that it will reconstruct the mural and build a new pool in the abutting J. J. Walker Park. (
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J. J. Walker Park has a children’s playground, pictured above, on its eastern side. The park also hosts baseball and soccer fields on its western side. (
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Playing fields on the western side of J. J. Walker Park, where baseball and soccer are currently played. (
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It appears that the Parks Department has not budged on its plan to demolish the landmarked Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, which was initially closed for repairs in 2021. The outdoor pool has been shuttered even longer, closing for similar reasons in 2019.
The recreation center, located on Clarkson Street and Seventh Avenue South, first opened in 1908. Originally known to many locals as the “Carmine Street Pool,” it was renamed after Dapolito—a longtime neighborhood advocate—in 2003. It abuts the two-acre J.J. Walker Park.
The city agency made the announcement at a Community Board 2 subcommittee meeting on Feb. 5, with backing from a City Hall representative. They doubled down on a message first made before CB2 last July, which is that repairing the building would cost $100 million dollars. Therefore, they still believe that it would feasible to level it and relocate its recreational services nearby, with equivalent indoor facilities promised for a mixed-use development slated to be built nearby.
At this month’s meeting, the agency said that vociferous public protest has led them to prioritize relocating the outdoor pool within J.J. Walker Park. They’d also want to preserve the current pool’s famed Keith Haring mural. Both would need to be deconstructed and rebuilt, however.
J.J. Walker Park currently has an artificial turf baseball field, used as the home field of the Greenwich Village Little League. It also has bocce courts, kids’ playground areas (including one with a sprinkler), bathrooms, handball courts, and a memorial dedicated to two deceased firefighters.
Tricia Shimamura, the Parks Department’s Manhattan Borough Commissioner, kicked things off by telling CB2 that “we still don’t have all the answers to everything.” Since the July briefing, she added, a report that the department had commissioned on the rec center had revealed significant “structural issues.”
Zach Campbell, the City Hall rep., added that he wanted “to thank all of the city teams who have worked on this project. It’s not just Parks who have done a lot of hard and thoughtful work.” He cited the Department of Design & Construction, the City Planning Commission, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Rebecca Burns, the Parks Department’s Chief of Architecture, stepped up to explain the aforementioned “structural issues” at a granular level. She said that the original 1908 chunk of the building, which was constructed with a “Gustavino tile-arch system”—a reference to a type of vault ceiling devised by the Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino—is now reportedly fragile and rusting. The 1922 and 1929 additions to the building, both made of “steel encased by concrete,” are reportedly rusting as well. This was due to “water infiltration,” Burns said.
Gorier details involve a significant crack in the gym ceiling and signs of deterioration in the cellar vaults, which happen to be located precariously close to a subway tunnel. Burns also said that there were non-structural problems related to programming, such as the inability to expand the compact basketball court to a more normal size, and the indoor pool not being ADA-accessible.
Overall, the Parks Department believes that the building’s structural grid is too “tight” for substantial repairs. “To provide a modern rec. center in this building would be extremely challenging and extremely inefficient, and we don’t even think we could get all the programming in there, or enlarge some of the undersized programming that’s there,” Burns said.
The “next steps” that the Parks Department proposed involve the “public reimagining” of J.J. Walker Park’s eastern half, ostensibly to include a new outdoor pool and the reconstituted Haring mural. Elements of the recreation center’s “historic” facade could also be “restored” or “re-used,” if the city finds it feasible after an additional period of study.
The revelations made at the Feb. 5 meeting were taken with a grain of salt by the landmark advocacy group Village Preservation, which deemed them a “partial victory” in a Feb. 7 press release, given the intention to reconstitute some of the complex’s elements.
“The building clearly needs repairs, and can certainly be reconfigured, expanded, and even reconstructed to best serve evolving needs and uses,” the Village Preservation said. “But the quest to demolish this historic, landmarked, and beloved structure that has served generations is environmentally irresponsible, unnecessary, and would set a dangerous precedent for the thousands of other landmarked buildings in our neighborhoods.”