Sign the Pool Petition to Keep McCarren McCarren!

As you may have read, there is a plan going around the Parks Department to sell the naming rights to several New York Park facilities, including McCarren Pool. While the Parks Department keeps saying that the plan is only in the preliminary stages and that McCarren may or may not end up on the "For Sale" list, local pro-pool activist group Poolaid is getting ahead of the game and collecting signatures against the renaming of McCarren Pool. (Poolaid was created by myself and by NAG co-chair Michael Freedman-Schnapp, along with Beka Economopoulos and others).

You can sign the petition online here, or at the NAG table at Williamsburg Walks--on the Nortwest corner or North 7th and Bedford. Below is the Poolaid statement regarding selling the naming rights.


STATEMENT AGAINST
THE RENAMING OF MCCARREN POOL

In 1809 the Parks Department named McCarren Park after Patrick Henry McCarren, a local politician responsible for many of the parks and green spaces in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. In 2009, the centennial year of McCarren’s death, the Parks Department wants take that name back by selling the naming rights to McCarren Pool.

It’s a terrible idea. Here’s why.

• North Brooklyn has fought for years to get MCCARREN pool reopened. We didn’t fight to for the right to swim in AT&T pool, AmEx pool, or any pool but McCarren Pool.

• McCarren Pool is already paid for, by taxpayers. The pool was built with taxpayer money and is being renovated with taxpayer money. The corporation would be contributing nothing to our community, but gaining great benefits. Other things in other parks, like Wollman Rink, are named for their *benefactors*, for those who donated the money for the facility. McCarren is already named for its benefactor, Patrick Henry McCarren.

• McCarren Pool is famous because of our local promoters, our local bands, and our citizens. It was longtime residents like Jelly NYC and bands like TV on the Radio who made McCarren into a premier destination, written up in national magazines, not some multinational corporation.

• Patrick Henry McCarren is an important part of local history. He is responsible for many of the parks we have today, and for the building of the WIlliamsburg Bridge. He also had ties to the sugar industry and the Havemeyer family, who owned Domino Sugar. Greenpoint and Williamsburg are undergoing extraordinary changes—every day, physically, we see our history going away. Patrick Henry McCarren, with his connections to local landmarks and local history, should be used as a teaching tool, not be erased from the pool that bears his name.

• Greenpoint and Williamsburg have already gotten a raw deal from Parks. We haven’t gotten the parks we were promised in the rezoning. The waterfront is still fenced off. It is wrong to sell the open space we do have, that we fought for, to a corporation.


Please sign and forward the petition to keep McCarren named McCarren.
You don't need to live here to sign it.