This story was funded by the Schooner Foundation as well as readers like you.

Most summer days, the Sulphur Springs Pool is buzzing with activity. Swim lessons, water aerobics, and kids just beating the heat brought an estimated 25,000 patrons to the Tampa landmark in 2023, making it one of the city’s busiest pools – a fixture of the long, hot Florida summer for many in the neighborhood.

But this summer, the pool was quiet. Instead of the usual lines at the entrance and boisterous splashing from the lanes, visitors found only locked gates and a drained pool. After discovering major structural instabilities in the pool’s deck and shell, the city had issued a May 16 announcement that the 24-year-old facility would be closed for repair. Indefinitely.

When city workers drained the pool for regular maintenance in late 2023, they were dismayed to find it kept filling with water – seeping in either from the river or the ground – sometimes five to seven feet deep. “It looked like a garden hose,” Director of Parks and Recreation Tony Mulkey told Tampa City Council at a recent meeting. 

Five years earlier, in 2019, the city had repaired instabilities in the pool deck caused by underground voids, and shifting terrain was suspected to be the culprit this time around, too. Ground penetrating radar tests on the pool’s shell revealed a significant void stretching right through the middle of the pool. Rebar reinforcing the pool shell appeared to be bending.

The pool, notes Lawrence Hollyfield, communications coordinator for Tampa’s Parks and Recreation Department, simply isn’t safe anymore. $1.5 million that had been previously allocated for repairs in the seawall that separates the pool from the adjacent Hillsborough River pool’s has been redirected toward consulting with engineers about potential solutions for the pool.

Hollyfield compares the dilemma to a broken down car: can the pool be fixed, or will the cost of the repair outweigh the value of the pool itself?

“What we care about,” he says, “is finding the quickest, safest, and most enjoyable resolution we can.” 

But seven months later, that vague timeline has many Sulphur Springs neighbors concerned. The pool, they say, offers refuge from the heat, a safe gathering spot for kids, and a place to learn life-saving swimming skills or enjoy health-building exercise classes. “It’s a vital resource to the area,” notes Charlie Adams, president of the Sulphur Springs Neighborhood Association. 

Even with a city-sponsored program that shuttles Sulphur Springs patrons – many of whom do not have access to their own transportation – to nearby Copeland Pool, it still feels like something important is missing. 

Perhaps that’s because Sulphur Springs has always been a place to swim. Perched along a picturesque bend in the Hillsborough, six miles north of downtown Tampa, the neighborhood grew up around a large spring whose mineral-rich waters wind past towering, moss-draped oaks into the river. In the 1920s, developers like Josiah Richardson saw the potential in its wild beauty and developed the spring into a full scale resort (one might say tourist trap) that included enclosed pools, a giant toboggan slide, a dance pavilion, and – because this is Florida – an alligator farm. To these water-based wonders, Richardson added a two-story gazebo for overlooking the river; an arcade complex that included hotel rooms, apartments, and shops (often cited as one of the nation’s first indoor malls); and a 214-foot Gothic Revival water tower still visible from nearby I-275. 

But the springs’ legendary waters weren’t open to everyone. Like many early tourist attractions in the south, Sulphur Springs was segregated. Black cooks, maids, janitors, and groundskeepers kept the resort running for white visitors, but were not free to partake in its pleasures – or build their homes nearby. Spring Hill, a tiny enclave of streets north of the resort, became the heart of the area’s Black community. 

Even after Jim Crow, says Adams, his grandfather could remember facing whites who wanted to keep Black swimmers out of the pool. “You had to go through a butt whipping just to get in,” he explains. As Antoinette Jackson has demonstrated in her studies of the neighborhood in her book “Heritage, Tourism, and Race: The Other Side of Leisure,” even with little access to the spring pool, Black residents often took to the water anyway – using the river itself for swimming, fishing, and baptisms.

Everything changed in 1986, when the city closed Sulphur Springs to swimming due to high bacteria counts. Investigations demonstrated that the spring was hydrologically linked to nearby seeps and sinkholes that had served, for decades, as dumps and stormwater retention ponds, or had simply been filled for construction. A subsequent study showed that, with limited freshwater recharge and old pollutants continuing to leach into the spring, restoration would be a long and costly effort. 

Neighborhood leaders applied to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, hoping the spring’s historical significance might secure an Outstanding Florida Water designation for the spring – only to learn that this protection is reserved for “pristine” natural sites. For many, this decision felt like another instance in what was becoming a pattern of neglect that left the once-famed community behind. 

Instead of restoration, the old swimming site received a new pool. Chlorinated, and plumbed entirely separately from the natural spring, the Sulphur Springs Pool was constructed to overlook the spring run and its venerable old oaks, within a minute’s walk of the old gazebo. The old spring pool was fenced off, still quietly bubbling away under the watchful gaze of spoonbills and limpkins painted on the side of a nearby pumping station. The mural also features an outsized microscopic view of algae – now another familiar inhabitant of many Florida springs, clearly visible in the spring run below.  

“It’s been 60 years since redevelopment in Sulphur Springs. I don’t want my family and my community to be forgotten.”

Charlie Adams, president of the Sulphur Springs Neighborhood Association

Despite that provoking protist, the pool has remained a beloved community fixture for residents of all ages. “It’s the closest thing our kids have to going to Busch Gardens,” quips Quinton McNair, proprietor of a local lawn service. Tampa’s famous theme park is just three miles away, but in a community where more than half of children and three quarters of seniors now live in poverty, it is financially unobtainable for many.

The ongoing closure has left some Sulphur Springs residents suspicious. They point to gentrification happening in their neighborhood. A developer is currently transforming the Tampa Arts Center (standing roughly where the old arcade building once stood) into a restaurant and co-work space. The land along the river where the old Harbor Club restaurant once catered to white tourists has been acquired by the investor who developed a major food court in the revitalized Tampa Heights neighborhood. And the Springs Theater, a former cinema just across the street from the pool, is soon to become a distillery and wedding venue. 

Thomas Baldwin, who runs the Sulphur Springs Museum and Heritage Center, wonders if the city has another development project in mind for the land currently occupied by the pool. “You have the Tampa Art Center down the street and the Springs Theater right across the street. What would you build there?”

Quinton McNair doesn’t think outside investment is inherently bad, but he is concerned about the purpose it serves. “We have to make sure it’s tied to the children growing up in this neighborhood,” he muses. “Kids shouldn’t get a sense that these places are off limits.” 

The Sulphur Springs Pool’s closure comes at a time when the nation’s public pools are facing a crisis on many fronts. Lifeguard shortages spurred by pandemic-era disruptions to training programs, for instance, have impacted nearly one third of the nation’s 309,000 public pools, leading to shorter hours or closings. And while construction of new residential pools is booming – Florida homes saw nearly 33,000 new pools installed in 2020 – the number of public pools in the country’s 100 most populous cities has remained relatively static for the last 10 years. In many municipalities, pools are vying with other aging infrastructure for budget allocations, even as other cities have identified them as a crucial tool for fighting deadly urban heat waves. In a country where heat-related illness is the leading cause of hazardous weather fatalities – and where low-income neighborhoods are disproportionately impacted by rising urban temperatures – access to cooling spaces like public swimming pools is essential.  

Signs for the future of the pool are not all discouraging. While city staff are consulting engineers and gathering estimates, weighing the possibilities for repairing or replacing the Sulphur Springs pool, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has clearly voiced her support. On July 18, 2024, Castor told Tampa City Council, “We are entering this budget year with a save our pool mentality.” 

Moreover, local activists like Adams have worked in dialog with the city to help to open up formerly closed and neglected spaces dating back to the neighborhood’s resort days. Visitors can now enjoy the shaded walkway along the river, or sit in the shade of the once-fenced-off gazebo, or venture onto the reopened old bridge across the river. Adams plans to use these new spaces to host a walkable neighborhood farmers market. 

“It’s been 60 years since redevelopment in Sulphur Springs,” notes Adams, arguing that investment is needed to make the community thrive. “I don’t want my family and my community to be forgotten.”

But, he says, investment needs to be community-focused – and it goes well beyond the issue of the pool. There’s something more fundamental that needs to change. 

He caught a glimpse of this something just a few years ago, when he took his first kayak ride on the river. While the 33-year-old Spring Hill resident treasured memories of going to the pool with his family as a child, he never thought about going into the river for recreation, despite growing up just blocks away from it. “I never knew anyone from school or anyone my color that went kayaking,” he says. 

All that changed when a new boat launch was added at a local park – one of the few such amenities in the area. Adams got a kayak and paddled two miles upstream to the Tampa Electric Company Dam and back. He couldn’t believe the beauty that unfolded around him. 

“It blew my mind!” he marvels. 

Inspired by this experience, Adams founded a nonprofit called Kids on the River, which aims to foster a sense of belonging for community kids through outdoor adventures. When he’s not organizing clean-ups or boating trips, he can be seen paddling the river on a homemade bamboo raft – just one of his ideas for entrepreneurial projects for Sulphur Springs youth.

Opening the disused and neglected spaces around the spring is crucial, Adams believes, to restoring the health of his neighborhood. “This is the most gorgeous botanical park in central Florida,” he muses. “It’s like the lost Fountain of Youth. Being around it can activate the youthful spirit of Sulphur Springs.” 

It’s a broader picture of resilience than we typically see in the language of public health and urban planning – and one that is founded in the neighborhood’s unique history. 

“This,” he says, indicating the water, the trees, the wild abundance of the river. “This is what we’ve been missing. The starting point of revitalizing the area is knowing you are connected to the world, to the river in your backyard.”

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Cover image: Sulphur Springs. Photo by Amanda Hagood