West Village Gains Public Pool, Loses Tony Dapolito Center, Neighbors Split on the Swap

As New York pitches affordable housing with a new public pool to the West Village, centuries-old battles over preservation and progress resurface, casting ripples far beyond municipal property lines.

On Hudson Street, amid the boutique shops and storied brownstones of the West Village, a municipal fait accompli beckons. The city intends to raze the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center—an aging, shuttered stalwart bearing the scars of a half-century’s worth of sweat and chlorine—and in its stead, erect 280 units of affordable housing atop a spiffy new indoor pool and fitness centre. In a city where one-bedroom flats regularly list for north of $4,000 a month, the prospect invites as much wariness as it does hope.

Announced by Mayor Eric Adams’ office on December 19th, the plan offers a developer—Camber Property Group—the right to turn a long-vacant city lot into a mixed-use beacon, branded “Hudson Mosaic.” The project would reserve 42 apartments (15%) for formerly homeless New Yorkers, a nod to rising shelter numbers. Its ground and basement will host a six-lane public pool, basketball court, and space for exercise classes, all to be managed by the city’s parks department.

The proposal emerges after six years of evaporation for West Village swimmers and gym-goers. Since 2019, the Tony Dap, as locals call it, has sat silent—its doors sealed, its plumbing suspect, and its roof leaking. Parks officials argue the structure is beyond reclamation; ADA compliance, fire codes, and modern amenities, they claim, would prove prohibitively expensive or structurally unfeasible. Tricia Shimamura, the parks commissioner for Manhattan, strikes a pragmatic tone: “We definitely hear and understand the community’s desire to preserve that history… but the building constraints really don’t allow us to renovate it in a way that makes it accessible, up to code, and truly programmable.”

The city, never known for sentimentality, now finds itself at odds with preservationist campaigners such as Andrew Berman of Village Preservation. Mr Berman contends the plan amounts to cultural vandalism, pitting architectural nostalgia against present needs: “The public has been clear that they want the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center repaired and re-opened… not the new facilities replacing Tony Dapolito and the center being destroyed as Mayor Adams proposed.”

For the West Village—where median household income hovers at $134,000 and affordable housing is as rare as rent control—this will be only the second such development in decades. It chimes with Adams’ larger promises to double affordable housing production citywide. But the plan also carries implications beyond bricks and mortar. Locals fret that adding 280 new, below-market units (and scores of new residents) may strain already-struggling school seats and squeeze parking on winding village lanes.

Broader currents swirl beneath the controversy. Social debates on historic preservation versus practical urban planning are as old as Jane Jacobs’ block, and in a city that is nearly 70% renters, the balance rarely pleases all. The city’s struggle mirrors those of global peers: Londoners battle over council flats replacing community halls in Hackney; Parisians wrangle about uprooting 19th-century facades for more énergique uses. The fundamental question remains: whose city is this, and for whom does it change?

On the economic front, the Hudson Mosaic deal reveals both promise and constraint. New York housing experts reckon that even 280 affordable units—doubtless welcome—still float as a drop in a gargantuan bucket. The city’s affordable housing waitlist exceeds 250,000 households. Meanwhile, the cost of public amenities—such as indoor pools, rarely built in Manhattan since the 1970s—remains puny as a portion of the city’s $110bn annual budget but essential for public health and civic trust. Advocates point to studies that show every public dollar invested in recreational facilities yields benefits in crime reduction and youth engagement.

Politically, the saga partially reflects the city’s shifting sands. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has signalled support for the preservationists and their alternative refit plan, setting up a predictable tussle with the outgoing Adams administration and an emboldened local constituency. City Hall, for its part, argues that delay and indecision merely perpetuate the housing shortage and keep neighbourhood assets mothballed.

Preservation or progress, but rarely both

The tension comes as city after city in America faces similar battles: how much heritage can be retained while accommodating demographic shifts and economic needs? Unlike Boston and Chicago, New York lacks a formal right-to-housing enshrined in law, making new construction both policy imperative and perennial political football. Ironically, it is the very charm of the West Village—preserved by past battles against overbuilding—that now renders the creation of affordable housing fiendishly complex and costly.

Yet the signs are clear: population pressures, rising homelessness, and battered public infrastructure portend more, not fewer, such standoffs. While nostalgia is a potent lobbying force, it rarely houses the unhoused or fixes a broken pool. Western European capitals have begun experimenting with creative adaptive reuse—integrating facades or historical motifs into new developments—a lesson New York might finally heed.

For now, the mayor’s plan is likely to proceed, buoyed by the city’s legal powers over its own lots. Whether Hudson Mosaic becomes a model or a cautionary tale will turn on execution: delivering promised public amenities, ensuring existing communities are not displaced, and resisting the urge to squeeze out architectural whimsy in favour of utilitarian bulk.

To our mind, every economic and cultural calculus in New York weighs toward compromise, not absolutism. Affordable housing and public amenities—especially in Manhattan—are more than fetishes of urban planners; they are vital threads in the city’s tangled social fabric. But cities thrive only when they preserve a sense of place, as well as provide shelter and play. A stubborn refusal to adapt or an uncritical embrace of new brick-and-mortar alike may both shortchange future New Yorkers. In the end, history and progress must share the same pool, chlorinated but communal, or risk both running dry. ■