Searching for the Lost Pool at the Hotel St. George

43 Comments

1. Wonderful find. Keep up the great photos and history of NY’s previous glory.

   1. there was a viewers gallery above the pool where the diving boards were. i spent many hours watching people in the pool wishing i was also at the pool but with no fee (.50c) all i could was watch. i also remember you passed a some kind of a wakway featuring hundreds of hollywod celebrites pictures as you walked to the viewers gallery. does anyone remember this. it was on or about 1950.

      1. I do remember the viewer’s gallery from about 1951-53. I remember because there was a small glassed-in room up there with four or five game machines for little kids like me to play. A baseball game pitched a metal pinball from a flap beneath the pitcher’s mound, and you tried to bat it out of the park into the stands. The best was the basketball game, in which you controlled a metallic player with a trigger, to make him flip a ball up at a hoop. Disneyland Main Street has an arcade with that game, last time I went with my son.

2. …not to say it isn’t glorious now, it’s just a different kind of glory.

   1. Orange?

3. Wow! The things you uncover never cease to amaze me. I’m sorry I don’t have the talent to know where to look for these things, but I’m really glad you do and that you take the time to share them with all of us.

4. I was on the Grand Central the other night and saw a Nissan Cube heading West with your bumper sticker

5. Great post! I live in the St. George and have membership to Eastern Athletic Gym. Much of the building still has memories and details from its history. Over the years of living there, I have uncovered a few treasures form Hotel era, including a silver tea dish that has a crest and St. George inscription on it!

6. I used to get high on the roof every day

7. It looks like a very nice gym. But for an obscene $125 per month, it freakin’ well better be!

8. I’m from Staten Island north shore. My Dad took the family once to the St George pool. This was maybe in the late 40s. I would have loved to have gone back but my hints were to no avail. We went the once and never went back.

9. Yet another fascinating post. This place has great bones, too bad that some of them like the area around the subway entrance are so tattered. I did a tight shot of the neon sign on the corner (interesting to see that on the old postcard) with the Clark Street sign in the corner. That is actually my name, minus the street of course.

10. A beautiful post.

11. Very cool! I live in St. George, Utah so this title really struck me haha. I love your posta

12. Weird el-cheapo fact: the rooms in the tower have 7-foot ceilings! I’ve never seen that anywhere else except in somebody’s basement.

13. My wife and I moved into the St. George in 1980, just as it was being converted into apartments. We lived in what was referred to as the Grill Building, the oldest component on the corner of Hicks and Clark.

14. My wife and I moved into the St. George in 1980, just as it was being converted into apartments. We lived in what was referred to as the Grill Building, the oldest component on the corner of Hicks and Clark. I had a chance to tour the basement before it was “renovated” into a health club. It was a holy mess! I understood that the width of the old pool became the length of the new pool and the rest of the club was built over the old pool.

    If you get a chance, you should see the roof garden, with its Egyptian style mosaics and spectacular views up and across the East River. One of my favorite memories of the hotel was the listing agent giving me a quick tour of a duplex unit (a huge two-story living room and one bedroom up the stairs) just below the roof of the tour, with four two-story Palladian windows looking up and over the river; if you closed your eyes you could swear that you were hearing Cole Porter at a piano in the corner and the clink of deco cocktails! Unfortunately, that apartment was already spoken for! (Rent – $1200!)

    PS: It was a salt water pool.

15. I live facing the back of the St. George Tower, opposite the back entrance to the Eastern Athletic Club. About three years ago more parts of the tiled walls around the pool were torn down, and I claimed several pieces of the brilliantly colored deco tiles from inside the dumpster.

    The pool was also used for the tryouts for Billy Rose’s Aquacade, during the 1939 NY World’s Fair. A friend of mine, the late author Frederik Pohl, lost his front teeth when he tried to see if he could dive down to the bottom of the pool, in 1933. He succeeded, all too well!

16. Wow! You are my hero for doing what I wish I had the investigative skills to do! I live on Clark and every day I walk past the remains of the hotel. I’ve been DYING to know what came of it, especially the pool. This is too magical, thanks so much for filling us in. Keep it up!

17. Nice article! My Long Island friends from Islip area went there with Mr. Bill Brown on day long excursions. He took many kids there, I’m sure as we were his “kids” who always loved places he would take us in the city.
    I DO remember the high dive, and watching another one of our group jump off. I was a skinny kid and afraid of heights, or even jumping in head first, but greatly enjoyed this pool, with its 30s atmosphere. My parents were from Elmhurst and were always telling me of city attractions like this in their teen years.

    Great memories, and thanks so much!!

    Dave Loder

18. Boy! You have revived such fond memories of my visits to the St. George Hotel pool. I used to frequent this pool with my late brother Gregory and 3 or 4 of our friends from St. Albans, NY (Queens). We would take a bus and 2 trains to get there. We would splash and play and swim and frolic for hours before heading back home. This was in the early to mid sixties. I don’t recall a disapproving eye or complaint from staff or patrons at the sight of six or seven skinny black kids making good use of this facility.

19. Wow! What great article. I look forward to seeing other sites of NYC that have been change and still have some of the old parts left. 🙂

20. My Step Dad was a Police Lieutenant in the local Precinct near The Hotel St George and when he worked the day shift, he would meet us at the Hotel with my Mom and get us all in to use the swimming pool. I remember how grand the Hotel St George was along with the other upscale Hotel Granada that was not too far away. At one time Brooklyn catered to the super elite before areas became run down and mutilated. I am happy to see now that Brooklyn is coming back storng and that many of the old Brownstones are being cleaned up and renovated. For many many years, as a Brooklyn resident you never had to leave the County and go into what we called “The City” (Manhattan). Even though it was mere minutes away by subway, everything you needed could have been acquired in Brooklyn. I myself was born and raised in the tiny hamlet of Greenpoint (still have family there) and if I could, I would move back in a heartbeat. Unfortuantely that is no longer possible but I will ALWAYS be a Brooklyn Girl !!! You can take the girl/woman out of the city, but you canot take the city out of the girl/woman. BROOKLYN, I LOVE YOU !!!!

    1. very sweet post, LeeAnn.

21. My grandmother, during the years c. 1950 when she was a famous D.A.’s mistress, would take my brother and me to the St. George Hotel, which formed my idea of the glamorous life I wanted to live when I grew up. What’s missing from this great article so far, and your letters, is the smell from that salt water, unlike any chlorine pool’s smell. Do you remember? It was the clean, fresh salt smell you get when you walk up onto the boardwalk at Jones Beach and the sea breeze hits you. It smelled like heaven. To this day, in Silicon Valley, when I luxuriate in the jacuzzi of the Bay Club next to Oracle, and look at the floral display facing us, and I remember Gram and the St. George Hotel. And I think, “I made it.” All I knew before this fine article was that the place had been destroyed in an enormous fire during the invasion and destruction of Brooklyn. (On the Clinton Hill block where I lived, next to Adelphi Academy near Pratt Institute, Biggie Smalls later sold dope.) It is so heartening to see the St George resurrected, like Brooklyn itself.

    1. I enjoyed reading your article because we had some things in common. My grandmother during the late 1940’s was having an affair with a vice president of RCA. I was adopted by my grandmother and she would meet with “Mr RCA” often at the hotel – I was offered to enjoy the pool during their meetings. Understandably, I loved the pool. I have a few remembrances that I hadn’t seen that I’d like to share.

       I remember that there was some sort of projection movie within the pool area. (I have no idea how that was done). I also remember that the ceiling was filled with mirrors and you could look up and find yourself swimming. I also remember that on an hourly basis, a waterfall of sort would come down from the ceiling for a short duration.

       I also remember the very ornate bar. I recall that it had fancy etched glass between the chairs.

       I also remember the ornate entry with marble with brass fittings. Of my many times to the hotel I never remember seeing the entry WITHOUT someone polishing the brass. I’m 75 now but I wish I could turn back the years and jump back into the pool.

       1. Those are wonderful memories; Oh! if there was a way of downloading our memories and 400 years from now Einstein theory of relativity makes possible a time machine. We can only wish!

       2. Dear Robert,
          Thanks so much for your post. I can now picture the St. George Hotel more clearly, a place where Mr. RCA and the Brooklyn D.A. could squire a lady friend in style. What if one day you and I were there together, with our lovely grandmothers. Those two fellows understood ladies– the way to her heart was to let her show her grandson a good time. That generation of Jews, just speaking for my own family, had grown up so poor that they could savor the good things in life, like that pool. You’re 75, I’m 70, so I didn’t have your memories of the great pool’s aesthetics. As a little kid, I only noticed the wonderful smell of the salt water, and the tiny arcade room where, with Gram’s unlimited supply of tokens, I played games I didn’t see again till I took my own son to the Main Street Arcade in Disneyland. Only memory I have that I haven’t recorded here, is of a powerful old man lying almost naked face down on a table off the pool, getting a massage, his butt covered by a towel, and him reaching up to grin and give somebody a fiver. Was that Gram’s guy? He seemed so happy he liked to make others happy. I hope I’ve grown up to be him.

22. In 1988 I was just back from a job in Spain when I moved into one of the tower rooms and started lifeguarding at the basement pool. One day a little boy dived into the shallow end of the pool and cut his head on the mosaic tiles in the bottom. He was terrified and crying and rushed up to hug me, burying his bloody head in my red lifeguard shirt. I wanted to do more than comfort him, and decided to go to medical school. It took a year to compete premed requirements, and four more to graduate in 1964. I’m retired now and living in Acapulco, but I’ll always remember the St. George.

23. That should obviously be 1958.

    1. Nice story. At the St. George pool you decided to be an M.D. and you did it. I would go there with Gram and one of her elegant gentlemen friends, who wore white shoes and slipped employees– and grandchildren– “fivers” when he shook hands with them. And I formed the dream of a life like that.

24. I live in the St George and swim in the current pool nearly every day. I knew some of the story, but this article is great. Thank you!

25. Over the years, I’ve heard so many family stories about my parent’s very fancy wedding reception at The St George Hotel in Brooklyn. Being a Manhattanite, the significance of a Brooklyn hotel escaped me. I was recently looking at my parent’s wedding photos, and was intrigued to know more about this venue. I even thought of visiting it. I was saddened to learn that it’s no longer open to the public. It looks like it was quite a glamorous place in it’s day.

26. The pool exists intact under the floor that houses all the machines.
    Wouldn’t it be great if someone were to restore it?
    I would look forward to that day.

    1. Really? How wonderful. It feels like the Renaissance, to watch the great architecture of Brooklyn and Queens be uncovered, like Rome, as the dark ages end. In the last weeks we’ve been reading how two of the greatest movie theaters survived, one now a church and the other a university.

27. ..I attended Pratt Institute Art School in the mid ’50’s and at least once a week went swimming at St. George’s. 85 cents including towel & bathing suit. Once an hour the waterfall poured down on us. The men’s locker room had showers, steam room, sauna & massage room.
    ..Those who’ve never experienced a salt water pool (especially indoors in mid-winter)- well, what can I say..

28. I found this description of the pool and area in a letter from a WW2 soldier:

    Sgt Andrew Ference, 33231659; 80th Adrm Sqdrn; Somewhere in New Guinea
    March 31, 1944
    He writes his girlfriend/future wife Margaret Cullen, a student at Georgia State College for Women located in Milledgeville, GA:
    Sometimes when were both in New York City, I’d love to take you to the pool at Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. It’s the loveliest pool I’ve ever seen. It has salt water, clear and cool, with an artificial waterfall at one end and different colors of light changing behind it that makes it look wonderful. The whole interior, walls and ceiling, are solid mirrors. There is a balcony for onlookers and visitors. Sun tan lamps, Turkish bath and a gym are all accessible. They also have a motion picture program showing cartoons and shorts right in the pool while you’re swimming. They project the film from one side to the other side of the pool. It’s beautiful dear. You’ll have to see and visit it to appreciate it. Sometime maybe I’d love to take you there.

29. When I was 8 years old in Jul 1955, I stayed at the St. George as a stop over on our family’s way to West Germany where my dad was going to be stationed. I have the letter I wrote to my grandmother from the St. George on their letterhead and in it I mention two things that really impressed me: the salt water swimming pool in the basement and the three faucets on our basin in our room (Room 37 at the time). They were for hot, cold, and ice water! Could not believe it. Staying there was a real treat. Glad I came across this website. Thank you for your efforts.

30. I grew up in Brooklyn and periodically my school would take us swimming a the St. George, which loved. It is a shame that this beautiful pool is now gone. But thanks for bringing back some of the most wonderful memories from my childhood.

31. I was about ten years old when my dad took me to the pool two or three times. One thing that stuck in my mind was the scratchy black swimsuits. Another, the joy of the salt water pool. Funny what you remember after 67 years.

32. Around 1945, I used to go to the pool with my mother. We would come down from the Bronx. I remember the subway would let us out right in the hotel. She would go to the spa to get some kind of treatment done, and she would drop me off at the pool. We would rent a swimsuit and I would go swim on my own.

33. How would u talk to a girl that lived at st george hotel during the filming of The Godfather i also helped on bar scene keeping people from walking through shoot. I was a 15 year old runaway . btw the real “family” lunched across the street among other things. Love to share my story.

34. Oh how I loved the St George pool. Living at 25 Clinton St was a short walk to go for that wonderful escape. This article has brought back many wonderful memories for me. I left Brooklyn a long time ago but my memories of the St. George or still like new with this article and I am 75. My visits were between 1949 and 1952.

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