Letter from the Bronx

Two Saturdays ago, to little fanfare (save long awaited blue skies and an occasional waft of the WKTU Michael Jackson tribute) the Floating Pool Lady opened for the season. Docked in Baretto Point Park in the Bronx, this swimming pool is just like any other of New York City’s fifty-four outdoor basins – offering two sessions daily (11am-3pm, 4pm-7pm), life guards clad in the Parks Department’s signature orange bathing suits and a cool respite from the summer heat. And yet it’s also different: the Floating Pool Lady, which has commanding views of the New York skyline across the East River, began life as an industrial barge in Morgan City, Louisiana. On her decks are three generations of New York City swimmers. “I grew up going to Astoria” Maria tells me, while my daughter and her granddaughter take running leaps into the cold water. Framed by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, she watches the girls splash in twenty-five meters of sparkling blue. “We’d also go to Lasker,” Maria’s own daughter remembers. “But Astoria has those nice, shallow parts where the little kids play. Plus you can see the Triboro. I mean RFK.” Indeed the pool at Astoria Park, down the East River to the southwest from Barretto in Hunts Point, is the city’s oldest and largest, built by Robert Moses in 1936 to host the U.S. Olympic Team swimming and diving trials. This summer, both the Floating Pool Lady and the Astoria pool provide free swim lessons, lunch and practices for the Summer Swim Team Championship Meet on August 8th. Both parks also have plaques commemorating the wreck of the SS General Slocum, the steamship that embarked on June 15th 1904 from “Little Germany” up the East River towards Long Island for an annual summer picnic. As the ship passed through Hell’s Gate, it caught fire. By the time it beached at North Brother Island, between Astoria and Barretto Point, more than 1,000 of the 1300 passengers – mostly women and children – had drowned.

The Floating Pool Lady was born out of a fascination with New York’s waterfront, past and present. In 1980, while researching her doctoral thesis, city planner and historian Ann Buttenwieser learned that in the 19th Century the city had fifteen “floating baths” moored on pontoons along the Hudson and East Rivers. The idea was planted for a modern day counterpart. Buttenwieser’s dissertation became one of the definitive chronicles of New York water ways, Manhattan Water Bound (Syracuse University, 1987); this month she will publish Governors Island: The Jewel of the New York Harbor (Syracuse University, 2009). In the intervening decades, Buttenwieser has also helped to shape the city’s recreational waterscape, working for a variety of city agencies on river parks, esplanades, kayak launches, ferries to the ballparks and a Skidmore, Owings and Merrill master plan for the lower Manhattan shoreline.  It wasn’t until 2000, however, that she turned to the floating pool project in earnest, undertaking a feasibility study, enlisting architect Jonathan Kirschenfeld and founding the Neptune Foundation to raise the necessary funds. In 2004, after an extensive search, the Foundation discovered a decommissioned river barge in the bayous of Morgan City. Construction began in nearby Amelia, Louisiana and after some Hurricane Katrina delay the soon-to-be Floating Pool Lady (a moniker also now used to describe Buttenwieser) arrived in New York in 2006 for final outfitting. The floating pool opened on July 4th, 2007 off the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and that first summer hosted 50,000 families.  In its current home in Barretto Point Park Point in Community District 2, it is the only public pool.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is swimming.

The Billionaire Who Wasn’t

By Conor O’Clery (PublicAffairs, 2007)

On January 22, 1997, from a payphone in the San Francisco airport, Chuck Feeney gave The New York Times a story for the ages. Although he had appeared regularly on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, Feeney was not, he revealed, the billionaire everyone presumed. This kid-done-good from Elizabeth, New Jersey—a Horatio Alger boy on steroids—had indeed built a great fortune by mastering the duty-free trade. But the recent sale of his company, Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), had forced Feeney to confess his great secret: he had given this fortune away. In The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing, Irish journalist Conor O’Clery chronicles how Feeney quietly amassed astonishing wealth, and, with equal stealth, signed it all over to his philanthropic foundations.

O’Clery’s account reads like a spy novel. Feeney and his business partners succeed through cloak and dagger secrecy: closed bids for duty-free concessions (Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, Hong Kong), off-shore havens to shelter their cash profits from U.S. taxation. Feeney’s commercial savvy is also characterized by an uncanny intuition for profitable opportunities, a penchant for shop-floor management (well into his later years, Feeney is coaching the sales force), and remarkable care for employees and their families. These traits also underpin his philanthropy, which is characterized by fierce anonymity, opportunistic giving that seeks to amplify the power of his philanthropic buck (in places ranging from the U.S. to Ireland, South Africa to Australia, Vietnam to Cuba), and extensive vetting (“kicking the tires”) of potential grantees. Ultimately, Feeney says, he is driven by a basic desire to help others, learned at a young age from his parents.

Feeney’s is an extraordinary tale of entrepreneurial dynamism, no doubt—but even more of unusual beneficence. His “outing” presents a number of important challenges. First, Feeney embodies “inter vivos” charity—giving while living. This is significant in an era when, for many, wealth serves as a competitive “scorecard” (Feeney’s words) for success. In offering an equally competitive, alternative yardstick—charitable largesse—Feeney joins Gates, Buffett, and others in harnessing new resources for the disadvantaged. The second challenge Feeney poses is to the philanthropic sector, where foundations typically expend five percent of their assets each year. Feeney has called for a full spend-down of his Atlantic Philanthropies within the decade: inter vivos in extremis. Though to date his foundations have granted nearly $4 billion to “vulnerable” people around the world, nearly $4 billion in assets remain. This means trying to give away—efficiently, effectively, entirely—about one million dollars a day. “Spending it,” he says, “is not a big problem. Spending it meaningfully is.” Understatement, ambition and optimism: vintage Feeney.

Georgia Levenson Keohane is a writer and consultant in the fields of social policy, philanthropy, and non-profit management. She lives in New York City.