VIEWPOINTS

Verdun Natatorium
— Arièle Dionne-Krosnick

How race and space have played out at the Verdun Swimming pool.

On a hot summer Friday afternoon in July, I make my way to the Verdun Natatorium. The building is showing signs of wear: pealing paint, broken lampposts, and jetting fountains that do not jet. One swimming pool stands empty, the casualty of damage to the filtration system. A lifeguard shortage limits their ability to oversee the entire swim zone and orange cones restrict part of the second pool.[1] The grassy lawns and beach chairs are scattered with an intergenerational, and economically and racially diverse crowd. Entrance is free and the gate stands open to a trickle of locals seeking relief from the heat and a communal gathering place.

The Verdun Natatorium opened its doors on July 12, 1940 to thousands of local swimmers eager to discover Montreal’s first public outdoor swimming pool.[2] Designed by Verdun-based town engineer Henry Hadley and architect H.C. Sturgess, the Art-deco style building boasts castle-like front turrets, a pool house with a roof terrace, and large concrete decks surrounding two pools, the largest of which was installed with jetting water fountains and five Olympic-regulation-sized diving boards.[3] Swimming pools have historically been considered spaces of public leisure and relaxation, community gathering and family fun, but they also emerged as sites of social conflict where norms around community life are monitored and disputed. Issues around race, gender, and class, are all put on display at the public pool, heightened by their distinct visual culture and physical intimacy.[4]

The case of the Verdun Natatorium shows that the public pool was a complex space in which Black Canadians were both integrated into leisure and sport while still kept marginalized with limited access to recreational infrastructures and positions of power. While the architecture itself does not reflect exclusionary intent in an obvious manner—this was not built as a segregated pool—photographic and textual evidence of the quotidien use of the space point to fluctuations and limitations in unbiased access for non-white swimmers. In their social history of swimming in Canada, a historical survey that spans from 1900-1960s, which serves as the inspiration for my own case study, Ornella Nzindukiyimana and Eileen O’Connor explore how racial and power relations between Black and white people were continually being reinforced in spaces of swimming.[5] Amongst many examples of discrimination at swimming pools across the country, the Verdun Natatorium stands out as one example where Black swimmers were included and visible in photographs from the era, and they state: “Further investigation into the Verdun pool history is necessary to better comprehend the circumstances surrounding attendance.”[6] This essay responds to their call.

Verdun Natatorium

Verdun, today a borough of the city of Montreal, is located on the southwestern part of the island, and though it was primarily a working class neighbourhood, the 21st century has brought significant gentrification and along with it, social and economic changes. In 1938-39, when the idea for the Natatorium began to take shape, the effects of the Great Depression were still being felt across Canada, and the 1930s in Verdun were marked by unemployment and housing shortages. Inspired by the American New Deal program of economic recovery, Verdun’s mayor hired residents as city “relief workers” on various municipal projects including streets, sidewalks, aqueduct system, a new arena (the Verdun Auditorium), and the Natatorium.[7] In the 1930s and 40s, Verdun was a largely white community, with a strong Anglophone English majority (hovering around 55%) followed by Francophone residents (more or less 40%).[8] According to the 1941 Census, from a population of around 67,000 residents, only 0.3% of Verdunites (about 200) self-identified as Black.[9]

The borough is bordered by the St. Lawrence River on its eastern side and by the Lachine Canal on the west, but polluted waters made swimming access difficult. The Natatorium was built adjacent to a boardwalk along the river and is now in close proximity to the site of an urban beach established in 2019.[10] Public baths, the ancestor of public pools, were introduced in Montreal in the early 1900s, primarily out of a desire to promote cleanliness and hygiene. The Victorian idea of “cleanliness” became deeply tied to imperialist and settler-colonial notions of white European superiority, and public baths for the working class can be interpreted not only as public health solutions but as a public obligation tinged with racism and classism.[11]

As their raison d’être shifted and they became popularised as sites of leisure, recreation, sporting, public swimming pools were built at an increasingly rapid pace in Montreal between the 1910s and 1940s.[12] Pools also became integrated into multi-use building types such as community centres, with other recreational and cultural facilities. Many of these recreational spaces limited access on the basis of race, and in response, many racialized communities were forced to develop and build their own privately financed facilities.[13]

One of the most famous of these community centres in Montreal was the Negro Community Centre (NCC), founded in 1927 in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood—the historical home to the city’s Black English-speaking and working-class community—to “promote racial advancement.”[14] The NCC supported programming such as a children’s day camp that included lectures on Africa, slavery, and Black pride, as well as music, arts, and sport, and trips to a local swimming pool.[15] Little Burgundy at the time was only serviced by one swimming pool, Hogan Public Baths on Wellington Street.[16] Even there, access was contingent as one patron recalls: “we used to go there, but sometimes we got pushed and shoved.”[17]

The NCC was originally dependent on funds from the Canadian National Railway, with additional financial support from the Financial Federation of Montreal. Though its building eventually grew to include a gymnasium, kitchen, and library, it did not have its own swimming pool.[18] The community centre closed in 1991 and was subsequently demolished in 2014. The Natatorium, on the other hand, acquired public funds for its construction in 1938, and still stands as a summertime destination for residents.

Racism and Swimming in Canada

Though Canada never enacted widespread racial segregation laws, racial discrimination in leisure spaces was not exceptional. Laws, court decisions, and social norms ensured that segregation persisted, though it varied widely across the country often by province or local community.[19] The Canadian colour line remained malleable and could shift over time: examples of the arbitrary nature of these racialized exclusions made it so various athletic facilities, public parks, and skating rinks were barred to Black people, and pools and beaches sometimes displayed signage stating “Whites only” or “White Gentiles Only.”[20] Further, Nzindukiyimana and O’Connor assert that discrimination in leisure spaces like swimming pools is actually indicative of the pervasive nature of systemic racism, writing: “discrimination in leisure was, arguably, gratuitous, and only aimed at undermining a group’s right to socio-cultural existence.”[21] When racist barriers curtailed the ability for non-white groups to gather socially in public leisure spaces (or to join in public swimming) they limited their potential to develop a full and uninhibited expression of their cultural, social, and political identities.

Black Swimmers in Verdun

Verdun, unlike Little Burgundy, was a majority white neighbourhood, and yet in photographs of the Verdun Natatorium from June 1943 two Black girls can be seen amongst a group of children performing exercises on the side of the pool (Figure 2). In their article, Nzindukiyimana and O’Connor identified these photographs taken by Conrad Poirier at the Verdun pool, noting that: “without a deeper understanding of the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, their interpretation is limited.” My aim in the following section is to answer their call for more in-depth context, through an investigation into Poirier’s career, as well as visual and spatial analysis.

Poirier, a pioneer of photojournalism in Quebec, turned his lens towards regular people’s daily lives, including cultural, sporting, and social events, privileging an un-staged and candid view of his peers.[22] An incredibly prolific photographer, Poirier’s images were published in numerous local newspapers, such as La Patrie, La Presse, La Revue populaire, La Gazette, in addition to becoming the official photographer of Le Samedi, a weekly Quebec magazine dedicated to local news. Though little is known of his personal life, he is considered to be one of the photographers responsible for developing and disseminating an emerging aesthetic of modernity in Quebec.[23] The Poirier photographic archives contain professional shots, as well as more personal images, self-portraits, and souvenirs, and I was unable to confirm whether the photographs of the Natatorium were issued as part of a commission or published in any news media.[24] Poirier often captured gatherings of athletes participating in public demonstrations or exercising as a group--a “mass of identical bodies”--emphasizing sports’ communal nature.[25] Further, the sports correspondent for Le Samedi, whose articles Poirier’s photographs often illustrated, affirmed that the goal of disseminating images of sports culture to a wide public was to ideally: “help make the French Canadian race strong.”[26] This racialized and nationalistic sentiment, though not necessarily reflective of Poirier’s own political leanings, gives further context to frame images from this period, as well as to draw connections between spaces of physical health, recreation, and politics.

In this photograph, Poirier captures the popularity of the pool: the pool deck and roof terrace are packed with young swimmers.The sunlight leaps of the gleaming wet wide concrete deck of the swimming pool and tall fence lines the perimeter, tightly administering the flow of swimmers under lifeguard supervision and those without. The kids balance on their toes, squatting under the watchful supervision of a lifeguard. For safety, the view of the deck is largely unobstructed, with visibility ensured from all sides and from above. As the only Black children in a sea of white, the girls both stand out and are absorbed by the crowd, emphasizing the dual hypervisibility and invisibility of Black girls and women in spaces of normative whiteness.[27]

Many of Poirier’s photographs of the Verdun Natatorium focus on lifeguarding demonstrations. In fact, according to an article in the Gazette from 1951, the pool ran one of the most advanced safety education programs in the country with free swimming lessons, diving, first aid, and physical education. In the second photograph from July 1943, a Black girl, 12 year-old Merlyn Bryant, and a white male lifeguard demonstrate lifesaving manoeuvres. In her 2007 obituary, Bryant was remembered as a student at Verdun High School who enjoyed sports like swimming, skating and baseball, substantiating her presence at the local public pool. In the photograph, she lies facedown on the concrete, while the lifeguard crouches above her, positioning her nose and mouth; the girl’s expression is obscured. The sharp contrast of the subjects, Bryant’s vulnerable position, and the blurred background, all emphasize the hazy, delicate nature of power, race, and gender relations at the swimming pool.

Two additional images by Poirier that are not illustrated in Nzindukiyimana and O’Connor’s article, but taken at the Natatorium on the same days as the photographs above, offer additional perspectives and points of view; once again, all swimming pool officials are young, white, and male. Though the vast majority of subjects captured in these and other photographs from Poirier’s series of the Verdun Natatorium are white, Nzindukiyimana and O’Connor observe that since Black Verdunites only composed a small portion of the population, their presence in these photographs is significant.[30] While Black individuals certainly had access to the Natatorium, every visible person in a position of authority—from the doorman to the lifeguards—was white and male. In fact, white Verdun police officers were stationed at the pool as lifeguards, security guards and swimming instructors.[31] For racialized people at this public swimming pool, there was a fine line between invisibility and hypervisibility, safety and surveillance.

Conclusion

For Nzindukiyimana and O’Connor, the presence of Black swimmers at the Verdun Natatorium on the one hand, and the need for a separate space like the NCC catering to Black residents on the other, further exemplifies the inconsistent pattern of racial intolerance across Canada and the fluidity of the colour line. The case of the Verdun Natatorium explored in this essay acts as a microcosm of historical race relations at the swimming pool, situated in the larger urban context of the city of Montreal. The early development of public swimming pools in Canada was deeply tied to sexist, classist, and racist discrimination. Black swimmers who did gain access to public swimming pools remained hypervisible in the almost entire white leisure landscape, and were subject to the authority of white Canadians in positions of power. In order to gain agency over sites of leisure and sports, Black Canadians had to found and build their own separate infrastructures and community-based institutions, emphasizing how structural inequalities become ingrained into the urban built environment. From these examples emerges a complex view of how issues around race and space, citizenship and belonging, are made manifest at the swimming pool.

References

[1] An employee of the Natatorium confirmed they lacked personnel to watch the entirety of the large swimming pool and informed me that the building is undergoing another renovation.

[2] Ville de Montréal, “Fiche du bâtiment: Natatorium de Verdun,” accessed July 27, 2022, http://patrimoine.ville.montreal.qc.ca/patri_municipal/fiche_bat.php?id_bat=9999-21-0006-01.

[3] Rohinton Ghandhi, “Tarzan Makes a Splash: Dipping into the History of Verdun’s Natatorium,” Quebec Heritage News 6, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 26.

[4] Architectural histories that discuss swimming pools focus mainly on private pools, used as guides to constructing your own “backyard oasis,” – all the better if the objects of study are famous pools that have become architectural icons. There is hardly much discussion of public or municipal swimming pools and their aesthetic associations with power, race, and capital. John Dawes, The Swimming Pool & the Garden: An International Illustrated Guide to the Design and Construction of Swimming Pools (Edinburgh: Bartholomew, 1975); Ludovic Roubaudi, Ceci n’est pas une piscine (Paris: Archibooks, 2014); Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen, The Springboard in the Pond:An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

[5] Ornella Nzindukiyimana and Eileen O’Connor, “Let’s (Not) Meet at the Pool: A Black Canadian Social History of Swimming (1900s–1960s),” Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure 42, no. 1 (2019): 137, https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2019.1582920.

[6] Ibid, 156-157.

[7] Andréanne Moreau, “Bien plus qu’une piscine pour Verdun,” Journal Métro, July 19, 2017, https://journalmetro.com/local/ids-verdun/1171766/bien-plus-quune-piscine-pour-verdun/.

[8] Note the Union Jacks flying above the pool house in the postcard illustration of the Natatorium, emphasizing the strong presence of an Anglophone and British majority (Figure 1).

[9] Serge Marc Durflinger, “City at War: The Effects of the Second World War on Verdun, Québec” (PhD diss., McGill University, 1997), 43.

[10] Swimming is still not recommended due to water quality and strong currents. Ville de Montréal, “Verdun Beach,” last modified July 12, 2022, https://montreal.ca/en/places/verdun-beach.

[11] Lisa Tink, “Fit to be Canadian? The Recreational Industrial Complex in Canada” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2021), 108.

[12] Ville de Montréal, “Fiche du bâtiment: Natatorium de Verdun,” accessed July 27, 2022, http://patrimoine.ville.montreal.qc.ca/patri_municipal/fiche_bat.php?id_bat=9999-21-0006-01.

[13] Shirley Tillotson, “Time, Swimming Pools, and Citizenship: The Emergence of Leisure Rights in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada,” in Contesting Canadian Citizenship, eds. Dorothy E. Chunn, Robert J. Mensies, and Robert L. Adamoski (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 214-215.

[14] Paul C. Hébert, ““A Microcosm of the General Struggle”: Black Thought and Activism in Montreal, 1960-1969” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015), 43-44.

[15] Steven High, “Little Burgundy: The Interwoven Histories and Work in Twentieth-Century Montreal,” Urban History Review 46, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 28, https://doi.org/10.7202/1059112ar.

[16] An Art deco building by Montreal architect David Jerome Spence, Hogan Public Baths was another municipal building project initiated in part to provide work for the unemployed during the economic crisis of the 1930s; it was equipped with showers and a large indoor pool. The building was open from 1931-1991, and since its closure it has been transformed into lofts, though the facade was preserved. Olivier Paré, “Le bain Hogan, un équipement nécessaire,” Mémoire des Montréalais, Ville de Montréal, October 2, 2017, https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/le-bain-hogan-un-equipement-necessaire.

[17] Steven High, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 45.

[18] Concordia University Records Management & Archives and Library's Special Collections, “Negro Community Centre,” accessed July 22, 2022, https://concordia.accesstomemory.org/negro-community-centre.

[19] Natasha Henry, “Racial Segregation of Black People in Canada,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, last modified September 8, 2021, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/racial-segregation-of-black-people-in-canada.

[20] Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, University of Toronto Press, 1999), 251; Martin V. Melosi, Water in North American Environmental History. Themes in Environmental History (New York, NY: Routledge, 2022), 182.

[21] Nzindukiyimana and O’Connor, “Let’s (Not) Meet at the Pool,” 138.

[22] Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), “Fonds Conrad Poirier,” accessed July 27, 2022, https://advitam.banq.qc.ca/notice/537101.

[23] Zoë Tousignant, “La Revue populaire et Le Samedi - Objets de diffusion de la modernité  photographique au Québec, 1935-1945,” Revue de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, no. 5 (2013), https://doi.org/10.7202/1017691ar.

[24] Julie-Anne Godin-Laverdière, “Montréal érotique : pin-up et imagerie de nus chez le photographe de presse Conrad Poirier, 1912-1968,” Revue de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, no. 5 (2013), https://doi.org/10.7202/1017690ar.

[25] Tousignant, “La Revue populaire et Le Samedi.”

[26] Oscar Major, “Les a-côtés de la boxe,” Le Samedi, June 22, 1940, 13, in Tousignant, “La Revue populaire et Le Samedi.”

[27] These dual concepts emerge from intersectional Black feminist theory: on the one hand, invisibility refers to the marginality of Black women in critiques of racial oppression that centre the experiences of Black men; while hypervisibility is concerned with enduring stereotypes about sexuality and commodification that are placed on representations of Black women’s bodies in ways that support systemic oppression. Maureen T. Reddy, “Invisibility/Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Normative Whiteness,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 9, no. 2 (1998): 55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43587107.55; Rasul A. Mowatt, Bryana H. French and Dominique A. Malebranche, “Black/Female/Body Hypervisibility and Invisibility,” Journal of Leisure Research 45, no. 5 (2013): 645, https://doi.org/10.18666/jlr-2013-v45-i5-4367.

[28] “Popular Open Air Pool Pays Verdun Dividends.” The Gazette, July 21, 1951, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=-4QtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=lJkFAAAAIBAJ&dq=verdun%20natatorium&pg=5688%2C2714783.

[29] “Merlyn Bryant,” Lohman Funeral Homes, May 13, 2007, https://obits.lohmanfuneralhomes.com/obituary/bryant-merlyn.

[30] Nzindukiyimana and O’Connor, “Let’s (Not) Meet at the Pool,” 152.

[31] Ghandhi, “Tarzan Makes a Splash,” 27.

Arièle Dionne-Krosnick is a PhD student in Architecture at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her dissertationSwimming Studies: Pool Segregation in the United States (1950-70), theorizes the urban protests of the civil rights movement that took place at, and around, swimming pools as highly contested sites of socio-political activity with deep repercussions on the architecture of American cities. She was a Curatorial Assistant in Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) from 2016-2020, and previously worked at the Chicago Architecture Biennial and at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago.

Guest Editor: Ipek Türeli