During the Depression, the Work Progress Administration helped employ nearly all of Sycamore’s 125 unemployed to build a pool.
Cost was $21,000. Engineers staked out the approved site for Community Park’s $21,000 concrete swimming pool, the buildings which adjoined and the re-routed gravel drive as the first actual step toward construction. The main pool with a daily capacity reckoned as 400 to 500, was 120 feet long, 50 feet wide and of graded depths with the deepest water at the at the eastern end. (Its bathhouse is now the Sycamore Golf Club Clubhouse and the pool was located to the west where the parking lot is now.)
It extended in an east to west direction with bleachers on the south side. The tank was situated just north of the present gravel-bottom pool which, until the new tank was opened, continued to serve its hundreds of patrons. A bathhouse, with lockers and shower, was located to the north of the main pool. A kiddy pool and bathhouse was next in the series to the north.
The park board, through a bond issue, burnished about $11,000 of the $21,000 necessary for the construction. The Work Relief Administration, approving the project to create employment, provided the rest.
There was no increase in local tax rates and a system of retiring the bonds removed the necessity of taxpayers footing any of the bill.
Photo: Sycamore Pool 1937
Derived from columns from the Sycamore True Republican saved and recorded by the Joiner History Room and the minutes of the Board of Directors of the Sycamore Park District. Articles were condensed and rewritten by Dan Gustafson with the intent to keep them as factual as the original.
