Queen City Pool: The WPA Built It. Segregation Closed It.
Near Tuscaloosa, Alabama
In nineteen forty-three, the Works Progress Administration poured a hundred thousand dollars into a public swimming pool on the western edge of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was one of the largest WPA recreational projects in the state, and its bathhouse was designed by an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright , a circular poured-concrete structure sixty feet in diameter with an art deco fountain and a wading pool attached to a main pool that stretched a hundred and sixty-eight feet. The total cost was a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. The city paid the remaining twenty-five thousand.
It was called the Queen City Pool, after Tuscaloosa's old nickname, and it was for white people only.
The city simultaneously maintained the Gulf States Pool in a Black neighborhood. Separate facilities, unequal investment , the standard grammar of Jim Crow public amenities. The Queen City Pool opened that spring and became the gathering point for Tuscaloosa's white families through the postwar decades, a place that now lives in local memory as a particular kind of childhood.
In nineteen sixty-six, federal desegregation orders reached the municipal pool. Rather than integrate, Tuscaloosa leased the Queen City to private management. City officials said the cost of operation had become prohibitive. Others said plainly that the pool's value to white Tuscaloosans had depended entirely on its exclusivity, and that the city had no interest in running an integrated public amenity.
The pool eventually closed in nineteen eighty-nine. In two thousand and five, the city filled in the swimming pool with dirt. The bathhouse, still standing, now serves as the Mildred Westervelt Warner Transportation Museum. The art deco fountain survives. The history of what this building once excluded is preserved in the National Register of Historic Places listing, which names the segregation context directly.
