When I pulled up to Carol’s pool in Staten Island, there was no sign and she was waiting for me on the front porch in reflective aviator glasses and flip-flops. Her two-story house looks like most of the others on a quiet one-lane residential street. The pool itself, which she rents out for $90 per hour on a site called Swimply, is in the backyard, separated from the neighbors by a white fence. To use the bathroom, you have to walk through a basement furnished with Mets paraphernalia and beer signs. It’s like going to the pool at your aunt’s house, except that it also happens to be the most-booked listing on Swimply — not just in Staten Island but across the entire city. Carol says this is the first she has heard of this. “I can’t believe it!” she says when I tell her.
Swimply, which launched in 2018, is like Airbnb for pools with its booking site that lists private pools you can rent by the hour from homeowners (and leave a review for after). With long lines at the city’s public pools and day passes at hotels easily costing $130 per person, there’s an obvious allure to having an otherwise-unused pool all to yourself at a fraction of the price. (If this sounds like an idea that would appear on Shark Tank, that’s because it was.) In New York, there are dozens of options, and you can find anything from an aboveground pool plopped on top of someone’s lawn in Clinton Hill to a lush oasis filled with trees in Howard Beach.
Carol’s pool is a standard in-ground one — deep enough for a diving board and big enough to hold a decent crowd (she allows a maximum of 15 people). The booking includes floaties, a barbecue, and a white tent in which you can sit in the shade. The space is more functional than glamorous: The patio is spare, paved with gray concrete brick, and has a few planters scattered around. But once my friend (whom I invited because it’s scary to show up to a pool party by yourself) and I got in the water, it wasn’t hard to see why Carol’s listing was No. 1. She has added thoughtful touches: a cooler full of ice, swim floaties for kids, lights strung up on the fence. Floating face up on a unicorn-shaped tube, I could see only blue skies and smell cut grass from a neighbor mowing their lawn. It was as if I had dropped into an episode of Desperate Housewives in which nothing happens except the housewives eat popcorn and do a crossword by the pool.
Carol says that she gets a lot of people trekking in from Brooklyn and Manhattan: “I’m like, Is there no other closer swimming place? I feel bad for them because sometimes traffic can be awful.” On weekends in the summer, she’s fully booked with as many as five groups in a day. She has had people come for first dates, birthday parties, and family barbecues. One of her regular clients is a group of Hasidic men that brings beers to drink by the pool. Other than the time someone tried to sneak in five extra people or the time a couple had sex in her bathroom, she hasn’t had any problems. There are many open questions about liability when it comes to Swimply — who’s responsible if a person drowns being the primary one or all the risks that come with opening your door to strangers — but Carol has instituted some guardrails: “I don’t do instant bookings anymore and don’t book past 10 p.m.” Like an Airbnb rental, she also has a few rules: No glass, and no eating in the pool. She’ll first ask if everyone can swim and then points parents to the floaties for kids. Then she goes out of sight, in the house but close by.
Of course, walking into someone’s home, even if it’s just to go swimming in their pool, will always come with some risks. It is here that I must disclose that I did face two jump scares during our visit. The first was a poster for the clown-based horror movie Terrifier 2, whose sequel I was later informed was filmed in this very house. The second was a Thin Blue Line flag hanging in the pool room when I was changing into my civvies. (The politics might come with the territory — many of the pools on Swimply’s map for New York City are concentrated in conservative strongholds like Staten Island and eastern Queens.) But at least we didn’t end up renting a pool that didn’t actually belong to the homeowner, which recently happened to a family in Canada.
After two hours, I felt at least ten degrees cooler. I had gotten away from the city without actually leaving it and managed to get some time with a friend. In a city filled with infinity pools, saltwater pools, thermal pools, and rooftop cabanas, New York City’s most-booked pool on Swimply had been surprisingly, and maybe just perfectly, average.