South Berkeley hasn’t had a public pool since 2010.

We are neighbours in the Willard Park area. We got curious about why there’s no pool here, and we’re asking neighbours where they swim and how long it takes them to get there.

Take the survey — 2 minutes

What was here

Willard Pool opened in June 1964 beside Willard Middle School, at the Telegraph Avenue end of Willard Park near Derby Street. You went in from Telegraph. For forty-six years it ran swim lessons, summer camp swimming, senior water exercise and open community swim.

It closed on 30 June 2010, after a ballot measure to fund repairs to Berkeley’s pools won 62% of the vote and needed two-thirds to pass. The following winter, city crews filled the basin with soil.

In the archive

The pool shows up in the public record from the year it opened. Some of it is worth reading in full.

1. 1964
   Willard’s yearbook, The Target

   In his letter to students, the principal writes that “our long-awaited swimming pool” is nearly finished and should be ready by the first of July.

   Read the 1964 yearbook
2. 1965
   The Target, the following year

   A page headed “Swim Center” records its first year: swimming added to gym classes, meets against other schools, after-school swims. Asked for their favourite memory of Willard, several ninth graders named the pool — one wrote swimming for the first time.

   Read the 1965 yearbook
3. Jan 2010
   Berkeley Daily Planet

   Facing an $80,000 cut to aquatics, the city proposes closing Willard — its oldest outdoor pool — unless voters pass a pools measure that June.

   Read the article
4. Jul 2010
   East Bay Express

   The day after it closed: the gates locked, and neighbours and councilmembers still looking for a way to reopen it for the summer.

   Read the article
5. Jan 2011
   Berkeleyside

   The city fills the basin with soil.

   Read the article

The yearbooks were digitized by Berkeley Public Library and are hosted on the Internet Archive. The printed originals are in the Berkeley History Room at the Central Library.

It was built as a system

Berkeley built three public pools between 1963 and 1966. All three were on school district land, and all three were at middle schools. That was the design — a pool at every middle school in the city.

• King Pool at King Middle School, North Berkeley.
• Willard Pool at Willard Middle School, here.
• West Campus Pool at Burbank Middle School, West Berkeley.

Burbank later closed, and the middle school that replaced it — Longfellow — was built somewhere else. The pool stayed where it was. That’s why Longfellow is the one school that never had a pool of its own, and why it still ended up a seven-minute walk from one.

Willard is the only one where the school is still open and the pool is gone.

How far each middle school is from a pool

Two of the three pools are still running, and both are good. Here is what is left of the original arrangement, measured.

Straight-line distance to the nearest public pool. Walking times are rough — on actual streets, from Willard, it’s longer.

Draw the same circle around each school

A half-mile is the distance planners usually treat as walkable to a park — roughly ten minutes on foot. Here is that same circle drawn around each of Berkeley’s three middle schools.

Two of them have a public pool inside. The third doesn’t.

Drawn to a single scale, north up, so the distances can be compared directly. Each circle is a half-mile straight-line radius, not a walking route — hills and street grids make the real walk longer. The dashed line is the straight-line distance from Willard Middle School to the nearest public pool.

Who lived closest to it

When the city studied its pools in 2009, it counted how many people lived within a mile of each one — about a fifteen-minute walk.

Figures from the City of Berkeley Citywide Pools Master Plan, November 2009. They’re more than fifteen years old now and Berkeley has added housing since — but at the time, more people lived within a mile of Willard than of either pool that stayed open.

How far neighbours actually travel

Everything above is national or statewide. This is the local picture, taken straight from the survey: every answer so far, by how long the trip to a pool takes, one way.

From 44 answers to the travel-time question, out of 55 surveys so far. Updated 2026-10-03.

Most people who answered drive — often out of Berkeley, or to a private club or gym. That is the gap this project exists to measure.

Add your answer

Questions before arguments

Before anyone argues about what should happen next, it seems worth knowing what’s true now. Who swims. Who stopped. How families get across town, and how long it takes. Whether people have been turned away because a class was full.

That’s all this is. We’re not asking you to sign anything and we’re not proposing anything yet.

Take the survey

If you swam at Willard

If you learned to swim there, taught there, lifeguarded, or took your kids — we’d like to hear about it. There’s a space for it at the end of the survey.

Those are worth more than any of the numbers on this page.