Keystone Crossroads: Public pools in Pa. cities; how many are there, and how much does it cost to swim?

There are 71 outdoor public pools in Philadelphia. That’s “one for almost every neighborhood in the city, and more than any other city in the nation,” as Malcolm Burnley pointed out in a recent phillymag.com article on a “pop-up pool” project.

“New York,” he continues, “has one pool for every 150,000 residents. In Philly, it’s one for every 22,000.”

It being the dog days of summer, and all, Burnley’s story got us thinking about the number of residents per pool in  cities around Pennsylvania. Here’s what we found.

Easton has the fewest residents per pool, so we would expect its pools to be less crowded than in the other cities. 

Reading, on the other hand, has only one pool for 87,812 residents.

These numbers aren’t necessarily a measure of how crowded the pools are, of course. That could be affected by the age of the population, the number of private pools, and behavioral factors.

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