The White House’s underground pool circa 1948. (Photo courtesy the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.)by DCist contributor Leah Caldwell
It is summer, and you will probably lounge near a pool at least once in the coming months. You will be outside, squinting your eyes from the sun and probably getting burned. It wasn’t always like this. At the turn of the century, the most exclusive pools in Washington, D.C. were underground.
The basement swimming pool was almost always an elite commodity and never turned into a full-on craze. Yet in the early 20th century, subterranean bathing in D.C. increased in popularity. Those commoners could have their outdoor swimming holes, but the richest citizens would have their private basement pools!
Basement pools might have reached a peak in exclusivity in 1907, when the newly constructed Cannon House Office Building provided lawmakers with a gymnasium to call their own. “Down in the capacious basement is a swimming pool wherein Mr. Congressman may lave his body, thus insuring clean politics,” detailed a 1907 report in the Princeton Union.
D.C.’s first private resident to have a basement pool was “Ohio Capitalist” Edward Everett, whose now-demolished mansion at 23rd Street and Sheridan Circle was completed in 1911. The basement was made of the finest Italian marble and also housed a bowling alley and gymnasium, much like George Vanderbilt’s 1895 Biltmore estate in Asheville. It was only a matter of time until the basement pool trend spread to the People, yes?
Well, no.
The basement pool never quite made it to the masses (despite its purported health benefits), and since its decline in popularity in the 1950s and 60s, it has been doomed as a relic of the past. The oldest surviving basement pool in a Washington apartment complex was built in 1929 beneath Harvard Hall, which housed members of Congress in its heyday. It has been closed since the 1950s and its beach-inspired murals continue to fade. Other basement pools in the city were planned and never built, like the 100-foot pool planned for the Chalfonte on Argonne Place NW.
Another basement pool relegated to a bygone era, but perhaps the most famous, is indirectly seen by thousands every day. Beneath the White House press briefing room sits President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pool, which was built in 1933, but then shut down by Richard Nixon in 1970. The FDR era also reportedly spawned another pool located underneath the Pentagon in the former Pentagon Officers’ Athletic Club.
Constructed upon and locked up, even the most prestigious of basement pools in D.C. are now either dilapidated or out of sight.
