Forest Hills Swim Club Closed For Summer Again, Angering Locals

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — A neighborhood swim club will remain shuttered this summer amid Hurricane Ida-related repairs, angering some locals expecting its long-awaited reopening.

The Fairview Swim Club, located on the grounds of the eponymous Forest Hills co-op building, is closed for the season as the pool undergoes repairs from Hurricane Ida, a co-op property manager told Patch.

Last September, the hurricane hit the co-op particularly hard, killing one resident and causing extensive building damage, including to the pool, the property manager said. The closure is in order to repair pool equipment damaged by the storm and fix ongoing deck issues, she said.

This isn't the first season that the swim club has shuttered, though.

In 2018, the swim club — which is open to residents and non-residents — announced it would be closed for the season, citing the need for (unrelated) repairs (the announcement apparently came the day before the supposed registration date, and many non-resident members weren't alerted, according to outraged commenters on Facebook).

The swim club appears to have reopened during the summer of 2019 (it got some rave reviews online that year), but was shuttered once again amid the pandemic, remaining closed through 2021 even as some of the city's other pools reopened.

Neighbors hoping that the swim club would reopen this year flooded the comments of a neighborhood Facebook post about its continued closure.

"Ugh why? Part of the fun of living there was the pool in the summertime," wrote one neighbor. "If I lived at the Fairview I’d be pissed."

Another neighbor, who said she does live in the building, expressed that she is in fact upset about its continued closure.

"As someone who lives there and has not had use of the pool for a number of years, I am pissed," she wrote.

Some locals speculated that the citywide lifeguard shortage is to blame for the closure. Others said they thought the pool was permanently closed in order to build more residences in its place.

The co-op property manager, though, rejected all of these claims.

"This comment about us permanently closing the pool and leasing out the space is not true," the manager said in an email to Patch. "Pool expected to reopen next season summer of 2023."