North Hollywood Municipal Plunge date unknown. Historic postcard given to The Museum of the San Fernando Valley by Gary Fredburg - December 2009The venerable Municipal Swimming Pool was dedicated on June 15th, 1929 at the north end of North Hollywood Park. Coming, as it did, at the onset of the Great Depression, this pool served as one of the few ways that Valley kids could learn to swim or find relief from searing summer heat. As the 8th public swimming pool established by the Los Angeles Playground and Recreation Commission, it represented a dramatic change in the accessibility of ordinary people to swimming facilities. Less than two decades before, most swimming pools like colleges in America existed as private facilities for the privileged.
Other pools in Reseda, Sun Valley and Griffith Park, that had been funded prior to the Depression, were built until about 1931.
With the end of World War II and a population explosion in the San Fernando Valley, a resurgence of park pools joined home swimming pool construction. From the late '60s until the introduction of the polio vaccine, use of public pools in Los Angeles County lost popularity.
Click on this image of the North Hollywood Municipal Plunge, and image a young high school boy by the name of Alan Ladd working as a summer lifeguard here. Or ask the older members of your family who grew up in the Valley, if they can remember the actor Andy Divine's Crystal Plunge just north of Van Nuys High School on Kester - or their adventures at Pop's Willow Lake.
The North Hollywood Pool is located:
5301 Tujunga Avenue North Hollywood
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