But Montgomery is now training its revitalization efforts on Wheaton, "to stop the decline," says County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, "and get it moving in the right direction before it hit bottom the way Silver Spring did." Since 2001, Wheaton's redevelopment office has drummed up about $350 million from private investors; $100 million of the pot is funding a major expansion of Westfield Shoppingtown, which next year is expected to debut a Macy's along with a fleet of other stores. County agencies have been sprucing up unsightly storefronts, renovating the affordable housing stock and bringing in high-dollar development as well -- the new townhouses across from the Metro selling for upwards of $500,000. "The other part of it," Duncan says, "was thinking about the public facilities around Wheaton we could improve on, and the pool was clearly one of them." In 1999, the dilapidated old public pool was interred beneath a new athletic field for Wheaton High, and, at a cost of $3.1 million, the county built a new one a few hundred feet from the former site. It opened in 2001.
Wheaton-Glenmont is not so much a pool as a township-scale water park trimmed lavishly with amenities and natatorial diversions: artificial geysers, slides, cascades, aquatic obstacle courses and springboards. The pool is cherished by residents (over the course of an average summer, the pool receives as many as 60,000 visits), and admired by out-of-town guests. "It's beautiful," says Carlos Diaz, a visitor from East Harlem. "In New York, you wouldn't see anything like this, not in a million [expletive] years."
George Romero tries to chat with Ana Chicas at the Wheaton-Glenmont Pool.
(Photograph by Greg Miller)
|
|
For Wheaton, the swimming pool represents, in a modest way, the attainment of the community's grander hopes for itself. And while its modern-day patrons might not give it much thought, the pool also embodies a simple sort of dream Grace Rosner and Harry C. Press were striving for when they showed up at the Wheaton Haven pool 36 years ago -- a place where all kinds of people can pass the summer in neighborly accord. It means something to the groups of young, beleaguered mothers who chat and sigh and pass the hours while their toddlers splash and stagger through the baby pool. It means a lot to the retirees who make up another clique of regulars, and who, in reading or dozing poolside in the sun's wavering glare, are quietly pursuing the leisure they spent their whole lives working to enjoy. It means something to Ryan White, who, after spending his last three summers here, looking out for skinned knees, bee stings and swimmers in distress, plans to leave the pool to begin his career, confronting dangers of a more momentous order. It also means something to kids like George Romero, who comes to Wheaton-Glenmont day in, day out, and for whom the joys, dangers and complexities of teenage summer will unfold at the pool.
THERE ARE FOUR POOLS AT WHEATON-GLENMONT. There is the "splash pool," which is a shallow receptacle for the giant slides. There is the "leisure pool," a curvilinear, thigh-deep concrete pond outfitted with several small water slides; a couple of tall, steel mushrooms with sheets of water cascading from their caps; and a steel armature laden with several upside-down, metal dunce caps that are perpetually filling with water and yawing over. There is the baby pool, and there is the large L-shaped main pool. Behind the diving boards is a concrete terrace with chairs, a blue canvas awning and a view of the rest of the complex. George Romero refers to the terrace as "the chilling spot, where the popular kids hang out."
From day to day, there is a rotating cast of popular kids, whose core members are George and his older brothers Josh and Chino. Josh is 18, with short, tidy hair and a pencil-thin mustache. Chino is an affable, hefty 16-year-old who sends up marvelous, explosive splashes when he jackknifes off the diving board. The rest of the crew is a fairly harmonious crowd of mostly Latino and African American teenagers.
The Romero brothers' parents are from El Salvador, and the family of seven children has lived in Wheaton for about 12 years, in Connecticut Avenue Estates. The neighborhood has a checkered history, and while it's been steadily improving over the last 10 years, it still has a reputation in the community as one of the rougher parts of Wheaton. Perhaps because their father is a pastor (and a maintenance worker at the Justice Department) or perhaps because they've seen horrors befall people who follow the wrong path, Josh and Chino put a lot of effort into being good citizens at the pool. They break up fights before the lifeguards know they're going on. They get on the cases of kids who curse. They are easygoing, pleasant kids, though their amiability is leavened with an awareness that, at a moment's notice, situations can tilt out of balance in some dangerous way.
Today, an overcast afternoon, Josh and Chino do "suicide" dives, a variation on the cannonball in which you grab your ankles and punch through the water's surface with your face; George is talking to a girl.
George has a kind of circuit of girls whom he regularly teases, flirts with and importunes, but he does not, per se, have a girlfriend. "I'm a player, man," he says. George is in the intermediate section of the main pool, where the water comes up to about his chin. He splashes a teenage girl. She yells and splashes him back. Then he puts his arm around her. She is a pretty 13-year-old, with long brown hair and braces. She wears a white bikini stenciled with crimson Playboy bunnies and a red shirt with white script reading, "Heartbreaker." "This is my girl," George says. However: "She's not my girlfriend. I just make out with her." She grins and blushes. "Shut up," she says, and then they fall into a frenzy of accusations and vituperative splashing.
The designations "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," among the early teenagers at the Wheaton-Glenmont Pool, seem to imply not so much an emotional association as a vaguely bureaucratic one -- not someone you necessarily choose to be with, but one to whom you are in some bewildering way assigned. When George's "girl" spots a boy who she says actually is her boyfriend, she regards him with a bitter familiarity. The boyfriend pauses and looks down at her with a dull, emotionless expression. She briefly dips her chin at him and then gazes off at the verdure on the far side of the pool. "Hey," the boy says. "I'm 'a call you." She doesn't answer. The boy shakes his head, "See, she ignoring me."
Then the sky darkens. A blue-gray fleece of ruptured storm clouds drifts in from the west, and a cool wind roughens the surface of the pool, carrying the scent of freshly moistened concrete. A disembodied voice announces over the guardhouse PA that "thunder has been heard." Patrons reluctantly clear the pools and trudge slowly back to the bathhouses.
Soon the rain is slanting down. According to pool regulations, no one is allowed near the water in the wake of a thunderclap. Everyone waits in a rambunctious crowd in front of the guardhouse. George and the girl stand out front. They decide they will go on a date. "Let's go to Popeyes," she suggests.
"Let's go to Hooters," George retorts. Then he goes over and tries to put his arm around one of the lifeguards, but she twists away from him. He backs off and holds his hands up apologetically. "Don't hate the player," he says. "Hate the game."
The weather clears. The pool reopens, and George heads back to the diving boards, the idea of the date having dissipated with the storm clouds.
Late afternoon, three kids, about age 13 or so, arrive. They're all dressed in black, exuding a contrived, pubescent menace. They are friends of the Romero boys, but they sit up in the chilling spot and watch the Romeros disdainfully. "Man, can you believe these [expletives] pay to get in here every day?" one of them says, reveling in the fact that they managed to slip past the guardhouse without shelling out the admission, which is $4 for teenagers.
Josh hops up onto the diving board, and catching the eye of the young woman sitting in the lifeguard's chair, he smiles and does a campy little dance before he dives. One of the boys snorts. "This dude needs to get a life."
"Hey, Chino!" calls another. "Gimme a dollar."
"Why?" Chino yells back from the diving board.
"For the bus!"
"You live right over there," Chino says.
"Aw, man, I'm not tryin' to go home!" the boy yells back.
Then the boys start taking off their shoes and shucking their baggy jeans. They've got swimsuits on underneath. At this point, George Koutsos, the assistant pool manager, shows up. "I thought you guys were just looking for somebody," he says.
"Yeah," says one of the kids, peeling off his sock.
Koutsos asks why, then, does it look as though they're getting ready to take a swim? No one in the group cares to answer. Koutsos stands there, drumming his fingers on the steel railing, deciding what to do. Finally, he gives them five minutes to leave.
