Williamsburg's Metropolitan Pool Won't Reopen Until Late 2027

The indoor pool at Williamsburg’s Metropolitan Recreation Center, shut since December 2024 after NYC Parks detected elevated ozone levels tied to a failing dehumidification system, will not reopen until late 2027, Greenpointers reported this week, citing an update Parks officials gave at a September 8 community board meeting. The facility’s own page on nycgovparks.org still lists its indoor pool among its amenities, with no reopening date posted.

Why it matters

NYC Parks’ Capital Project Tracker, the agency’s public system for logging the design, procurement and construction status of its capital work, carries the fix under project 10796, “Metropolitan Recreation Center Dehumidification System Reconstruction.” That record shows design was assigned in July 2024 and finished in March 2025, and procurement, the phase that selects and contracts a builder, ran from August 2025 to April 2026. Construction itself, the tracker shows, is not scheduled to begin until November 2026, with a projected completion in March 2027. For a facility that closed in December 2024, that timeline means nearly two years pass before a contractor breaks ground, the kind of front-loaded design-and-procurement runway that construction professionals watching public projects will recognize as typical of city capital work, but one residents rarely see broken out phase by phase.

The numbers

The tracker lists total funding for the project at $3,299,000, sourced from mayoral capital dollars, for a single mechanical system rebuild inside an existing building rather than new construction. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, addressing the closure’s length, put the delay on the agency’s own execution rather than its budget: “This is not a money issue; this is about parks being inefficient,” he said, according to Brooklyn Paper. Construction’s projected March 2027 finish falls roughly eight months before the “late 2027” reopening Parks gave the community board, a gap that likely reflects equipment startup, testing and the health-department re-certification a public pool needs before it can admit swimmers again.

What’s next

With construction not slated to start until November, the coming months will show whether NYC Parks holds that date or slips again, a real risk given the project’s procurement phase alone already ran past its original schedule. For New York construction and public-works watchers, Metropolitan’s tracker page is now the record to check for the next status change, phase by phase, rather than the next community board meeting.