The internet's been buzzing over a Brooklyn company's plan to convert discarded dumpsters into swimming pools, and now that they've successfully conned doltish hipsters into swimming inside of dumpsters, the owners want to expand their evil empire into suburbia.
The company's name is Macro-Sea and it's run by a man named David Belt. Belt and his partners "borrowed" the idea, lining old dumpsters with plastic, filling them with water and adding water-filtration systems, from a Georgia man who'd made one himself. They figured that since there aren't many places to swim in New York City and since New York City is laden with dumpsters, why not give it a try? I mean, why not? And it worked! So now they're expanding.
Macro-Sea itself is using the project as a template for a larger idea: turning eyesore strip malls into artsy community destinations, with Dumpster pools and other indie attractions.
"I thought if we could get people to come here and swim in a Dumpster, I could probably use the same aesthetic sensibility" to get people - and, not incidentally, better retailers - to come to a dingy strip mall, Mr. Belt said. The company hopes to open its first repurposed shopping center in Atlanta this fall, ideally with dozens of pools in the parking lot that visitors can rent for the day.
Again, why not, right? After all, what works in Brooklyn always works in the deep South!
Finally, there was a quote near the end of the piece that made me howl with laughter. It goes:
"The water's amazingly fresh, for swimming in a Dumpster," said Alexis Bloom, a documentary filmmaker from TriBeCa, after doing a few laps. She compared it favorably to the pool at Soho House, an actual urban country club.
Now, you'd probably have to live in New York to truly get the joke about the pool at Soho House being compared to a dumpster, but just know that Soho House is a notorious Eurotrash hangout and, yeah, you can probably figure out what the joke is now.
Forget the Trash Bag, Bring a Towel [New York Times]
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