Unruly after-hours behaviour last year pulls plug on pool behind Royal Vic.
Well-known secret closed this summer
The swimming pool behind the Royal Victoria Hospital, often described as a “hidden gem” and one of Montreal’s “best kept secrets,” will not be reopening this season.
Anyone who has spent an afternoon basking on the lawn around this pool, surrounded as it is by the towering, leafy trees of Mount Royal Park and tucked away from city noise, will understand why this “secret” was actually quite poorly kept. In fact, for years now, tourism websites have been gushing about “Montreal’s secret hipster pool” and blogs have been buzzing about the party atmosphere at the pool.
Some longtime users had actually begun to complain that the party atmosphere had got out of control in recent years and that alcohol and drugs were being freely consumed in the pool area. Some also complained that lifeguards did not seem to be properly supervising the pool.
Those concerns were fuelled by an incident last summer. On the afternoon of Aug. 8, 2013, a 77-year-old man was found unconscious at the bottom of the pool. Although he was resuscitated, the man died the next day in the Royal Victoria Hospital.
A coroner’s investigation into the death has not yet been completed.
But a spokesperson for the McGill University Health Centre, which has owned and run the pool for decades, said the closing has nothing to do with that fatal incident.
The MUHC’s manager of media relations, Ian Popple, said that although the pool closed immediately after the event and did not reopen, the reasons it has not opened this season are unrelated.
“There are two main reasons for it (not opening this summer). One is that an increasing amount of our resources has to go to the move that has to occur in the next few months to the Glen (Campus, the site of the new superhospital). In the spring, we start the moving of the hospital, so there is an awful lot of work that has to be done. So there are not too many people available to run that operation throughout the summer.
“The other issue was that over the past few years, and particularly last year, there was a certain amount of poor behaviour that was going on after hours, when we closed the pool. We would get people breaking into the pool (area) in the middle of the night. We have security at the hospital, but there is a limit to the amount they can observe the pool area. So on several occasions, we would come in the next day and the picnic tables would have been thrown into the pool, with broken glass, beer bottles and things like that.”
He said he was unaware of any issues about drugs or alcohol in the pool area, and that lifeguards were trained properly and the pool met all legal and safety requirements.
The pool had originally been built for the use of hospital staff and patients in need of physiotherapy or rehabilitation. It was opened to the public about 10 years ago, he said, and swimmers could either pay for each use or buy a season’s pass. When the pool closed early last year, those with season’s passes were offered a refund.
Popple said he can’t say whether the pool will ever reopen. The future use of the Royal Victoria Hospital buildings and other assets is still under study by the provincial government. McGill University has proposed to take it over for academic and community purposes, but there is no word yet on the university’s plan for the pool.