Metz pool holds many memories for families
After neighborhood’s protests, city decides not to close landmark.
Growing up, Nina Delgado lived the dream of children across the country.
Her home on Pedernales Street in East Austin was right across the street from Metz Park and only a few hundred steps from the neighborhood watering hole: Metz pool.
In the summer, she practically lived there.
“My grandmother raised us, and she pretty much knew we were going to be at the pool if she needed to find us,” Delgado said.
Delgado, now 31 and a mother of two, brings her daughters to the pool every summer hoping they will create fond childhood memories in a place that holds so many for her.
This year, those summer pool outings almost didn’t happen. In April, the Austin Parks and Recreation Department announced it would close two neighborhood pools, Metz and Mabel Davis, for repairs during the summer, after it was revealed that the pools had leaked a combined 7 million gallons of water last year.
But this month, after protests from neighborhood residents, the city said it would keep the pools open.
Delgado was overjoyed. She wants the pool repaired but thinks that should be done after the summer swimming season. She doesn’t want her daughters, or other neighborhood kids, deprived of the one place where they can all hang out together.
The recent rains have delayed the pool’s opening; the city needs to patch up its biggest leaks but cannot excavate
when the grounds are so saturated. City officials say they hope to have Metz open sometime in June.
For Delgado and many others like her, the pool is much more than a place to splash around and escape the sweltering Central Texas summers. It’s a place of community and history.
When gang activity was high in East Austin, the pool and the park’s recreation center were havens for kids who wanted to stay out of trouble.
At a town hall meeting at the Metz Recreation Center to protest the closure of the pool this month, several residents spoke about its importance to the neighborhood.
A man who identified himself as a law enforcement officer said it helped keep kids off the streets, and Farhad Madani, a former assistant director in the parks department, protested the city’s decision and said a conversation about the pool’s closure should have happened long before summer.
“This is a neighborhood center,” said Lisa Flores, whose family has lived in Austin for five generations. “It needs to be used as a neighborhood center.”
Delgado, who said she grew up on government assistance, learned to swim at Metz. As a teen, she was hired there as a lifeguard. She also participated in several of the recreation center’s youth groups, helping her earn a Gates Millennium scholarship for full tuition at any college of her choice.
She chose St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and became a Span- ish teacher but returned to Austin after her schooling, partly because of the city’s parks reputation.
While in San Antonio, she saw her nieces and nephews grow up with no parks in their neighborhood.
“That’s why I chose to raise my kids here,” she said.
Delgado has moved to an apartment of her own in a different neighborhood, but she visits her grandmother so often she still considers the Holly neighborhood, where the park is located, her home.
“When you grow up in one area, you’re connected to that place forever,” Delgado said.
When her two little girls run from Grandma’s house to the park nowadays, they’re following the same path their mother took as a little girl.
They go down the same porch steps. They cross the same paved street. They walk past the same murals on the walls near the pool — murals that bring back fond memories for Delgado.
“I saw those same murals when I was young,” she said. “It does take me back to my childhood being outdoors, and I want to instill that in my girls, too.”
If it were up to her 8-year-old, Delgado said, she’d watch cartoons on Netflix all day. But the pool helps get her out of the house.
When they visit Metz in the summers, the 1-yearold hardly ever wants to get out of the water. And the 8-year-old is just like her mother.
“If we could be at the pool every day,” Delgado said, “she’d want to be there.”
For many in the neighborhood, Metz pool is much more than a place to splash around and escape the sweltering summer heat. It’s a place of community and history.