World’s Largest Suspended Natatorium

Things are Going Swimmingly
Yale Practice Pool, New Haven

I spent a wonderful day in New Haven recently doing a few tours of unique and interesting buildings around Yale’s campus. There are so many ridiculously cool things of note around campus that I came away thinking I could do an entirely separate site called YQ (Yale Quest). Now sure, some of the things I’d rate as CTMQ-worthy you may find silly, but when taken in aggregate, I think I’d win my case.

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Awesome

Take this single bad picture of a pool. It’s just a pool. Not even a big pool. in fact, it’s rather small. What is that? Five lanes of 50 meters? Whoopdee doo.

Aha! It’s where this “little” 330,000 gallon, 2.75 million pound pool is located that makes it website-worthy.

It’s on the THIRD FLOOR of the Payne Whitney gymnasium! Let that sink in: It is three floors above the street.

And that’s rather insane. Especially when you realize it was built in the early 1930′s. Why? Who knows, this is Yale and they like to do things a bit extravagantly there sometimes.

It’s used as the practice pool for Yale’s swim teams, but several city swimming organizations, and I believe any one who’s a member of the gym, can swim three floors up in the massive building.

The Payne Whitney gym itself holds several other cool things, but those are for another page on another day.

Yale Pools
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