Medgar Evers Pool

*Sigh. I love this place. My son is on the summer swim team and he is having a blast. As for lap swim… I’m a competitive swimmer (well years ago anyway) so I know my way around a pool and understand how things work. I have dealt with super cranky lap swimmers there, but I think that’s because they are kind of dumb. All the experienced swimmers are pretty fun to share a lane with and make things move smoothly. When a swimmer who isn’t familier with the lap swim etiquette at Medgar Evers starts making things difficult, the lifeguards step in.
The facility is pretty old, but very clean and well kept considering the tiny budget they are given (it’s a PUBLIC pool folks, not a health cub!!) and that the high schools use the facility as well.
The staff are for the most part pretty great. I’ve only had a negative experience with one or two guards. And I think that had to do with them being kind of older and grumpy? Not sure, but I blew it off.
All in all, this is what all public pools should strive for.

Just your standard public pool. Nothing fancy about it. Pool is at a perfect temperature, four lanes for lap swimming.
Women’s locker rooms have quarter operated lockers. A small shower room with maybe 6 or so shower heads, bathroom stalls in a separate part, changing stalls line the wall of the main locker room part. Nothing fancy but you’re there to swim!
Staff is incredibly nice and helpful when I visited. Answered all my questions and helped me since I was new to the pool. I felt very welcomed. Staff gets ⁵⁄₅ stars.
One last thing– there is limited parking available (maybe 8 spots?). I was able to snag of one two open spots on a Saturday during lap swim which I think isn’t bad at all.

Took my son here for swim lessons when he was a baby, and also took swim lessons myself. Although the lessons were great, and reasonably priced, I never went back after we finished lessons because the water is SO cold! There’s no way it’s the normal indoor pool temp in there.

My son does swim practice here with his swim team during the week, the occasional swim meet on the weekends and we’ve done family swim time once or twice. I like that they have both a separated «shallow-​er» pool (not a baby pool) and a large deep pool. The deeper pool has a rope swing and diving board they open during family swim, but it’s otherwise your normal 6-​lane 25-​yard pool for laps n such.
Locker room is huge and showers seem to work fine for our purposes — but this isn’t a fancy athletic club, so don’t expect that.
It’s nice that it’s so close to Capitol Hill, because there aren’t a lot of other inexpensive options for kids to swim if you don’t belong to a club with a pool.

Like all other Seattle pools, it was built on the cheap, and it shows. It has cement floors and walls throughout, including in the pool itself. It has no tiles outside the shower area. Shower plumbing is so noisy, it is annoying.
On the upside, it has separate swim and play areas, which allows for less contention on pool use. Lap swim times at Medgar Evers are better than at other Seattle city pools. The water quality is also far better than at other Seattle pools, thanks to the pool maintenance woman at ME. The staff and patrons are very diverse, and the place usually has a good vibe.
Being in a poorer neighborhood, staff tend to nickel and dime patrons, and some feel at liberty to be rude. For example, my access card was delaminating after six years of use. I was told that I would have to pay them five dollars to get another card. They were very inflexible about my request. I refused to pay for the defective card they gave me six years earlier. Later I went swimming at a city pool in a much wealthier neighborhood, Queen Anne pool, and I only had to bring up the delaminating card, and they replaced it on the spot for free. But this is typical of government services between wealthier and poorer neighborhoods, and not necessarily particular to Medgar Evers pool.
Recently I swam for a whole minute after the lap swim session was over. When that was brought to my attention by a possible staff member carrying a clipboard, not a lifeguard, even as I was making my way towards the side of the pool, where I could exit, as swimmers are not allowed to stand on the bulkhead, she kept yelling at me to get out of the pool, and making a scene. No one was in the lane I was swimming in, nor in any of the lanes I was making my way through to exit. It was rude, disrespectful, and unprofessional of her. I wish pool staff were that inflexible about starting and ending swim sessions at their scheduled times. Instead, they remove lane ropes, sometimes even five minutes before the scheduled session end time. I have been tangled up on those loose ropes many times, while lap swimming is supposedly still on. Despite a few bad interactions with staff, they are usually very friendly and professional.
Despite the downsides of a poor neighborhood pool, I drive all the way there because of the diversity, good vibe, better water quality, and better lap swim hours.

Clean pool, reasonable hours. My only issue is the high volume of people who (potentially) use this place — sometimes I can have whole lanes to myself, other times it’s crowded up the wazoo and I can barely lap swim because of the high variability of swimmers in a lane. I think people have trouble self-​gauging swimming ability and speed, and don’t do a good job of placing themselves here. Also, there are typically 3 lanes of Slow, Medium, and Fast, but there is so much variability between medium and fast, and within fast itself. I would like to see there be a permanent very fast lane so I don’t have to feel bad about swimming in the fast lane and always being in somebody’s way.
regardless, it’s a convenient location and I’ll continue to go back because of that and it’s reasonable price — roughly $ 45 for a 10 punch pass (including tax)

My kiddo practices here with his central area aquatic swim team. The pool & locker rooms are spacious, clean & all the people working there are always helpful.
They do have 2 family changing rooms with showers, so if you have a young one who is too little to be in the locker room alone (ie, I can’t go into the men’s locker room with my boy, but he still needs my help getting showered & changed & he is past the age they want him in the women’s locker room), you can take them in there. Of course getting into one can be a challenge depending on how busy it is, but I’m not complaining as people are courteous & try to get in & out quickly — I’ve never had to wait more than 5 – 10 minutes.
The main «problem» is that I smell Ezells on the way in/​out & have to remind myself it’s never quite as good as it smells (and kiddo asks every time to stop for dinner).
The pool is an awesome community resource, check it out sometime if you can!

Today was my first time at this pool. I usually frequent the YMCA Pool down the street, however they were not having adult lap swim at the time I was interested in, and so I took it as an opportunity to try this pool that is also nearby.
The time was Saturday at 1p, and I was not able to find a parking spot anywhere near the facility, since it is on the same intersection with many other facilities/​businesses. Once I did park (two blocks away) I walked into the building using the slightly ajar/​broken door. The woman working the front desk was really kind, and answered all of my questions just fine.
The reason for 3 stars? Well, half a star for the locker room, and the rest for the pool.
The locker room is just a big room with lockers against one wall. For someone who seeks any sort of privacy while they are changing and/​or getting showered, good luck. There are a few stalls for dressing (no stalls for showering, just a shower room), but they have such high curtains that if I had bent over, my bits would have been super exposed in an unflattering way. Additionally, the lockers are the small (square-​size at the bowling alley type, not long and skinny) old school kind that take a quarter, and didn’t allow for me to use my own padlock. Fortunately, the woman at the counter told me it was acceptable to take my belongings out to the deck. Which was obnoxious, since I had two big bags of stuff, but okay…
Once out to the pool area, I was impressed by its size. It’s a 25y pool, but six lanes wide. There is an additional pool about half the size for kids to play water basketball and stuff. I was able to have an entire lane to myself during this time too, which is always a big bonus. However, the first thing that caught me off-​guard was that I am to get into the pool from the deep end. This sucked. I usually put my goggles and stuff on after I get in the water, and being in the deep end meant I couldn’t use both hands to get myself ready to go. Also, the water was really cold. Once I got moving, the pool felt well lit and clean. The water still felt cold a halfhour into my lap swim.
When it was time to get out of the pool (I had no idea that they were going to take down the lanes for public swim, but that’s my fault) there were no easy stairs to get out. They had a couple that were the kind that are built-​into-​the-​wall, but they were sort of in the middle of the pool wall and not easily accessible. Not a fan of that.
Back in the locker room, I tried to take a shower in the open shower room, however, I never figured out how to keep the water on for longer than a minute. I found that the kid-​sized one (about 4ft high) had an actual faucet lever and stayed on, and so I washed up there. Then, I went to put my street clothes back on, just to realize I had forgotten all my stuff out by the pool (not used to taking stuff out there) and I was just standing there in my towel. Which meant I had to put my wet bathing suit back on and get my stuff. By this time, while I realize that was my own mistake, I was pretty annoyed with the place. After getting dressed, I looked for a suit spinner, just to learn that it wasn’t in the locker room, but back out at the pool. So, fully dressed, I had to go back to the pool (take off shoes) to dry my suit.
The facility itself is fine and clean enough, but not good looking in any way (broken door, concrete floor, aged walls). It probably is much more well-​suited for leisure swims with families and kids who want to do cannonballs from the diving board. But, for the lap swimmer who visits pools frequently, there was a lot that just didn’t seem right for me.
Basically, I enjoyed the swim itself once I got in the cold water, but just about everything else kind of made me want to get out of there pretty quickly. I won’t be going back anytime soon for lap swims.

I love Medgar Evars. It’s cheap and never crowded, and the staff is super-​friendly. There’s a playground on the same grounds for hanging out after swimming, and it’s near Ezell’s. mmm… Ezell’s.
The lanes are short, which is a bit annoying if you’re a serious swimmer but not at all a problem for most of us. The family/​public swim is never crowded.
All in all, pretty darn cool.

Hidden away on the back side of Capitol Hill next to Garfield High School is a secret gem of a pool. It looks a bit like a bomb shelter, and the high windows are covered in an eternal grime of leaves and dirt, but it is clean and spacious for all that. For lap swimmers you can’t beat the M/​W/​F 6:30−8 a.m. session which is rarely crowded, but has a healthy masters class if you want the extra push. And best of all, there is a very nice sauna… though you probably won’t have time to use it during the morning sessions.
At one point they used to have a jazz band playing on Tuesday nights, but I’m pretty sure that gone for good. It was a lovely, though slightly odd. I miss it.