The team behind Prospect Swims wants to make the lake safe for human swimming.
Idan Sasson lives close to Prospect Park and had an “aha” moment one day while walking through the Brooklyn greenspace.
“‘Oh, we should be swimming in this lake,’” Sasson recalls thinking. “It started as kind of a joke in a bar, my hot take of the moment. Then I decided to email a couple of people, talk to some architects and engineers in my network, and that turned into about a 40-person workshop at Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club in December. And I realized we were onto something.”
In this era of revived waterways, where whales, sharks and otters are returning to our shores, and humans can dive head first into the Hudson river or paddle around the Gowanus Canal, can swimming in Prospect Park Lake really be so far behind? Sasson is now the founder of Prospect Swims, an organization that’s spent the past year dedicated itself to making at least part of the park’s lake swimmable for humans.
