Swimming at Ell Pond

In 1927, a reporter for the Boston Herald wrote “A prettier spot for swimming and diving than Ell Pond would be hard to find.” He was in town to witness the New England Association of the Amateur Athletic Union’s annual swimming championship, which was being held at Ell Pond for the third year in a row. The city had just laid out a considerable sum to build a modern bathhouse, with lockers, changing rooms, and toilets. Ell Pond had taken its place as one of Greater Boston’s finest swimming holes. But it was not to last.

Recreational swimming, like most modern sports, was an invention of the Victorian era. The earliest attested recreational swimming in Ell Pond dates to the mid-1880s, but the pond at that time was encircled by private landowners and was primarily used by two ice harvesting operations on its southeast and southwest shores.

In 1897, the Melrose town meeting voted to purchase most of the north shore of the pond for parkland. This property had long been a swampy bottomland prone to flooding, and in many ways it still is. The area corresponding to what is today the Melrose dog park was soon adopted by locals as a public beach and boat launch.

In 1910 Melrose built its first bathhouse on the site, and hired a seasonal staff of attendants and lifeguards. In 1913 the city reported that 10,057 people used the bathhouse, with a gender breakdown of 8,823 males and 1,234 females. Within a couple of years, the number of female bathers had quadrupled, suggesting changing gender norms surrounding swimming.

By the close of the 1920s, when the NEAAAU held its competitions at Ell Pond, men and women were equally at home at Ell Pond. The beach drew upwards of 1,000 people on summer weekend days. This happy scene would prove short-lived. In the years that followed, the pond was becoming noticeably murkier, with fewer Melrosians willing to take the plunge.

In 1951, swimming was finally banned at Ell Pond. By then, the underground tributaries that supply Ell Pond’s waters had become hopelessly polluted by human waste and other contaminants. In 2021, it remains contaminated, and it is harder than ever to imagine the aquatic paradise that Ell Pond once was.