The May Long Weekend came and went, and the gates at Kitsilano Pool stayed shut.
No squealing kids. No lap swimmers slicing through saltwater lanes. No lingering scent of that particular Kits Pool blend — ocean brine, sunscreen, and nostalgia. For those of us who live nearby, the silence along the seawall felt like a missing note in a familiar song.
This year’s delay was framed as “seasonal maintenance and final repairs,” with the City of Vancouver targeting a mid-June opening — eventually confirmed as Saturday, June 21, 2026. Vague? Yes. Surprising? Not really. Not if you know this pool’s history.
Kitsilano Pool didn’t start as the sleek, chlorine-free rectangle we know today. When it opened on August 15, 1931, it was a sprawling ellipse — 660 feet long, covering 2.3 acres — billed as “America’s Largest Swimming Pool.” Attorney-General R.L. Maitland cut the ribbon as 5,000 curious Vancouverites flooded in.
The water itself came straight from English Bay, tidal and wild. Mud sharks drifted in. Octopuses made occasional appearances. The bottom was pure sand until the 1960s. Children swam alongside the creatures of the deep, and nobody seemed to mind.
To celebrate Vancouver’s 50th birthday in 1936, a diving board was installed — a gift from a young city to itself.
But entropy is patient. By the 1970s, poor water circulation had turned the old pool into a health hazard. In 1977, the city bulldozed the grand old ellipse and built what stands today: a heated, pump-fed saltwater pool 137 metres long — the longest outdoor swimming pool in North America, and the only saltwater pool in Vancouver.
The 1979 rebuild bought decades of joy — but not immortality. By 2018, a $3.3 million upgrade was needed just to stop the basin from hemorrhaging potable water. A 2023 feasibility study delivered a gut punch: the pool was leaking approximately 30,000 litres of water every single hour.
Last summer, Kits Pool was closed for most of the season. It finally reopened on August 7, 2024 — a brief, bittersweet reprieve.
Now, in the summer of 2026, the delays continue. The City has been measured in its language, but the writing has long been on the seawall: Kitsilano Pool is, in the City’s own words, “at the end of its service life.”
Not everyone is prepared to let it slip quietly beneath the waves.
The Kits Pool Swimmers community — passionate, organized, and vocal — have rallied behind a campaign they call “137.5,” a number that speaks directly to the pool’s famous length. Their message is clear: don’t give up an inch of it. Their steering committee has engaged the Park Board and City Council, participated in the feasibility study process, and is actively exploring technological innovations to reduce the pool’s operating costs.
Meanwhile, the City launched public consultations in the summer of 2025 and has put the question of a replacement pool squarely on the table for the 2027–2030 Capital Plan. Options on the table include a brand-new facility built outside the floodplain, with an estimated cost of $230 to $300 million and a 75-year lifespan.
Standing at the edge of Kits Beach on a warm June morning, watching the pool finally fill with swimmers again — children splashing in the shallows, lap swimmers churning through turquoise saltwater, the North Shore mountains framing it all — it’s hard to imagine this place simply disappearing.
This pool has survived the tides of nearly a century. It has held the laughter of generations, the ambitions of competitive swimmers, the cautious first paddles of toddlers. It was born from Coast Salish land — a site the people of Skwa-yoos knew long before the pool existed — and it has been renewed before.
The question now isn’t really whether Kits Pool will survive. It’s whether the next chapter — whatever form it takes — will be worthy of the one that came before.
For a pool that has always punched above its weight, that seems like a pretty fair bet.
For more information: https://www.kitspoolswimmers.org/
Sources: Wikipedia / Kitsilano Pool, kitspoolswimmers.org, vancouver.ca, shapeyourcity.ca, dailyhive.com, canada.constructconnect.com
