Two realities exist, simultaneously, at Colman Pool. One is the fact of a swimming pool tucked so deep into the forested depths of Lincoln Park, even neighbors who have lived in the area for decades have no idea it’s there.

The other involves warm summer days and an Olympic-size oasis perched on the tip of Point Williams, so close to Elliott Bay you can sit in your lounge chair and take in the expanse of water, mountains, and ferries. Fancy hotel pools would kill for these views, but it’s a Seattle Parks and Recreation facility showcasing the Northwest at its glorious summer peak—and there’s even a water slide. Colman Pool is somehow a secret to many, yet so packed during high season people line up to secure one-hour time slots to swim.

Seattle’s oldest public pool is also its only sea saltwater facility. This summer will mark 83 years of pulling water in from Puget Sound to be treated (and heated) until it’s ready for swimmers. Colman Pool’s annual preseason refilling generally happens in the middle of the night, when high tide submerges the three concrete intakes that are often visible down on the beach during lower tides.

Listening to Maya Sears, who has maintained the pool since 2015, the system sounds complicated: a combination of pumps, timing, a seawater line, and open sand pits for filtration. “It’s got a personality,” she says. “There’s almost a magic to it.” But it’s a vast improvement from what came before.

In 1925, the city dug out a nearby lagoon to form a proto–public pool, essentially a big, beachy hole with a sluice gate to control the water levels. The city opened the gate at night, during high tide, then shut it when the pool filled up. Mark Sears, Maya’s father and her predecessor as Colman Pool’s caretaker, remembers an old-timer lifeguard telling him how dogfish would come in with the tides. The next morning, lifeguards had to chase them around with pitchforks to remove them from the pool.

Enter the descendants of a prominent pioneer family. Laurence Colman and his son, Kenneth, developed Seattle’s Windermere neighborhood together in the 1920s. Laurence also wanted to give kids some wholesome stuff to get up to when they weren’t in school—YMCA activities, youth classes, Sunday school, even summer camps on the family’s Orcas Island waterfront property (later donated to the YMCA as Camp Orkila).

When Laurence died in 1935, Kenneth and the rest of the family contacted the city, offering the gift of a pool as a memorial. Kenneth wanted it to be in Lincoln Park, close to the family’s waterfront property. (This might explain why the pool is located so infernally far from a parking lot.)

The art deco facility that opened July 4, 1941, was a significant upgrade from sluice gates and stray dogfish. Colman Memorial Pool had a clubhouse, locker rooms, and a dazzling mural by Ernest Norling filled with Laurence Colman Easter eggs.

Colman Pool’s current steward went through the usual city interview process for the position before she took over from her dad, but the Sears family connection doesn’t end there. Mark’s father—and Maya’s grandfather—Norman Sears was the pool’s original caretaker. According to Mark, his dad worked previously at the Alki Beach Bathhouse’s steam laundry: “He had a steam engineer’s license,” apparently essential for washing the woolen bathing costumes the parks department rented out back then. When Norman retired in 1973, Mark, already well-versed in running that saltwater intake system, took over for more than four decades. He remembers the days when chlorine was used so sparingly his dad would drain the pool halfway through the season for maintenance—“all the lifeguards would get in there with scrub brushes and get all the algae out.”

Like his dad, Mark raised his kids in the caretaker’s apartment in the bathhouse, above the pool. A megaphone and an imposing demeanor helped ward off vandals and would-be night swimmers in this isolated corner of a large, forested park. The pool gave him such a good vantage point to see southern resident orcas cavorting out in the sound, he even contracted with NOAA to collect data on whale activity in the area.

Today Maya is the one filling Colman Pool in the middle of the night, at high tide, for the new season. Colman Pool historically opens around Memorial Day, though in our current lifeguard shortage hours remain limited in early June, until college students come home for summer lifeguard jobs.

Wendy Van De Sompele, the pool’s coordinator, has advice on how to beat crowds: “Pick a day when it’s forecast for 75 or so in the afternoon, but it’s cloudy in the morning.” During early summer’s gloomier moments, the wind off the sound can send lifeguards rushing for parkas, she says. But “when it’s hot, everybody wants to be at Colman Pool.”