Taylor Dow, Brooklyn
For Taylor Dow, getting a pool was a gradual process that also happened to be the realization of a long-term dream. When he lived on the top floor of his building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 2000s, he’d look down at a neighbor’s aboveground situation and vow to have something similar of his own one day. (To add insult to injury, the neighbor appeared to take a dip only once or twice a year.) In 2012, Taylor got the chance to move to the garden level of the same building and take over the yard. At that time, he says, it was just a patch of dirt. Over the next decade, that would change.
First, as a joke, a friend brought an adult-size inflatable pool to Taylor’s birthday party one year: “It lasted about six hours before we realized it wasn’t a real thing,” he says. He endeavored to find himself something