Hugo's WPA Pool: A 1930s Public Work You Can Still Swim In

On the plains in Lincoln County, the town of Hugo keeps a piece of the 1930s that you can actually jump into. The Hugo Municipal Pool and its bathhouse were built between 1936 and 1938 by crews from the Works Progress Administration, the federal program that put people back to work during the Great Depression.

The bathhouse is the part worth slowing down for. A district WPA engineer named Lloyd Heggenberger designed it in the Art Moderne style of the era, with a flat roof, rounded corners, and long bands of windows. The walls went up in adobe block, a slow, hands-on method the WPA liked because it spent little on materials and a lot on local labor, exactly the point of a relief program. The pool opened to swimmers on June 18, 1938, before the surrounding wall was even finished. In 2008 the pool and bathhouse were added to the National Register of Historic Places.

What makes it more than a roadside plaque is that the town still runs it as the summer pool, so a kid doing a cannonball today is splashing in a piece of Depression-era public works. Seasons and hours change year to year, and the town has at times listed the pool as closed.

The Town of Hugo has the current schedule worth checking before you pack a towel: townhugo.com/parks-and-pool.