Eichler Swim and Tennis Update: Working Like Crazy for Pool Season

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Joe Eichler
Joe Eichler cutting the ribbon at the Eichler Swim and Tennis Club in 1958. Photo courtesy Lynn Drake.

Work at the Eichler Swim and Tennis Club is well underway this winter, after the members of the club in the Palo Verde neighborhood worked hard to cooperate on a plan to restore the facility.

As we noted before, simply getting 300 swim club members to approve the $600,000 initial project budget represented a major feat of communication. And now that the work is in progress, with photos posted on the club's website, it's clear that the project itself is a pretty major undertaking.

With the entire pool deck gone, and the pool itself stripped down to its shell, I asked Lynn Drake, a deck committee member and Eichler homeowner who helped spearhead the project, to share some "before" photos so we could get a sense of the scale of this work. It's impressive, to say the least.

In this image Drake sent, showing the pool in use before work started, we can see the flawed concrete in the foreground. Restoring this was a key goal of the renovation:

As you can see, the concrete is all gone, and will be replaced with new stuff:

Another key goal was to replace electrical and other services underneath the concrete. As you can see, the pipes were massively corroded:

But new conduit and drain pipes (such as the one below) are going in, with the goal of making the facility ready for future upgrades, should the club want them:

The club members spent a lot of time and a lot of money making this project happen, in an effort we at the Eichler Network see as one possible model for other Eichler neighborhoods with similarly crumbling facilities. While the finished product is still coming together, the sheer scale of the work sure looks impressive.