Lincoln, CA McBean Park (0259)

McBean pool and park, opened in 1925 and built from donations from the McBean family. The facility is quite large for what was once a small town. Pictures from the opening of the park are on this link: www.lincolnnativesons.org/pool_opens.htm

Why this impressed me takes a little personal history. I first started visiting the Lincoln area around 2000 and at that time Lincoln was a fading, small, former farm town surrounded by over-grown fields. In the close to 15 years since I first visited there, the area surrounding downtown has basically been swallowed up as a distant suburb of the Sacramento metropolitan area, but the central older area still feels like that declining older farm city.

The architecture of the town is thus a good example of the boom and bust cycles of American (and particularly Californian) commerce. For the town, as I knew it when I first started visiting in 2000, this looked out of place -- "how did this little town warrant such a grand swimming pool?" The answer to that is evident in the older, decaying, towns of much of central California -- that there were many robust and growing small cities across the state back when transportation and the extent of manual labor meant large populations living relatively close to land that was heavily worked. By 2000, when transportation networks, farm mechanization, and international commerce had shrunk the small towns of mid-America, this elaborate pool complex looked out of place for a fading small town. Now, with the town being just a suburb of Sacramento, there's probably a need again for such a pool complex -- though the current generation probably considers it too old.