“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.” — Russell Baker

Seventy years ago, in the summer of ’55, a paddling of people numbering in the thousands, swimming-trunked with towels shoulder-slung and slathered in Sea & Ski, descended en masse for the opening day of the newly minted Lindley Park municipal swimming pool. It wasn’t long, however, before that above ground complex began making waves, awash in a clash of cultures that seemed to fall on waterlogged city leaders’ ears.

It’s one of our city’s loveliest and most serene neighborhoods, but, beginning in 1902 before any homes were ever conceived of there, Lindley Park was originally an amusement park, complete with a sprawling lake, casino, dance pavilion, 1,000-seat vaudeville theater, miniature railroad, electric fountain and a cozy cafe. Live entertainment consisted of a trapeze act, a spunky monkey and a chatty parrot who likely ended up as a curiosity in the basement level of Silver’s 5–10¢ and $1.00 Store on South Elm and Washington.

The city’s first public park was named after J. Van Lindley, whose nearby 1,000-plus-acre nursery, established around 1850, was likely one of the largest in the world, with some 1.5 million plants under cultivation. Lindley lent 60 acres of the eastern end of his property to the Greensboro Electric Company with a proviso that they establish an entertainment destination there to coincide with the 1902 debut of the Gate City’s first mass transit system.

For less than a dime, commuters could trolley from North Elm downtown to the farthest western stop on Spring Garden Street, destined for the enchanted land of Lindley Park, where they could spend the day boating, swimming and tightrope gawking. Propelled along rails embedded into brick-lined streets and powered by overhead electrical wiring, a fleet of streetcars criss-crossed the city north to Sunset Drive, south down Asheboro Street (now MLK Drive), and both east and west on Market. 

After the amusement park closed in 1917, Lindley gifted that real estate and another parcel to the city with a caveat — that a spacious, refined community be established there, designed by preeminent Southern landscape architect Earl Sumner Draper, who was behind Charlotte’s Myers Park and High Point’s Emerywood, among other tony neighborhoods. The lake was reduced to a creek with landscaped banks, making it a 107-acre verdant centerpiece to surrounding homes, soon to be constructed in a wide array of architectural styles, favoring Craftsman and Colonial Revival.

Endeavoring to reintroduce recreation to Lindley Park in 1955, the city sunk $200,000 into a public swimming pool designed to accommodate up to 800 sun worshippers, with 10 wide lanes for competition swimming and a cutting-edge aquatic sport scoreboard. There was one other city-owned pool in Greensboro reserved for the Black community built in 1937, located at Windsor Recreation Center on Lee and Benbow streets. After two Black women, Dr. Ann Gist and Ms. J. Everett, were turned away from the Lindley facility in June of 1957, the NAACP petitioned the city to integrate the pools.

Council members and apparatchiks such as Parks and Recreation commissioner Dr. R. M. Taliaferro voiced opposition to any attempt to abrogate the Jim Crow status quo. Current in their minds was the wanton unrest that erupted just a few Junes ago when Atlanta and St. Louis incited white rioters after their swimming pools were integrated.

Facing a potential unruly undertow that city leaders were loath to be swallowed up by, their initial reaction was to nuke the pools, plow them under, before realizing that a legal loophole could serve as a flotation device. At that time, private entities were at liberty to discriminate indiscriminately, so it was resolved to offload these two chlorinated, all-of-a-sudden nuisances at auction, sold to the highest (like-minded) bidder, thereby surreptitiously preserving this pernicious practice. That brazen tactic triggered a preemptive lawsuit (Tonkins v. City of Greensboro) adjudicated downtown in the U.S. Middle District Court.

In May 1958, the court ruled in favor of the defendant but deferred dismissing the suit until 30 days after the sale of the pool “to give the plaintiffs an opportunity to show that the sale was not bona fide in the sense that there was collusion between the defendants and the successful bidder regarding the future use of the pool.” In other words, the plaintiff had a short window of time after the sale to prove it had actually been rigged by the city to enshrine segregation.

On June 3, 1958, J. Spencer Love purchased the “lake-sized” pool at Windsor Center, turning the operation over to David Morehead, executive secretary of the Hayes-Taylor YMCA. The Lindley Park aquatic center was acquired for $85,000 (only 3 years old, what a bargain!) by a hastily assembled coalition calling themselves Greensboro Pool Corporation, one of the organizers being none other than the aforementioned Dr. Taliaferro. No surprise, the Lindley pool would remain whites-only.

Did someone mention collusion? An appeal to Tonkins v. City of Greensboro was filed, one of the attorneys consulting on the case being future Supreme Court Justice and legendary Civil Rights leader Thurgood Marshall. Argued in January 1960, a ruling in March declared that the plaintiffs had not met their burden of proof. While recognizing that Taliaferro had openly opposed desegregating the property and was instrumental in setting up Greensboro Pool Corporation, the judge ruled, “he was a member of a nine-man commission, which serves in an advisory capacity only, legal authority [for the sale] being in the City Council of which he was not a member.”

In 1967, just as an expanding, yet-to-be-named, Wendover Avenue (a road that began as a wagon trail rut in 1753) was carving away some 25 acres of the district, the City of Greensboro reacquired the Lindley Park Pool, making it accessible to all. A year later, a new swimming pool replaced the three-decades-old hole at Windsor Center, which, today, is being reimagined as the Windsor Chavis Nocho Community Complex, a 65,000-square-foot facility with, among many other impressive amenities, a lap pool, lazy river and water slide.

Meanwhile, drowning under innumerable structural and mechanical quagmires, the Lindley Park Pool at 2914 Springwood Dr., now our city’s oldest, has been hung out to dry since 2023 but workers are resolute to rehydrate that concrete crate sometime this season.

Just this morning, I ventured out, hoping to uncover the one remaining remnant from Lindley Park’s initial 15 years as our nascent township’s sideshow. Not shy about wandering around, behind a hilltop home on Masonic Drive, I discovered a dollhouse-like, wooden women’s cabana with dual French doors that once sat lakeside.

Bracketing the neighborhood entryways off Spring Garden are matching stone monuments. Characterized by obelisks boldly asserting themselves where the amusement park’s mammoth arched gateways were positioned on either side of the lake, they were installed in 1924, when Earl Sumner Draper’s master plan was nearing completion. Over a century later, those monuments still warmly welcome visitors and residents alike to a shady little lady known as Lindley Park.