For generations, swimmers packed Mendon Ponds Park for a summertime dip while sunbathers soaked in the rays in the park’s beach area.
The park had a staff of lifeguards, a bathhouse for changing and a refreshment stand. On hot summer days, crowds numbering in the thousands were common at the beach.
Swimming lessons were offered for decades. Mendon Ponds stayed open while other area beaches closed due to water-quality issues.
The beach remains at Mendon Ponds, now covered with grass. The lifeguards are long gone and swimming is prohibited. So, why did swimming stop at Mendon Ponds Park?
Several people posted fond memories on Facebook. “I can still hear Dad and Mom telling us to walk out until we were chest deep and swim back in,” wrote Cathy Caruso, now of Victorville, California.
Nicholas Konz of The Woodlands, Texas, added, “My mom dragged me and my brother down there for swimming lessons every day one summer in the ’70s. The lifeguards had to carefully turn over the boats to chase away the skunks each morning.”
Monroe County acquired the property that became Mendon Ponds Park in the late 1920s. The first newspaper accounts of swimming there — with lifeguards — came the following decade.
Located in southeastern Monroe County, Mendon Ponds doesn’t border Lake Ontario, like Ontario Beach and Durand-Eastman parks. Swimming at Mendon Ponds was in a pond formed tens of thousands of years ago by glacial activity.
A 1977 Upstate story about local “swimming holes” mentioned Mendon Ponds. “The swimming area…reaches a depth of 15 feet, has a slow-pitched sandy bottom, and a sandy beach for idle sunning,” the story stated. The fun with swimming holes carved by nature, the story noted, are the “bends and dips, mysteries and local legends.”
By the late ‘30s, news stories reported in excess of 10,000 “bather-hours” at Mendon Ponds on busy days. In the 1940s, Mendon Ponds led the way in number of swimming lessons given among county park beaches and was labeled the area’s safest beach for young children.
A news account said it was “rapidly becoming the Jones Beach of Monroe County,” referring to the popular swimming area near Manhattan. A 1944 Democrat and Chronicle story profiled the first female lifeguard at Mendon Ponds and, using sexist language of the time, said the 16-year-old girl was doing “a man’s job of guarding the lives of area swimmers.”
In 1956, the pond was stocked for the first time with hundreds of trout. Three years later, hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses were baptized in the pond following a daylong session at the Community War Memorial.
Swimming continued each year. Brian Terho posted on Facebook that he got terrible ear infections in the late ’50s from what his doctor attributed to swimming at Mendon Ponds Park. “Our family kept going anyway because we loved it there,” Terho wrote. “I just kept my head out of the water.”
When pollution and high bacteria counts closed other area beaches in the 1960s and early ’70s, the one at Mendon Ponds remained in business. A 1974 Democrat and Chronicle story reported that Mendon Ponds’ beach was the only county-operated beach officially open that summer. Another story mentioned that Mendon Ponds’ beach water was frequently muddy but “looked in good condition.”
By 1977, county officials considered charging a fee to use the beach at Mendon Ponds as part of an effort to make parks more “self-supporting.” As part of that proposal, there was talk of installing a fence or wall around the pond to prevent freeloaders from sneaking in.
Then-County Parks Director Calvin Reynolds called the plans “a farce,” and added, “I don’t know who would pay to swim in that mud pond anyway.”
One woman posted on Facebook that Mendon Ponds by the ’70s was good for “dog-swimming only.” But people kept swimming there, and lifeguards continued doing their thing.
Within a decade or so, things changed.
County officials pulled lifeguards from Mendon Ponds in late August 1990, a week or so before the typical Labor Day finale. The reason given was a lifeguard shortage at other beaches and pools.
Lifeguards returned for 1991, but that was the end. As part of a deficit-reduction plan, county legislators eliminated lifeguards from Mendon Ponds for 1992. They never returned.
Swimmers occasionally did, cooling off in the “unsanctioned” swimming area. In 1994, there was talk again of charging a fee to restore lifeguard services, but nothing apparently came of that.
By all accounts, the once-popular area no longer is even suitable for swimming, at least for humans. “In 28 years, the pond has been ‘naturalized,’” said former Parks Director Larry Staub. “Vegetation has grown in. Water-life and waterfowl have staked their claim there.” Swimming at Mendon Ponds is just a fond memory.
Alan Morrell is a former Democrat and Chronicle reporter and a Rochester-area freelance writer.
This story was originally published in August 2019 as part of the Whatever Happened To series.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Mendon Ponds Park was a popular Monroe County swimming hole for years
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