Swimming Pools of Florida Hotels in the 1950s and ’60s Through Beautiful Postcards

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The first swimming pool was a public pool built in 1887 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Pools such as this were great places to socialize, and they provided a way to escape the summer heat before the invention of air conditioning. One of the first residential pools built was on the Vanderbilt estate in Asheville, North Carolina in 1895.

Swimming pools of Florida hotels in the 1950s and 1960s

In the 1950s, after the Korean War, the pool construction boom really took off, as more and more pool companies were using gunite over poured concrete or hand-stacked concrete. Now Florida, Texas, New York, and even the Midwest were beginning to have pool companies move in, mostly from California.

In the 1960s, the boom continued, with low unemployment and a good economy. Motels continued to put pools in people’s minds, and the application process of gunite continued to improve. The 1960s are credited with PVC plumbing, pool skimmers, manufactured pool main drains, underwater lights, kool deck, and vinyl-liner pools. But the biggest advancement for this decade was the shapes of pools, which were becoming more freeform than the rectangle pool that preceded it.

Here below is a set of beautiful postcards that shows what swimming pools of Florida hotels looked like in the 1950s and 1960s.