File:Kensington Pool bathhouse, Buffalo, New York - 20211228.jpg

English: The bathhouse at the Kensington Pool, 665 Kensington Avenue at Grider Street, Buffalo, New York, as seen offseason in December 2021. Community leaders had been advocating as early as 1928 for a public swimming pool to be installed in the northeast part of the city: an article that year in the Buffalo Evening News noted that there were already such facilities in use at Riverside and Humboldt Parks, and that four children had recently drowned while swimming in the abandoned Bennett Quarry. However, the project did not come to fruition until 1936, when the Kensington Pool was one of fifteen Works Progress Administration projects approved by the Common Council that year. The swimming complex - which comprised an 11,250-square-foot swimming pool, a 3,000-square-foot diving pool, and a 2,400-square-foot wading pool - was expected to be ready for use by late summer 1937, but delays in excavating the shallow, solid bedrock in the so-called "Jammerthal" section of Buffalo pushed back opening day to July 1938. Architecturally, the building bears some resemblance to the storied "PWA Moderne" style typically used by government-funded public works projects during the Depression, but is comparatively more modestly-scaled and rustic, with a buff brick façade rather than smooth-textured stone or concrete. The circular windows, low massing, prominent horizontal lines, and stylized Classical detailing, however, place the building very much within the Art Moderne sphere. The buildings of the Erie County Medical Center rise in the background.