For six years, a Piedmont summer had a hole in the middle of it. The old community pool closed during the pandemic and stayed closed, and swim teams, lesson families, and casual lap swimmers scattered across the Bay Area to keep their routines going. Some drove to St. Mary's College in Moraga. Some crossed to Emeryville. Some ended up at what is now Northeastern's Mills College campus. A town that measures roughly 1.7 square miles had its aquatic life outsourced to other zip codes.
That ended on April 11, 2026, when Mayor Betsy Smegal Andersen cut the ribbon on the new Piedmont Community Pool. The interesting question this summer is not whether the pool is nice. It is how quickly the rest of the calendar is rearranging itself around a walkable civic anchor that was missing for the better part of a decade.
The Facility Is Not a Like-for-Like Replacement
The most useful way to read the new pool is against the one it replaced, not against a generic municipal aquatic center.
| Feature | Old Pool | New Community Pool |
|---|---|---|
| Competition pool | Shallow enough that water polo teams had to stand | Deeper, letting both teams do the eggbeater |
| Lap lanes | Limited | 12 lanes, 27 meters, with a separate diving well |
| Activity pool | None comparable | Warm-water activity pool with three lap lanes and zero-depth entry |
| Energy source | Gas-heated | All-electric, one of only two public all-electric pools in California |
| Total footprint | Baseline | Twice the size of the pool it replaced |
Going all-electric was driven by the city's Climate Action Plan, with heat pumps funded in part by a no-interest loan from Ava Community Energy. The practical translation for residents: a warm-water pool that stays warm without a gas bill attached, and a competition pool that finally lets Piedmont High and Piedmont Middle water polo train on their own side of the street rather than borrowing pool time from other districts. The facility sits directly across from both schools, which means students on swim team or in aquatic P.E. can walk across the street.
That last detail is the one worth sitting with. Piedmont is small enough that a single civic building can reshape foot traffic patterns. Moving the pool back into town, next to the schools, doesn't just save drive time. It reopens the possibility of a kid finishing a lesson at 4:15 and being home before dinner without a parent in a car.
The Pass Math Is Where Residents Are Actually Deciding
From April 11 through April 30, everyone swam for $5 per visit, which was the city's way of letting households test the water before committing. That window is closed. What is open now, and what shapes the summer, is the pass structure.
Starting May 1, visitors chose between an annual pass, a summer pass, or a drop-in day pass, with the annual pass being the best value for regular swimmers. A few features are worth understanding before you compare options:
- The system uses a build-a-pass model: pick a base pass (Adult, Senior, or Family) and add household members as needed.
- Resident base rates run 40% below non-resident rates.
- Resident annual passes come with priority registration for aquatics programs, including summer swim lessons, and early access to facility rentals.
- Resident annual pass sales opened March 24 through the City's Aquatics registration portal at rec.us/piedmont, with no limit on annual pass sales.
The design choice here is subtle but consequential. Piedmont didn't gate access with a single household tier. It let a two-parent, one-teenager household pay for a smaller pass than a five-person household would, which lowers the friction for people who were only occasional swimmers before the closure and are still rebuilding the habit.
What Andersen Said, and Why It Matters for July and August
"I'm very passionate that everybody have the opportunity to learn how to swim. I think it's a life skill, especially living in the Bay Area so close to the water."
The regional-destination framing is the piece that changes how a resident should think about June, July, and August. If lessons draw in families from outside Piedmont, the pool becomes a busier, more programmed place than the old one ever was, and the smart move is to plan around the schedule rather than showing up on instinct.
Limited space for open swim in the Activity Pool became available by reservation only on Monday through Thursday evenings and weekend mornings starting Saturday, June 20. The Activity Pool is reserved for swim lessons from 4 to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 12:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, with limited open swim during those blocks by advance registration only. When capacity is reached, priority goes to annual passholders.
If you took away one operational fact for the next two months, that would be it. A drop-in mindset works for the competition pool in the morning. The warm-water pool at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday is a reservation game.
The Weekly Rhythm That Is Rebuilding Itself
The pool is the biggest change in a Piedmont summer, but it is not the whole summer. What's interesting is how the rest of the calendar clicks into place around it.
Camps at 358 Hillside. The Piedmont Recreation Department opened its 2026 lineup with the earliest summer registration date the department has ever offered, with resident registration opening at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, February 3 and non-resident registration a week later. Camp Everything runs 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with free early drop-off starting at 8:30 a.m., and weekly field trips this year after popular trips to the Oakland Zoo and Alameda County Fair last year. Adaptive programming through the Sidekicks program expanded to five full-day camps this summer, up from one last year, including a new "Mindful Movement" camp in partnership with NeuroAffirm. The camps at 358 Hillside end within a five-minute walk of the pool, which is not an accident.
Piedmont Center for the Arts on Magnolia. The Center's summer calendar reads like a small jazz festival tucked into a residential block. Its 2026 season includes an "in the tradition" trio Harry Warren tribute on July 12, a Richard Rodgers tribute on August 9, Nathan and Jessie's jazzy folk set on August 13, and a Leyland/Coots boogie-woogie evening on August 14. Two of those fall in one August week, which is the kind of programming density that lets a household plan a summer night out without leaving Piedmont.
Mulberry's on Highland. Mulberry's Market has been operating on Highland Avenue since 2007 as the neighborhood store for groceries, coffee, sandwiches, and prepared dinners. It sits at 335 Highland Avenue between Oakland and Vista. The market's role in a pool summer is the boring, essential one: the sandwich you pick up before an afternoon swim, the coffee before a 6 a.m. lap session, the prepared dinner on a night that ran long at Hillside.
PRD special events at 801 Magnolia. The department's adult-oriented evening events are held at 801 Magnolia Avenue in the Main Room, designed as a fusion of adult socializing and entertainment. Registration runs through PRD's CommunityPass website, and advance registration is recommended for PRD Special Events.
Read together, these aren't four disconnected updates. They are four points inside roughly a one-mile radius that a Piedmont household can now string together into a single Saturday: 8 a.m. lap swim at the competition pool, coffee and pastry at Mulberry's, an afternoon at the activity pool with the kids, dinner from the prepared case, an 8 p.m. concert at Piedmont Center for the Arts.
The Practical Note Nobody Tells You
Two things trip up families who assume this summer will run like a normal municipal-pool summer.
The first is the reservation layer. Evening activity-pool time and weekend mornings sit behind advance registration. Building the reservation window into the household calendar the same way you would a doctor's appointment is worth doing once and reusing all summer.
The second is capacity. The city has said priority for admission goes to annual passholders when the pool approaches capacity. On a hot Saturday in mid-July, that means the drop-in day pass strategy that worked in April may not get a family through the gate. For households that plan to swim more than once a week, the annual pass is doing double duty: it's a price break and a queue-jumping mechanism.
Why This Reshapes the Sense of Living Here
Piedmont has always been the kind of town where residents describe the geography by walking distance rather than driving distance. Losing the pool broke that habit for anyone with a swimmer in the household. Getting it back, and getting it back in a form that is bigger, warmer, and better placed than the one it replaced, is the sort of civic change that shows up in the small decisions people don't consciously notice: whether a Saturday plan involves a car, whether a July evening ends at home or three blocks from home, whether a summer feels like Piedmont or like a series of trips out of Piedmont.
If you have been thinking about what the next chapter of life in this neighborhood looks like, or how a change like this affects the way you use and value your home, The Knapp Team would welcome the conversation. Reach out for a private consultation or request a free home valuation whenever the timing is right.
