A Dive into Charles McAfee’s Beloved Modernist Swimming Pool

Architect Charles McAfee has always aimed to serve his community in Wichita, Kansas, where he has lived and worked for almost all his 90 years.

There was the time he lobbied Wichita City Hall to rename what would become McAdams Park after Emerson McAdams, a former city cop and the neighborhood park’s first director, who had cut the grass and raked the sand so that children would have a beautiful place to play. Or the time McAfee opened a manufacturing plant that provided jobs and full-time healthcare for 50 people.

So in 2017 it felt fitting when his community rallied together for him.

A municipal swimming pool McAfee had designed in 1969 at McAdams Park was facing closure due to slowing attendance and budget shortfalls. A group of local supporters (dubbing themselves the “Women Warriors”) quickly formed the Save McAdams Pool coalition to protect the architect’s creation. Due to their activism, the city promptly changed course and preserved the water complex, ultimately renaming it in McAfee’s honor.

And last June the Getty Foundation, in collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, awarded a grant to the City of Wichita to conserve the pool through Getty’s Conserving Black Modernism initiative, an effort to elevate and preserve the work of Black modernist designers and architects in the United States.

“The extraordinary contributions of our nation’s Black architects and designers to the modern movement have been overlooked for too long,” says Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation. “These grants prioritize the preservation of buildings that speak to the experiences of Black communities and shed light on the talents and resilience of Black architects in 20th-century America.”

Through the partnership with the National Trust, Getty provided $1.2 million to fund preservation efforts at eight modernist sites across the country—churches, a civic building, a university, a cultural center, and the pool—with another round of grants to be announced next year. The grants are part of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, created in 2017 and dedicated to preserving sites of African American activism and achievement.

“We must address the invisibility of generations of Black architects whose architectural genius, creativity, and ingenuity helped shape our national understanding of modernism,” says Brent Leggs, executive director of the Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust. “With Getty, the Action Fund will further demonstrate the power of historic preservation as a tool for increased recognition, interpretation, and protection of the physical sites representing Black achievement.”

A Modernist Pool for Modern Times

The newly renamed Charles McAfee Pool represents another of the architect’s efforts to serve others—a safe, built-to-last pool for a historically Black community that had previously been denied access to recreational facilities due to segregation.

“McAdams Park was always very important to me, as it was the only park Black people could attend when I was growing up,” says McAfee, who still remembers playing there with neighborhood kids. “When I got the chance to build the pool, I used materials that were going to last forever. Mostly concrete columns and brick walls that I knew couldn’t easily be destroyed.”

Today, the pool stands with much of its original design intact, and its concrete and brick have become iconic markers of more than just endurability. They are a testament to McAfee’s progressive modern design.

A design movement that took shape worldwide from the early 1900s through the 1980s, modernism reflected aspirations for a better way of living in response to global technological and social change. Modern architects embraced experimental materials, including reinforced concrete, glass, and steel, and innovative concepts, such as open floor plans, curtain walls, and asymmetric shapes, to expand what was possible with the built form.

One of the first African Americans to graduate with an architecture degree (in 1958) from the University of Nebraska, McAfee was an enthusiastic adoptee of modernism and went on to win numerous accolades, including the American Institute of Architects Kansas Chapter Excellence in Architecture Award and the Federal Housing Administration’s First Honor Award. He applied modernism’s minimalist ethos and dictum that “form follows function” with his clean-lined, L-shaped Wichita pool.

McAfee knew that many local schoolchildren didn’t know how to swim and that they had never competed in swimming races, so he designed the length of the lanes to meet competition regulations. The pool helped introduce young people to the idea of swimming as sport and became the first in the state where African Americans could practice laps at competition length.

Next to the pool, McAfee erected concrete light towers for night swimming and double sandblasted concrete shade structures where poolgoers could find respite from the sun as it moved through the columns. A nearby pool house composed of concrete and brick offered guests a streamlined place to shower and change.

“Everything that you see is modular. The concrete, the brickwork…there is no cut brick because everything aligns perfectly,” McAfee says. “It’s the discipline that you notice when you walk into the pool area. The lines in the concrete are lined up with the columns. You must have personal discipline so that there’s no waste.”

“The Heartbeat of the Area”

With Getty grant support, these features and McAfee’s original designs will become the focus of historical research and be enveloped into a preservation plan that emphasizes both cyclical maintenance and long-term care. The City of Wichita also plans to make crucial yet sensitive renovations to the pool house locker rooms, including modifications to align with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 that will protect the integrity of McAfee’s vision and legacy.

“There is a lot of energy around the pool, and it really is the heartbeat of the area,” says Tim Kellams, principal planner and landscape architect at the City of Wichita, who will manage the preservation plan process. “The pool helps the community stay connected and grow, especially during summertime, when the surrounding park becomes the epicenter of Juneteenth celebrations.”

The City of Wichita preservation planner, Christina Rieth, is leading the charge to get the pool listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This designation could help the site receive federal preservation tax credits under the National Park Service.

“My father’s pool is such an exciting facility, and it doesn’t look like anything else that was ever built—he was very much ahead of his time and deserves to get recognized,” says Cheryl McAfee, Charles McAfee’s eldest daughter and CEO of McAfee³ Architects, Charles’s firm (renamed to include representation of his daughters). Both Cheryl and her sister, Charyl McAfee-Duncan, have become accomplished architects and leaders at the firm and within their communities. “What Getty has done with its Conserving Black Modernism initiative is prevent valuable cultural heritage by my father and other African American architects from being destroyed.”

The fate of many modern buildings is far from certain, particularly those by Black architects and designers whose work has long gone underrecognized—as the near loss of the McAfee Pool shows.

“We invited the community to express their interest in the pool’s future,” says Mary Dean, a Wichita resident since 1979 and member of the Save McAdams Pool group. She and other engaged citizens attended City Hall meetings when the pool was on the agenda and advocated against its closure. “Well, guess what? Five hundred people brought their children out to McAdams Park to play games, eat food, and declare that, yes, they wanted that pool to stay open.”

“The city heard them loud and clear, this place is cherished,” says Kellams, who remembers the excitement when the city council voted to save the swimming pool. That decision led to a slew of important site improvements and repairs that culminated in 2021. But another of McAfee’s buildings, the Wichita Eagle Newspaper headquarters (which McAfee had remodeled and expanded in the late 1960s), was not so fortunate. In 2017 it was demolished by the building’s new corporate owners, demonstrating the need for concerted efforts to save Black-designed structures.

“If Black contributions to history are not preserved, spoken about, written about, and learned, then we’ll lose them—and Black contributions don’t just need to exist, they need to be elevated,” says Cheryl, the first African American woman to receive an architecture license in the state of Kansas. She also served as the first female president of the National Organization of Minority Architects, and along with Charyl, has fervently advocated for minority female representation in the American Institute of Architects. “People of color are now aspiring to become architects, but they’ve never seen a Black architect or a female person of African descent who’s an architect,” she says. “They need to see people who look like them.”

The McAfee family is changing that. From Charles’s affordable housing designs to Cheryl’s spearheading of the sports venues for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta to Charyl’s renovations of the Samuell-Grand Recreation Center and Tennis Center in Dallas—where Arthur Ashe secured a US victory over Mexico in the Davis Cup America Zone final in 1965—the McAfee family offers a profound example of architectural leadership.

For Charles, it all goes back to the pool, and to Wichita. “The pool just evolved into the next project, and the next project, and the next project...my dedication to this community has been my whole life.”

Today the pool has resurged in popularity and is open seven days a week. “There are a lot of smiles, and it’s the perfect place for people in the community to learn to swim,” says Charyl.