Why is the Queen Mary’s swimming pool closed to the public? Many people claim it's because
the room is structurally unsound, and is collapsing into the turbo generator room
below. But that isn’t exactly the truth, the real reason is a bit more interesting.
First, lemme give a little background about the pool.
The RMS Queen Mary held her maiden voyage in May of 1936, she was one of the premier ocean
liners of her time, ferrying passengers across the North Atlantic between the United States
to England and Europe. Part of what made her luxurious was her two swimming pools.
There was a more modest swimming pool near the stern of the ship for second-class passengers,
but the real bragging point was her first-class pool. The room stands two decks high,
with a wrap-around upper balcony that leads to a dual staircase descending onto the main floor.
The pool itself is not very large by today’s standards, but you have to remember the ship
rolled when at sea, and having a large body of water sloshing about wasn’t exactly safe,
so this pool was the right size for its intended purpose. Some of the key features of this room are
its wall-to-wall glazed tiles, built-in drinking fountains, and spectacular faux mother-of-pearl
ceiling reflecting the ambient light with iridescent sparkles. The pool once featured a
slide and two diving boards, although the diving boards were eventually removed because the pool
simply wasn’t deep enough for diving, nor were the boards safe to stand on when the ship rolled.
An interesting thing about it too, was that the pool didn’t use chlorinated water, but rather
clean salt water that was produced by filtering seawater in the water-softening plant of the ship.
After World War II, they allowed third-class passengers to use it during specific times of
the day because the third-class didn’t have a pool of their own. When the pool time was over,
it could be drained, filtered, and the tank refilled, all in a matter of 30 minutes while
the stewards cleaned and prepared the room for the arrival of first-class passengers.
Now, the Queen Mary was retired from its transatlantic service in 1967 and was
subsequently sold to the City of Long Beach to be used as a hotel and museum. During that time
many of the ship’s original parts and fittings were removed, such as the ship’s boilers and
generators. The tank of the first class pool sits directly over the forward turbo-generator room,
to get the generators out, they cut an opening in the watertight bulkhead bordering boiler room 2,
and then dragged the pieces out the funnel hatch. They never repaired the bulkhead, instead leaving
it with a big hole in the center. And it's this big hole that everyone seems to focus
on when it comes to the issue of the swimming pool, but we’ll come back to that in a second.
The Queen Mary Hotel offered tours of the ship, and one of the stops on the various tours was a
quick walk-around of the first-class pool. Back then they still kept the pool filled with water,
although it was chlorinated and left to sit there every day for over two decades.
After years of age, some of the tiles on the walls would come loose and sometimes break off.
For a while, maintenance kept up with it pretty well, but the tiles couldn’t be replaced with
exact replicas, so cheap modern look-alikes were used, which stand out when photographed.
But there soon came another issue, I haven’t found out exactly when it started, but tour guides would
notice the water level in the pool would slowly drop. But the issue wasn’t initially taken very
seriously, so they just kept topping off the pool whenever the water level was too low.
Soon, people started to notice the main floor around the room was sagging in certain places, the
floor plates buckled and bent under stress. Tile work along the edge of the pool and running up the
pillars and walls began to crack and break away. By the time Disney took over the ship in the late
80s, they inspected the pool to figure out the problem and ultimately it was decided
by maintenance that the pool tank simply could no longer support the weight of the water. So
the pool was drained. And Disney didn’t want folks to see an empty pool so they had water
mist effects installed in the pool tank, keeping the tank constantly filled with a cloud of fog.
To install these effects they had to drill right through the tile lining of the pool. You see, the
pool tank was made of riveted steel plates, that were covered in thousands of tiny glazed bricks.
To reiterate, the pool was lined not with glazed tiles, but with glazed brick.
The mist effects leaked water into the pool tank, leaving a small puddle of water that eventually
developed algae and moss and continued to rot away at the steel tank. To cover up the damage,
the glazed tile was coated in cheap blue swimming pool paint. This made the pool look new again from
a distance and temporarily slowed the leak, but it also covered up the underlying issues.
Before Disney abandoned the Queen Mary in 1992, an inspection was performed on the room. The effects
of the warped main floor and the deteriorating shape of the room were cause for concern. You see,
by this point, people had assumed that the hole in the watertight bulkhead of the generator room
below, was weakening the structure holding up the pool, causing this warping that was now prominent.
But that wasn’t the case, the bulkhead was still flat and true. And the deck girders running the
length of the floor are still intact. So if there are no signs of warping or stress from
below…why is the pool room in such bad shape? To understand what happened you must look at
how the pool was built. It starts with a steel basin referred to as the cofferdam, it’s perfectly
rectangular in shape, and it is supported by the steel beams and bulkhead walls below.
Within this cofferdam, they constructed a smaller pool tank that holds the water,
again it is made of steel and lined with small glazed bricks fitted in place with grout.
The walls of the cofferdam are held in place with steel webbing which is essentially just small
steel I-beams. After the ship came to Long Beach they removed the steward's lavatory on D Deck,
but for some reason, they also removed the steel webbing in that particular area and the weight
of the pool water pushed against the bulkhead deforming it. We’ll come back to that later.
In 1990, when an inspector went inside the cofferdam he saw that there were several highly
corroded beams of lumber supporting the bottom of the pool tank. While at Long Beach the pool
had a very slow leak that was now rotting away the lumber. The resulting loss of support caused the
inner lining of the pool to sag, the sagging pulled inwards on the walls of the pool tank.
The combination of the missing bulkhead webbing and the sagging pool tank started to deform the
deck plates on both levels of the pool room. Now to my understanding, the deformed plates
along the floors and bulkheads are not part of the structural support of the ship. They instead
are wrapped over the supports. The pillar for instance is likely a structural steel cylinder
on the inside, with a steel wrapping that creates the decorative square prism we see.
So in other words, just because the steel plates are deformed doesn’t mean the structural support
of the ship is compromised. The Queen Mary was designed very well, to the point that you could
replace virtually any part on the ship without detriment to the integrity of the framework.
The bad news is the pool tank is so rotten, a person could potentially fall through it under
their own weight. Thankfully though, the cofferdam below is still in decent
shape and would prevent the person from plunging far down into the generator room.
With the tank now warped, the glazed brick lining has started to pull away, taking some of the tile
work on the pillars and walls with it, and ruining the tiles along the edge of the pool.
On rare occasions, passing tourists would pull loose tiles or fittings from the walls,
taking them as souvenirs. In 2018, the decision was made
that until the room could be properly preserved, it was to remain closed.
This closure had re-ignited the rumors that the room was sagging because of the hole in the boiler
room bulkhead below. Now to settle this once and for all, yes, there is a hole in the bulkhead,
however, the flat steel plates of the bulkhead do not bare any loads, it is the incorporated steel
beams that support the weight of the decks above. The people who cut the hole understood this,
and only cut holes in the bulkheads between the support beams. Believe it or not, the ship was
designed to handle having holes in its watertight bulkheads because this is how the boilers were
moved around and installed in 1936 when they were lowered down through the funnel shafts.
And the bulkhead below is still holding up the pool room just fine. It was the bowing
of the pool tank itself that caused the deformed walking paths in the pool room. The steel floors
stretched and warped a little, but they are not in danger of collapsing because the steel beams
supporting them are still intact. If you don’t believe me, then you can take a tour
of the generator room below and look up, you will see the steelwork is all still in order.
So now you might wonder what will need to be done in order to reopen the room.
Well thankfully the repairs are a simple concept, but it's the expense that stands in the way.
First, the old pool tank will need to be removed, and a replica put in place. Then the deformed
plates surrounding the pool will either need to be hammered down or replaced altogether.
Once that is done, a skilled craftsman will have to be located, one that can closely
replicate the very specific color and texture of the tile work along the walls and pillars.
That might sound simple, but it would be the most expensive and time-consuming task
the room will need, because you can’t just slap on store-bought tiles, or else it won’t match.
I have done a lot of research into this subject to bring you the most accurate info that I could,
I have combed through inspection reports, observed the generator room underneath the pool,
talked to employees of the ship, and even got in contact with some
insiders who could better explain the situation to me. And after all of this,
I realized that while yes, the swimming pool was warping, it just wasn’t collapsing in the
catastrophic way people think it is, nor for the reason people believed it was.
To my knowledge, the damage that was done has been halted since the pool is no longer holding water,
and the room is no longer available for tours. While repairs to the room are not yet on the
to-do list, we can rest assured that at least the damage will not worsen. Long Beach is fully
aware of how important that swimming pool is to the ship’s visitation and tourism, and it is
definitely on their priority list of repairs that must be done when the funding comes in for it.
Since last year, Long Beach has been faithfully repairing and restoring the Queen Mary. It’s
a seemingly unending task to do so, but the results so far show that the old ocean liner
has seen a tourist boom since she reopened back in April of this year, and the visitation is
only expected to increase as more of the ship is repaired and opened up. The Queen is in the
midst of a sort of renaissance, the likes of which we are just barely getting a taste of.
For now, let’s all hope that soon the day will come when we can all observe Queen Mary’s
First-Class pool room again in its full glory, and possibly, that volunteers can get involved
to help aid in the ship’s overall restoration. My channel also provides updates every 2-3 months
of the ship’s repair progress, look for the link in the description of the video for the
latest update. What are your thoughts on Queen Mary’s First Class Pool Room? Leave a comment below!
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