The oval pool above ground in Moores Park is the oldest of its kind

Most public pools are a hole in the ground. The one tucked into Moores Park, on the bluff above the Grand River in south Lansing, is the opposite — a big oval tank that sits up out of the earth, ringed in fieldstone, so you climb stairs to reach the water instead of steps down into it. It looks a little like a stone spaceship that landed in a city park, and there’s a good reason it looks like nothing else nearby: this is the first one ever built.

Wesley Bintz was Lansing’s city engineer in the early 1920s, and he had an idea. Dig a pool into the ground and you have to fight groundwater and pay to haul out all that dirt. Build it above ground instead, as a sealed oval shell, and you save the digging — plus you can tuck dressing rooms and mechanical space right underneath the pool deck. He drew it up in 1922, and the city poured the prototype in Moores Park in 1923. It worked so well that Bintz left municipal work and spent the next decades selling the design. Towns from Michigan to the East Coast built their own “Bintz pools” off his template.

Dozens were built. Many are gone now. The one in Moores Park is the oldest that’s still standing and still filling with water every summer, which is why it carries a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Generations of Lansing kids learned to swim in it, and the neighborhood is fierce about keeping it open — restoration work has gone into the old shell rather than letting the city pour a flat modern replacement.

Stand at the top of the stairs on a July afternoon and you’re looking down into the original — the pool every other Bintz pool was copied from.