For six years, if you wanted your kid on a swim team in Piedmont, you drove somewhere else. St. Mary's College. Emeryville. What used to be Mills College and is now Northeastern's Mills College campus. The Piedmont Community Pool had been closed since the pandemic, and the water polo and swim teams that once used it were borrowing lanes across the Bay Area just to practice, according to KTVU's coverage of this spring's reopening.
That ended on April 11. And the way it ended is the reason this fall's calendar in Piedmont looks different from any fall in recent memory. Not because the city added more events. Because it finally has a piece of infrastructure that can hold them.
Six Years of Borrowed Water
The old pool dated back to 1964. When it closed, Piedmont lost the one shared facility that could anchor a season, not just a Sunday. Mayor Betsy Andersen described what that scarcity did to competitive play at the ribbon cutting in April, telling KTVU that in the old pool, water polo players had to stand through matches because there wasn't enough depth. The new one changes that math directly.
"Now the competition pool is deep enough that both teams can do the egg beater," Andersen said.
That's not a small distinction if you have a kid on the team. It's the difference between a facility that technically exists and one that actually works.
What $35 Million Actually Bought
The rebuilt complex, covered by the San Francisco Chronicle as the largest capital project in city history, doubled the competition pool from six lanes to twelve. The new tank runs 27 meters with a diving well. Next to it sits a separate warm-water activity pool, more than 3,100 square feet, with zero-depth entry and three lap lanes for lessons and casual swimming.
Both pools run on electric heat pumps instead of gas, funded in part through a no-interest loan from Ava Community Energy. That makes the Piedmont Community Pool one of only two all-electric municipal aquatic facilities in California, the other being Mountain View's Rengstorff Park Aquatics Center, which opened about a year earlier.
The complex sits at the corner of Magnolia and Bonita, directly across the street from Piedmont High and Piedmont Middle, which means students walk to swim PE instead of boarding a bus. A community fundraiser brought in more than $2 million from roughly 200 donors to help close the funding gap, which is why the competition pool now carries a donor's name, the Settlemier Family Competition Pool, alongside the Ellis Family Pavilion and the Smegal Family Poolside Room.
None of that would matter to a fall calendar on its own. What matters is what the city decided to do with a facility that finally has room to spare.
The Two Events That Only Exist Because the Pool Does
Look at the Piedmont Recreation Department's official pool schedule for this September and October and two entries stand out because neither one existed as a program before this year. On Saturday, September 19, the pool held its first Cardboard Boat Build & Race. On Saturday, October 24, it will host a Pumpkin Dive, the event most residents know as the Floating Pumpkin Patch, where kids dive into the activity pool to pick a floating pumpkin.
Neither event is a tradition getting bigger. Both are new, and both required a pool that could absorb a Saturday's worth of families building cardboard boats or hunting pumpkins without displacing the lap swimmers and the water polo teams who depend on the same water. A six-lane pool closed for repair every time a birthday party or a school group showed up. A twelve-lane pool with a separate activity tank has the slack to do both at once.
That's the mechanism worth understanding if you live here. The fall calendar didn't get busier because the Recreation Department decided to add more programming for its own sake. It got busier because the facility underneath it changed first, and the calendar is catching up to what the building can now support.
The Older Pattern the Pool Slotted Into
None of this replaces what Piedmont already had. It stacks on top of it, and this year the stacking is unusually tight.
Food Truck Fridays already opened the season at Piedmont Park on August 21 and returned on September 18, now starting at 5 p.m. after the city moved the start time earlier this fall, a change Piedmont Exedra reported came after families with younger kids said the previous slot ran too late on a school night. One more Food Truck Friday remains on the calendar for October 16.
This Friday, September 25, at 7:15 p.m., the park hosts Movie in the Park, screening "Elio," sponsored by the Piedmont Cub Scouts. Two days later, on Sunday, September 27, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the city runs its 28th annual Harvest Festival, the anchor event of the season.
The Harvest Festival hasn't changed its bones. There's still an Edibles Contest, open to anyone who grows or bakes something worth entering, with labeled entries dropped off at Piedmont Community Hall between 7:30 and 10 a.m. that Sunday morning. Scarecrow Alley still runs as a school-class project, built each year around a different theme. The Art Show still sets up around the Tea House next to Community Hall. And the Farmer's Market has expanded this year to include vegetable starts, cut flowers, local honey, and skincare products alongside its produce stalls.
The carnival, run by the Piedmont Education Foundation, sells wristbands in advance through PiedmontStore.org, with proceeds benefiting three of Piedmont's elementary schools: Beach, Havens, and Wildwood.
What's Left Between Now and Halloween
Three dates on this season's calendar are already behind us: Food Truck Friday on August 21, Food Truck Friday again on September 18, and the pool's first Cardboard Boat Build & Race on September 19. Four more are still ahead.
| Date | Event | Where | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept 25 | Movie in the Park: "Elio" | Piedmont Park | 7:15 p.m. |
| Sept 27 | 28th Annual Harvest Festival | Piedmont Park | 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. |
| Oct 16 | Food Truck Friday | Piedmont Park | 5 p.m. |
| Oct 24 | Pumpkin Dive (Floating Pumpkin Patch) | Community Pool | See pool schedule |
Seven dates across two venues over nine weeks, four of them still on the calendar as of this week. If you already live within walking distance of either address, that's most of your remaining fall weekend planning done for you.
Why the Park Ends Up Doing This Work
Here's the part that explains why this pattern exists in Piedmont specifically, and not in most East Bay towns of similar size.
Piedmont is almost entirely zoned for single-family residential use, with a housing stock that leaves little room for the kind of business district that anchors a typical town calendar. The city provides its own fire, police, parks, and recreation services, but it doesn't have its own library or post office, sharing those with Oakland. Its population sits at roughly 11,270 residents as of the 2020 census, according to Wikipedia's entry on the city, with almost no commercial core to speak of.
A city built like that doesn't get a town square from Main Street storefronts hosting sidewalk sales or a merchants' association running a festival to drive foot traffic. It has to build that shared space somewhere else. In Piedmont, that somewhere else has always been Piedmont Park, Community Hall, and now, for the first time in six years, a Community Pool built with enough capacity to hold new events instead of just replacing the old ones.
That's the actual story behind this fall's calendar. It's not that Piedmont suddenly got busier. It's that the piece of civic infrastructure doing the heaviest lifting, the pool at Magnolia and Bonita, finally caught up to the job the rest of the calendar has always needed it to do.
If you're weighing what your own next chapter in Piedmont looks like, whether that means staying in a home you love or exploring what else this small city and its neighbors have to offer, Anastasia Levitansky knows this market from the inside out. Schedule a strategy consultation to talk through what's actually happening on your street, not just on the calendar.
