Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/20/mysterious-swimming-pool-found.html
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Place did not seem like a dwelling. Seemed more like an onsen. The upper metal shelves weren’t diving platforms: those were for a giant garden of hanging plants. The stone bench overlook seemed like the only diving area. The three or four shower areas and the benches around the fires looked like sitting areas. My guess is a bath house, not a house that people lived in.
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So it’s basically being sold as a tear-down? Looks like it needs a ton of work even if you want to keep the pool…
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Would probably take 100k or more to redo the inside of that house. What an atrocity, makes me sad that they took a historic home and ruined it
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The only hypothesis that springs to mind is “used by a competitive swimmer/diver to train in alone”. The dwelling is fit for no other purpose, really, unless it was just a rich person’s private spa.
You could maybe turn it into a bathhouse or something, but it seems so inappropriately and dangerously designed. Just imagine yourself as an inspector from the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene checking this place out!
Just filling the damned pool with rubble and concrete is going to be expensive. The economics of fixing this place just to get it to code are a five-figure sum in a neighborhood of $170k houses, and no bank will loan against it until it’s already there.
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Could not tell from the camera swinging around all the time, but could that be a recirculating type “swimming” pool? I know other people that have installed these in their basements so they can “swim” whenever they want, the water just recirculates quickly and they stay in the center of the pool. Not sure why it is so deep though. Perhaps it was stocked with fish?
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Hm. Replace the pool with a giant infinity mirror.
eta: Sorry, the question was “how could you make it weirder?”
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Baltimore, you say…
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Every time the narrator said “someone spent a lot of money on this place” I feel like the camera panned to something crappier and crappier-looking. Was that stair rail made of rebar?
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Post updated with PREVIOUS OWNER
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Eccentricity knows no bounds… I wouldn’t be even a little surprised if there were someone out there who sees that listing and loves it. Of course they’d need deep pockets. I’m guessing the previous owner underestimated how deep they’d need to be – much of the place looks half-finished to me, though some of that might be industrial-chic aesthetic choices.
If it’s a tear-down there will be a ready supply of fill for the pool. Or maybe it could be covered over but not filled, and turned into a basement of sorts. Still best if someone wants to keep the pool, if (big if) it was installed correctly.
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Indoor skate park
Rad!!!
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“Welcome to the Greg Louganis Murder House episode of Murder House!”
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Who declined to comment. My bet is still on onsen, but now I’m raising it to “secret brothel/onsen.”
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I can see a lot of spinoffs here.
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But then the former owner wouldn’t refuse to explain it.
I’m assuming some sort of sexually-oriented bath house.
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Fells Point isn’t particularly run down. Anymore than any historic neighborhood is (Beacon Hill in Baltimore day). There is a new luxury hotel (in what was the police station in the wire) and all of lower Broadway has recently been rebuilt. I used to love on a sailboat in Canton and in the last 5 years it’s changed radically. Probably for the safer but also for the boringer. Definitely more touristy and sanitized then it used to be. But still fun and vibrant and mildly good weird.
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Run down neighborhood? Isn’t Rob from Philadelphia? Would Rob consider Society Hill in Philly “run down”? Would you call Old City in Phildelphia “run down”?
Fells Point is a wonderful urban neighborhood that has seen substantial developement and investment. If you fault it for anything its for being gentrified, but even at that not as much so as the two Philly neighborhoods I mentioned.
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Mr. Aquaman laughed & had no further comment.
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