Walk down Rocky Shore Drive on a Thursday evening in June and you can hear where the neighborhood has gone. Not to the pool. The pool is a fenced construction site with rebar showing. The sound is coming from the other end of Lower City Park, where a 470-seat wooden theater modeled on London's Globe is running a free production of A Midsummer Night's Dream four nights a week.
For a neighborhood whose civic identity has run through the oak-shaded pool bathhouse since 1949, the summer of 2026 is a strange one. The pool that anchored generations of Manville Heights childhoods is closed for a second consecutive year. The stage a hundred yards away is doing the work of holding the block together.
The Pool That Isn't Opening (Again)
On June 5, 2026, the City confirmed what neighbors on McLean and Lexington had been quietly bracing for. City Park Pool, closed since the 2024 season, will not open in 2026 either. The new target is 2027, and the reasons cited were weather, site conditions, and supplier delays.
The scale of what's being built helps explain the schedule slippage. The City Council awarded a $13,695,400 construction contract to City Construction of Iowa City in April 2025, part of a project whose total anticipated cost reaches roughly $18 million once design, furnishings, and equipment are counted. The design by Williams Architects, MMS Consultants, IMEG, and Hitchcock Design Group replaces the old single basin with three: a 5,197-square-foot leisure pool with play features, a six-lane 50-meter lap pool with ramp and stair entries, and a diving well with two low boards and a high board plus a climbing wall. The bathhouse is being rebuilt with a year-round community room.
For context on what the neighborhood is losing during the wait, the pool that closed had been operating since 1949, designed by local engineer Edward "Ned" Ashton. Before it was demolished, the old basin was leaking roughly five million gallons a year through cracked joints. Refurbishing it had been estimated at about $10 million, with more repairs looming inside a decade, which is why the Council voted for a full rebuild rather than a patch.
None of that is a comfort in July. What it means on the ground for anyone who lives inside the walking radius is a second summer of driving to Mercer, Coralville, or North Liberty for open swim, and a second summer of watching one of the neighborhood's two civic anchors sit behind fencing.
The Festival Stage Picks Up The Slack
The other anchor is having an unusually good year.
Riverside Theatre's A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Adam Knight and sponsored by ImOn Communications, ran June 12 through June 28, 2026, at the Riverside Festival Stage in Lower City Park. Every performance was free. No reservation was required. The show ran Thursday through Sunday evenings at 7:30 p.m., and audiences were told to arrive early to claim a seat on the 470-seat wooden benches. The Festival Stage is available May 1 through October 1 each year, and the season typically fills those months with weddings, concerts, and rentals in addition to the Shakespeare production.
The stage itself is worth naming for what it is. The City owns and rents the facility, which was Riverside Theatre's original idea and was endorsed by the Parks and Recreation Commission and the City Council before construction. It is modeled on the Globe in Southwark. It has a stage, two dressing rooms, and a concession stand. Rental runs $75 an hour for the stage and dressing rooms, or $100 an hour with the concession stand added, with a refundable deposit of $250 or $500 depending on whether alcohol is served.
That combination of free professional theater and rentable civic space is doing a specific kind of work this summer. When the pool bathhouse would normally be the neighborhood's summer clubhouse, the stage is functioning as the substitute. The concession runs on show nights. The lawn between the stage and the river fills with blankets from about 6:45 onward. Actors are not amplified, which means the audience adjusts by moving closer as dusk sets in, and the whole thing has the quality of a block party that happens to contain Shakespeare.
The Walking Radius Is Still The Point
The reason people bought into Manville Heights in the first place has not changed, even with the pool dark. Almost everything that made the neighborhood work in April still works in July, on foot or by bike.
- UIHC and the VA. A pedestrian bridge connects the neighborhood to the VA Hospital, and a tunnel connects the VA to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. For a physician or nurse whose shift starts at 7 a.m., the commute is a walk, not a drive.
- Hancher Auditorium. Immediately east of the former marching band practice field, Hancher's summer programming and lawn are inside a five-minute stroll from most of the neighborhood's east side.
- Finkbine Golf Course. Adjacent to the west, with 18 public holes and a driving range, functioning as an accidental extension of the neighborhood's green space.
- Trader Joe's. One mile northwest, close enough to be the default grocery for a household that would rather not drive to Coralville.
- The 2nd Street corridor. A short trip crosses into a compact stretch of Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, and West African restaurants, plus Global Mart at 2nd and 1st Avenue.
- The Iowa River trail. Along the northern edge of the neighborhood, running through City Park itself and connecting north toward the Peninsula and south to downtown.
- The Riverside Festival Stage. The point of this post. The neighborhood's shared summer room, currently doubling as its cultural center.
The Cambus system, which is free and runs on the University's schedule, threads through the same radius. For a neighborhood where more than four in ten residents walk to work, the pool closure is a genuine loss but not a structural one.
What A Vacant Field And A Full Theater Have In Common
There is a second civic conversation happening on Manville Heights land this year that most residents already know about. West of Hancher, on the site of the former Hawkeye marching band practice field, the University has been talking with the neighborhood about a 7.8-acre redevelopment that would also absorb the vacant Parklawn Residence Hall. University Business Manager David Kieft and Senior Vice President Rod Lehnertz have told neighbors the project will be "residential in character" and low-rise, closer to two stories than four, and the ideas floated at the neighborhood meeting ranged from senior living to keeping much of the parcel green.
Read alongside the pool rebuild, the practice-field conversation says something specific about the neighborhood's next decade. Two of the largest institutional land parcels touching Manville Heights are being redesigned at the same time, both with input from the people who live around them, and both with completion dates well into the future. The Festival Stage's success this summer is a small reminder of why that input matters. Civic infrastructure in this neighborhood, when it is done well, becomes the thing the block gathers around. When it is done poorly, it becomes a fence with rebar showing through.
For A Resident, The Summer Reads Like This
A Manville Heights summer in 2026 is not the summer anyone planned for. Nobody who bought a house on Ferson Avenue in 2019 was picturing a second July without the pool. But the neighborhood's design, the pedestrian bridge, the Cambus, the trail along the river, and above all the Festival Stage lit up four nights a week in June, is doing what good neighborhoods do when one piece breaks. The rest carries the weight.
Save the 2027 pool opening as a placeholder on the calendar. In the meantime, the answer to "what are you doing tonight" is a walk to Lower City Park and a blanket on the grass.
If you own in Manville Heights and are weighing what the next two summers of construction, redevelopment, and neighborhood change mean for the value of your home, Adam Pretorius works this neighborhood specifically and can talk through the current market with you. Request Your Home Valuation.
