The Venetian Pool welcomed hundreds of dogs Sunday, and many dressed for the occasion.
Life vests in orange, turquoise and pink camouflage bobbed across the water. One black dog wore a purple flotation vest with a shark fin on its back. A dachshund had one in gray. An Italian greyhound arrived in a skirt patterned with spiderwebs.
For one day, one of Coral Gables’ best-known landmarks belonged to the dogs.
The annual Paws in the Pool, which began in 2009, opened the historic pool at 2701 De Soto Blvd. on Oct. 4 for two sessions. Dogs weighing 30 pounds or less had the water from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Larger dogs followed from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.
Four hundred dog tickets were sold.
That left plenty of room. Venetian Pool holds more than 820,000 gallons of water, or just over 2,000 gallons for every ticketed dog.
The dogs seemed satisfied with the arrangement.
Fetch, flotation and a lot of tennis balls
A beagle in a purple life vest paddled across the turquoise water with a tennis ball clamped in its mouth. After reaching the side, it hauled itself onto the rocky edge without surrendering the ball.
Elsewhere, a curly gray dog in a harness watched from the deck. A corgi in a pink-trimmed vest got a full-body hug from a person sitting at the water’s edge. A French bulldog in pink camouflage posed for a photograph. A curly brown dog stood dripping on the deck, while a wet chocolate Lab waited patiently near the ticket window.
Tennis balls were everywhere — floating in the pool, rolling along the deck and disappearing into dogs’ mouths. Inside the lobby, even the tiled entry fountain had been filled with them beneath a wall of historic photographs showing generations of human swimmers.
People spent almost as much time photographing the dogs as swimming with them. Owners waded alongside their pets, sat with smaller dogs on the stone steps and held up phones whenever something worth preserving happened. Turquoise wristbands circled wrists throughout the pool.
Around the deck, vendors handled some of the day’s less glamorous necessities.
At an Equipaws Pet Services tent, a kiddie pool filled with colorful plastic balls sat beside the table as a woman crouched to shake paws with the Italian greyhound in the spiderweb skirt.
At a drying station beside the iron fence, two women in matching blue shirts worked a blow dryer over a wet terrier stretched across a folding table. Towels and a cooler stood nearby.
A rare exception at a historic pool
The scene was unusual for a place where pets ordinarily are not permitted.
The city requires dogs attending Paws in the Pool to have current rabies vaccinations and to remain leashed when they are out of the water. Owners are responsible for cleaning up after them, and dogs showing aggressive behavior can be asked to leave.
Admission this year was $15 per dog and $12 per person.
The rules appeared to leave plenty of room for chaos of the harmless variety.
Signs along the loggia warned “No diving, shallow water.” The dogs mostly complied. They paddled, chased balls and climbed onto the stone ledges. One dachshund in a shark-fin vest stood guard over a tennis ball on the tiled deck.
The setting made the spectacle more distinctive.
Venetian Pool opened in 1924 as the Venetian Casino, part of George Merrick’s plan for the new city of Coral Gables. Its site had been a coral-rock quarry that supplied material for early buildings and roads. Merrick turned to artist Denman Fink and architect Phineas Paist to transform the excavation into an elaborate public swimming pool.
The result was a lagoon-like pool surrounded by loggias, waterfalls, grottos, palms and Mediterranean-style architecture. Venetian Pool was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.
Its water comes from the Biscayne aquifer, and the 820,000-gallon pool is drained and refilled with fresh water.
For most of the year, those waters belong to human swimmers.
Sunday was different.
Dogs chased tennis balls through the same pool where generations of residents and visitors have swum for more than a century. Some plunged in without hesitation. Others stayed close to their owners. A few seemed content to stand on the deck and watch.
And for six hours, nobody appeared particularly concerned about dog hair in the pool.
