Everybody In!(The Talk of the Town)(lifeguards)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 30-APR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Judging from the scale of this year's recruitment campaign, it would seem that the city's lifeguard shortage--always a problem--has reached crisis levels. "We have our standards," Liam Kavanagh, the first deputy commissioner of Parks and Recreation, said the other day, of the effort to hire twelve hundred new lifeguards ($11.72 per hour). "We send flyers to the schools, community boards, the Y.M.C.A., the Boys' Club. We've done bus-shelter ads with our 'Whistle Worthy' logo. And then there are the chairs"--fourteen-foot-tall aluminum lifeguard chairs, plunked into temporary sandboxes around town and hung with recruitment posters. "We try to be strategic."

They also threw a kickoff party in Union Square (the...

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