Owners Nancy and James Gypton on hand for the opening of the Quarry Swim Club, May 23, 2015.
Jim and Nancy Gypton have had their eyes on a pair of Canada geese for each of their last 28 summers as owners of Hopewell’s Quarry Swimming Club. Every year, two geese come to the club in early spring, make a nest, and lay their eggs.
When the babies hatch, they learn to fly on the quarry’s diving boards, and they develop swimming skills in the club’s pool. They walk out through the front gate once the babies are old enough, always a week before opening, and the Gyptons don’t see them again until the next spring.
They don’t know if the latest inhabitants are offspring of the original couple or just a new pair of geese, but Nancy said watching the families grow each year is something she and her husband will miss when they turn over the club to new owners—whenever that might be. The Gyptons, hoping to retire, put the club up for sale last year, and it is still on the market.
As it happens, tending grounds, overseeing lifeguards, and working straight through every spring and summer for nearly 30 years can be exhausting, even though it’s also often enjoyable.
“The place can lend itself to a lot of activities,” Nancy said. “As we got older, we cut back, and we stopped doing things like nighttime parties. We cut out the camp because we have other camps that come. We are very busy during a certain period of time. It was hectic, but we loved it, and we think the place is so much fun for people.”
The quarry was first mined in the early 1900’s, but after operations ceased in 1916, equipment that had been installed to pump out water had been removed. The 55-foot-deep quarry is naturally filled from underground springs, and over time, more and more locals flocked to “the old swimming hole,” and it was finally incorporated as a swim club in 1928, and the first in-ground pool was built in 1946. It has been in steady operation ever since.
The Gyptons love the quarry’s history, and don’t want to see the property go to just any buyer. The possibilty of someone purchasing the land and using it to build homes is one outcome they hope to avoid.
Instead, the Gyptons hope to sell the facility to a person or an organization who will continue to run the club, preserve the water, or both. They have reached out to the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association and D&R Greenway, as well as Mayor Harvey Lester, councilman John Hart, and former Rep. Rush Holt, but nothing came of their campaign.
Some organizations, while they want to preserve the land, don’t want to “run it like a swim club.” Currently, they are trying to enlist the help of Mercer County and the state.
“This is a strange body of water,” Jim said. “There are catfish in here, and you would think they would outbreed themselves, but there aren’t any more catfish in here than this body can handle. We were told years ago, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ We think the future owners, whoever they are, should be someone who has somewhere in their minds that they want to preserve the ecology,”
And preserve the water, he added. It proved its value in 1991 when a fire started at the Van Doren Lumber Yard.
“They had been there for a long time, so there was a lot of very dry wood,” Jim said. “Hopewell Borough, the water pressure failed because of the size of this fire. They lined up trucks from here all the way into Hopewell and pumped six inches of water in [to put out the fire]. Six inches of water out of here is about 40,000 cubic feet.”
Nancy feels that younger owners would be better for the club, as they would probably be more willing and able to expand hours, re-open the camp, and bring back after-hours parties.
She also suggested that an individual owner could partner with an organization like the Watershed Association to do just that while keeping the club open.
“We don’t have a [for sale] sign out front because we’re thinking about how we want this to go to the community rather than somebody just coming in and building a house,” she said. “We’ve had different offers like that. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that we have a lot of people who have been coming here for so many years.”
Jim and Nancy purchased the club in 1988 from Bill James, who knew the couple and was looking to put the club up for sale. Jim was working in corporate real estate at the time, and since he had the background, James thought Jim might be able to check out the facility and help him decide how to sell it.
It turns out Jim had the perfect buyers in mind: himself and Nancy, who, at the time, worked in property management and was hoping to avoid an out-of-state transfer.
“I just loved it [in Hopewell],” she said. “I wanted to put roots here.”
She was wary when Jim first suggested she could manage the club—she didn’t have much experience in the water, and that scared her—but she thought about it some more and realized she couldn’t pass the opportunity up.
“When I looked at it, it was so pretty here,” she said. “I could work outside all day. Some of the buildings were a mess, but that meant we could do our own.”
Nancy enlisted the help of her father, a carpenter, who helped them re-do the snack bar, changing room, and other buildings. They kept the original concrete walls, for the most part, but covered them in wood and replaced flat roofs with slanted ones. They wanted the club to look like it did in the ’30s.
“I just wanted them to be the backdrop,” Nancy said. “The quarry was the center of attention. Plus, we wanted to keep it looking old-fashioned, because everything changes. I wanted people to have a feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s this spot that’s not all modern.’”
Now, those buildings are still intact, and so are many families’ relationships to the club. Jim said a good chunk of their employees have parents or siblings who worked at the club as teenagers. They have even seen children of their original lifeguards get married.
“The little kids learn to swim here in the pool and then graudate to the quarry,” Nancy said. “A few of the new lifeguards took their swim tests in the quarry because they’re local kids.”
It’s nice to be a part of different families, they said, but they would also like to see more of their own, which is why the Gyptons want to retire. Their sons, Chris, John, and Jeremy, live in Arizona, Idaho, and Colorado. They’re sometimes able to squeeze in off-season visits, but not always. If their sons and their families want to come back to Hopewell in the summer, they don’t get to spend quality time with Jim and Nancy, who are at the club all day, every day.
The couple also just adopted Nash, a new puppy and friend to their older dog, Olivia. Sometimes, Nancy said, they get homesick during the summer.
“We like it here,” she said. “People think we’re going to move to Florida. We don’t like Florida. We have family that we like to visit, and it would be nice if we could see them in the summer when [grandchildren Morgan and Michaela] are off from school.’”
The Gyptons have chosen not to publish their asking price, and there isn’t a “for sale” sign anywhere on the property. This, Jim said, is their way of avoiding too-curious citizens and those with no real intent of purchasing the club.
“We would be flooded with people who didn’t have the wherewithal to pay,” he said. “It would just be nosy. ‘How did you get to that?’ And I’m not interested in dealing with that.”
Nancy said they’re not trying to “dump” the quarry—while they look forward to retirement, they won’t quit before they find the right buyer. The club will stay open for as long as it takes. Now that the club is open for the season and summer is approaching, Jim hopes it will attract more serious buyers out to view the property.
“We hope that it stays, if not the way that it is, at least available to the community,” Jim said. “If all else fails, somebody will build a house here. But that would be a shame.”
The Quarry Swim Club is located at 180 Crusher Road. Hours are noon to 6 p.m. every day until June 30. Starting July 1 to Sept. 7, the club is open Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Phone: (609) 466-0810. On the web: quarryswimclub.com.
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