Hotel Indigo Williamsburg

The pool

• 4th-floor terrace
• 70-ft heated pool
• Marked 4 ft
• Wide shallow entry
• Lifeguard on duty
• Day passes

Why it's on the list

The best actual swimming pool in this list — seventy heated feet on a fourth-floor terrace, marked four feet the whole way, with wide entry steps and a lifeguard on the chair. Day passes for non-guests. The hotel around it is unremarkable and the skyline is far off, but nobody gives you this much water.

The stay

The Indigo is the swimmer's pick, and not much else. It reads as a value hotel — the building is plain, the deck is plain, and the skyline it looks at is distant rather than dramatic. What it has is the pool: seventy feet of it on the fourth-floor terrace, a uniform four feet deep so you can push off and actually swim rather than wade around, with a shallow stepped entry that makes it workable with children and a lifeguard actually on duty. Guest access is generous where most New York decks ration it — free 9am to 6pm Monday and Tuesday, to 9:30pm the rest of the week — and non-guests can buy a four-hour block. At $$ book it if the swim is the point of the day; book the Vale two streets over if the view and the room are.