Bernard D’Orazio takes a shot during a half-court game that has been a Monday night ritual in the Stuyvesant High School gym for nearly 20 years. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
Christmas came early to the community center at Stuyvesant High School.
Set to close on Dec. 20, the center will remain open for an indefinite period following an agreement between Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Dennis Mehiel, president of the Battery Park City Authority, which operates the center. Mehiel and Silver jointly announced the agreement late last month.
The authority had been under heavy pressure from Community Board 1, local elected officials and Downtown sports leagues to rescind its plan.
In September, the BPC Parks Conservancy, an arm of the authority that runs the center, announced its decision to discontinue its low-cost memberships for the use of two basketball courts, a weight room and its own programming. It attributed the decision to close the center in part to its “significantly diminished” membership. Addressing a meeting of CB1’s Battery Park City Committee at Asphalt Green in early November, authority spokeswoman Anne Fenton said the center is operating at an annual deficit of $200,000.
“We also made a major investment in the new [Asphalt Green] community center, which is where we’re sitting now, and that’s why we’re looking to leave Stuyvesant High School,” she said. “We’re willing to work with the elected officials and the community board in your selection of a new operator.”
In announcing the authority’s change of heart, Mehiel and Silver said they have agreed to form a committee charged with selecting a new operator and “developing funding sources” for the center. A BPCA spokesman said the Parks Conservancy will run the center during the “interim period.”
Manhattan Youth Director Bob Townley, who had vehemently objected to the center’s closing, was pleased by the news. “It’s a great resource for teenagers and people with limited incomes and for the whole community,” he said.
Townley said that he would be willing to help draw new members to the center but that he would likely refuse to serve on a committee tasked with finding a new operator. “I don’t think the [Conservancy] should abandon their central role here,” he said. “I don’t understand the premise that they don’t have the money to run the program, when they spend oodles of money for other things.”
Silver and others insist that, per a 1987 agreement with the city’s then-Board of Estimate, the authority has a binding obligation to run the center, which opened in 1993, as part of the deal for siting the school in Battery Park City.
“We believe the authority has to continue to play a role to make this program viable—it’s just that simple,” said Paul Goldstein, Silver’s district director, who negotiated the agreement as CB1’s former district manager. “This program needs to have some degree of subsidy to continue to make it affordable.”
The planned closing of the center had been especially worrisome to those who have been regulars over the years. Devon Kolb, 19, of Gateway Plaza, a member since he was seven, said he comes to the center three or four times a week.
“It’s my gym,” said Kolb, who was shooting baskets in the fifth-floor gym just days before the announcement. “I come here and play basketball and basically that’s the only thing that keeps me active at the moment.”
In the gym two floors below, Andrew Sambuk, a Hofstra University English professor, had just arrived for the Monday night half-court game that has been his ritual since 1996.
“The game’s meaningful,” he said, “but so are the social relationships that have formed. I’d miss it terribly.”
—Carl Glassman contributed reporting.