This article, written by Marjorie Beggs, was originally published in Central City Extra's February 2015 issue.
It was hard to resist the nail-in-a-coffin metaphor when workers removed the Central YMCA sign from the institution’s temporary location at 387 Golden Gate Ave. and put it into storage, the symbolic end of an era in the Tenderloin.
The Central YMCA had spent more than 100 years a block away at 220 Golden Gate Ave. Then, in 2009, underused but still beloved, it shut those doors and operated for four years in tight quarters on the ground floor of Hastings Law School’s garage — expected to be a stop-gap measure until a plan for a new Y to serve the central city materialized. It hasn’t. And while service and staff reductions followed the Y to Hastings like a deep winter shadow, the sign shone on at the temp site.
So when the sign came down December 22nd, it removed what was a neighborhood fixture for more than a century. Watching it come down blew away any hope of restoring Central Y to its former stature.“The sign’s history is important,”says Carmela Gold, former Central Y executive director for 18 years. “It’s a reproduction of an old sign that I had found from one of the Central Y’s photo archives. It was redone (in 2002) when Theresa Stone Pan gave $5 million to the capital campaign for a new Y in her father’s honor,” thus adding Shih Yu-Lang to the Y name.
Photo: Kasey Asberry
The removal of the sign was “a very sad and unfortunate indication of theYMCA’s reduced commitment to the people of the Tenderloin which began with the sale of 220 Golden Gate,” Pan emailed The Extra through her lawyer. A meeting last fall with Chuck Collins, president and CEO of SF YMCA, left Pan, “very frustrated with an understanding that the Y has no plans to rebuild. Instead, it appears that the Y will focus on a reduced service-based program which will be under constant threats of budget cuts while the funds from the sale of the building (including a large contribution from me specifically for the Tenderloin) are being reallocated to supporting Y’s in other parts of the city.
“The administration told us in 2010 that the interim site was just that, and they showed us plans for a permanent YMCA with Hastings. We believe that the need for a true community center for people of all ages is greater than ever in the Tenderloin. It is sad that a charitable contribution of this magnitude to an organization of this caliber can turn into the worst business decision I have ever made.”
Meantime, the Y lives on at Boeddeker Park, part of the ambitious programming that runs daily, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.weekdays and until 6 p.m. on weekends. The master schedule lists activities in 53 time slots, many occurring simultaneously in different park locations. Of those slots, 29 are handled by Y staff: youth, adult and senior activities from mahjongg and movement to culinary arts and basketball. The Y is the primary subcontractor to the Tenderloin Boys & Girls Club, Rec & Park’s master tenant overseeing all park services. The Central YMCA provides more activities than Rec & Park, Boys & Girls Club, and four other operators combined.
There has never been so much going on at Boeddeker Park. Signs that the supply of activities may exceed the demand emerged just a month after Boeddeker’s December 10th grand reopening. Park partners held a half-day open house with snacks, a raffle and samplings of the 15 programs specifically for seniors and younger adults.
The Extra asked the Y, Boys & Girls Club and Rec & Park for participation statistics and was told Rec & Park’s family Zumba class had 15 adults and Y programs had 25 elementary school kids, 17 teens, and 59 adults and seniors.But no one could confirm if those numbers were sign-ups, daily attendance or unduplicated counts. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine 10 adults and seniors coming to programs five or six times — thus, “59 adults and seniors.”
One senior who hasn’t come out for Y programs yet is Charles Buntjer. For years he was a Central Y regular, taking classes at the original Y and then at the temp location, representing seniors on the Y’s coordinating board and voicing his concerns at meetings to discuss the Y’s future.
He quit it all, right around the time the park programs started. At meetings, he wrote in an email to The Extra, the talk was all about campaign fundraising. “For what, I asked? I said, ‘There isn’t a Y (at Boeddeker).’ I was told I had a bad attitude because I wasn’t going to the park. So I quit.” He’s relented a little and checked out the park in January. His evaluation: “The building (clubhouse) is nice but kind of a lousy layout. There was enough room to put in at least four separate rooms with doors to close off. Would have been much better than one bigger, all-glass room, but it does clean up the area.”
In time, he believes, more people will come, and while the park is better than he expected, it left him “depressed.” “I guess I think about the original Y and the temp Y — everyone knew everyone and it was like family.”
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