A Green Dream for Jacob’s Field
May 19, 2009
Resident Set Sights on Stimulus $$ for Center
As New York gears up to spend an estimated $25 billion in federal stimulus money, folks in Crotona have a suggestion: How about building a big, green community center in Jacob’s field?
Today the site, on Mapes Avenue between East 180th Street and East 181st Street, is home to two worn out but beloved baseball fields, with a vacant building intruding into center field. But the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center has plans for something more: an ecologically sustainable community center, designed by neighborhood people for neighborhood people, and named for the legendary community organizer Astin Jacobo, known locally as Jacob, the man who first rallied local teens to clear the empty lot and create the baseball fields.
“[We need] a center that is going to empower the community, educate the community,” said Mary Mitchell board member Karen Washington. Washington wants a center which is not only a youth and rec center, “but work[s] on social issues as well – problems that are plaguing our community,” like sky-high diabetes and obesity rates, and the need for job training.
If the Mary Mitchell Center gets its way, the ball fields will remain, moved to the east side of the field, and joined by batting cages and community gardens. But on the west side of the lot, they would build a center which would offer space to overcrowded local schools and then transform after hours into a vast resource for the neighborhood: a school cafeteria would double as a community kitchen, a gym would open its doors to the public. There would be dance studios, a dojo for martial arts, a community theater, a green teaching roof, classrooms for a green jobs training program, space for community groups, and afterschool programs for local kids.
To bring that vision to life they’ll need $66 million. And so they’ve set their sights on the federal stimulus money pouring out of Washington.
“An Obama administration ought to find this particular use of stimulus money very compelling,” said Heidi Hynes, executive director of the Mary Mitchell Center. “It combines two great ideas: people in a poor neighborhood can identify problems and solutions themselves, [and] this project would create green jobs which would have a ripple effect in the community.”
But there are obstacles to attaining the stimulus money. Organizations apply for stimulus grants by submitting proposals to state agencies. The proposed Astin Jacobo Center doesn’t fit neatly into the requirements of any of those agencies, said Hynes. She has shopped the project around to agencies charged with jobs, energy, education, and community development, but heard no response. Most grants, she said, are going to larger organizations which have worked with the state before.
Hynes says her job now is to convince people that this is how stimulus money ought to be spent.
“There ought to be a place [for] projects identified and promoted by neighborhoods with the greatest challenges,” she said. “If we’re going to spend $1 trillion, we should be a better nation because of it… if we’re going to spend $1 trillion, we ought to have projects like the Astin Jacobo Center that really create sustainable communities.”
”I’ve stopped apologizing for the fact that a poor neighborhood wants a fancy building,” Hynes said. “There is no reason why this neighborhood shouldn’t be able to define for itself what kind of facility would best serve [the] people who live here – and then those people should work like hell to go out and make that happen.”
Hynes and Washington say the success of the project will depend on whether elected officials step up to advocate on their behalf and help them navigate the process.
They already have the backing of Congressman Jose Serrano, who allocated money in 2006 which allowed the Mary Mitchell Center to buy the vacant building standing in Jacob’s Field – a crucial first step in acquiring the site, and a bargaining chip, they hope, in making a deal with the Parks Department, which controls the land.
The proposal is also on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s radar screen.
“The senator is supportive of the project and she’s working with the center on a number of funding proposals,” said Gillibrand spokesman Glen Caplin. But staff of both lawmakers cautioned that Congress has no formal role in disbursing stimulus money.
The Mary Mitchell Center is itself the result of a stubborn community campaign. It took 15 years to build the Center’s building on the corner of Mapes Avenue and East 178th Street, which it has occupied since 1997. Most of the center’s staff and board members are neighborhood residents, and the center draws upon their knowledge and talents to create and run its programs for local kids, said Hynes. During the day, it houses a bilingual GED program, in the afternoons an afterschool program, and in the evenings, dance or jujitsu classes – all in the same space. On the weekend, community groups meet there.
“We’ve outgrown it,” Washington said. In 2003, the center hosted a brainstorming session on community needs among board members, staff, students, and local community members. Out of that session came the vision of the new, larger facility.
They held an architectural contest, won by Rogers Marvel Architects, which completed plans for the center largely bro bono. And they reached out to possible partners, including the local middle school, KAPPA III, which shares its building with three other schools, and green jobs programs like the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition’s weatherization program and the Excel Institute.
Seleen Danquah and Mildred Duran, high school juniors in the Mary Mitchell Center’s teen-run Health 2 Know initiative, are particularly excited by the community kitchen and opportunities for exercise, dance, and sports. Fifty percent of kids born in Crotona today will have diabetes in their lifetime, they said.
“There isn’t anywhere to go to buy healthy food and fruits. On the corner there’s only McDonald’s and Chinese food,” said Duran. In the new center, people “can exercise and afterwards eat healthy in the same place.”
For Washington, the significance of the space goes beyond the individual programs.
“For too long in neighborhoods of color and low-income neighborhoods, we’ve always been looked at as deficits – as neighborhoods in need. People look at our community as statistics. They don’t look at us as a resource,” she said. Projects like the Astin Jacobo Center prove “we can now do for ourselves,” she said. “That’s the shift I want to see.”
And despite the hurdles, Hynes believes it’ll happen. “Astin Jacobo taught us that you work and fight for your neighborhood every day – and then you don’t worry about it,” she said. “If you need a miracle, you’ll get a miracle.”
By RACHEL WALDHOLZ
Ed. Note: You can see the plans for the new Astin Jacobo Center and sign a petition in support at www.astinjacobocenter.org.
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[...] In absence of the mayor, the center recorded the performance and plan to send the video to Bloomberg himself. Staff hope he’ll still reply to their invitation to come live in Crotona. In the meantime, they’ll be working on getting funding for a new community resource, the Astin Jacobo Center, which will offer free programs to families. [...]