Fair Haveners Eye New Community Center

A zumba and dance studio for the elderly, with safety rails and hand bars and mirrors and a soft floor design. A renovated kitchen and an altogether new computer/video room to support much wanted intergenerational programs. More art and photo displays tapping into the neighborhood’s rich oystering history. A reconfigured and more welcoming entryway; picnic tables and better lighting and security so gardening and greenhouse activities can occur in the underutilized outdoor spaces.

Those were only a few of scores of hopeful ideas put forward during a community brainstorming session at the Atwater Senior Center in Fair Haven.

The meeting took place Monday night at 26 Atwater St.

That’s one of eight municipal spaces, from the shuttered to the under-utilized, that the Elicker Administration is upgrading into what it calls ​“hubs” for senior, adult, and youth activities. And in the case of Atwater, an all-purpose community center, with some of $2.4 million in American Rescue Plan (ARPA) funding that has been set aside for this purpose.

The problem engaged, however, by the 65 impassioned Fair Haveners who attended Monday, is what should be the priorities and how much in total can realistically be accomplished with Atwater’s share of the ARPA pot.

That amount is perhaps $200,000 or $300,000, guesstimated City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, one of half a dozen state and city officials, including Mayor Justin Elicker and State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, who attended the hope-filled gathering.

“I grew up in Fair Haven and I used to play basketball in this space,” said Looney of the 1930s era red brick school building, which still sports, in the central gymnasium space, a colorful, dynamic mural painted by Depression-era artists for President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA.)

“Then basketball moved to Farnam [Neighborhood Center] and this became a place for seniors. Now [we’re contemplating how to make it] a full service, open-many-hours center for all,” Looney concluded. 

Currently senior-focused activities and their lunch program finish each day around 2:30 p.m. The local arts organization Arte is the only other program operating regularly in the space. It features classes for kids from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday; and an ​“arts academy” that draws about 75 kids every Saturday, said Arte co-director Dave Greco.

But otherwise the building is closed, so there is much room to do new programming and to contemplate what capital investments might be needed to support that.

“We have a bunch of ideas for seniors,” said Greco, including senior/teen video interviewing programming and intergenerational international cooking. ​“We’re on hold here to see what happens with what I hear is about $200,000.”

And everybody else had ideas too, initiated at previous meetings in November with the seniors who use the space currently and via an extensive survey organized by Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller.

In summarizing the long list of suggestions from the survey and inferring some conclusions, Miller said, ​“Fair Haven has long needed a place to be open when other area facilities, like churches, the Fair Haven Community Health Center, and the library are closed.”

Other area officials, such as Fair Haven/East Rock Alder Claudia Herrera echoed the point that many Fair Haveners who would benefit, for example, from programs such as art therapy or dance therapy, have no local access to those and for a whole range of reasons do not go Downtown or to other parts of town where such activities might be available.

Tomi Veale, who helms the city’s elderly services programs, said her survey of seniors yielded a strong desire for intergenerational programming including painting, gardening, cooking and baking, more tables for dominoes, and even, surprisingly, air hockey!

Denise Dean, who works at the Fair Haven Community Health Clinic, said whatever new programming or capital improvements are initiated, the aim, to be kept in mind, for seniors, is the importance of social connections – to new people, to younger people, to their own family members whom they might bring to a renovated center. That’s ​“because isolation breeds so many problems,” Dean said. ​“A safe place and connection are gifts.”

The recurrent theme of intergenerational programming in the evening’s discussions underscored the point made several times by the meeting host, city Youth and Recreation Department Director Gwendolyn Busch Williams: That senior activities are to be augmented by youth and adult programming to complement and improve, not to displace.

Based on his experience thus far in work the city has done or is planning to do at other sites in the purview of the $2.4 million ARPA initiative, such as the East Rock Ranger Station and Coogan Pavilion, Zinn said, ​“We’ve learned to make the space flexible.”

As each table of brainstormers presented their chief ideas to the room, Zinn advised, ​“Don’t get caught up in how much this costs or that costs. You need to have a vision.” 

And anything short of knocking the building down, he joked, is to be entertained at this stage. If some new program comes in and it’s wildly successful, funding from other pots, he added, could be pursued. 

One of the knottiest aspects of the discussion was engaged at the table where Alder Herrera sat with Democratic Town Committee Ward 14 Co-Chair David Weinreb, Fair Haven’s new outreach worker Frank Redente, Jr., Erick Gonzalez (a ceramicist who hopes to do ceramics programs with seniors and kids in the renovated center), and others.

Namely, how to avoid or, even, should there be an avoidance of, replicating services and programs? That is, for example, should Kirk Morrison, the Fair Haven branch librarian, who was in attendance, help organize a book club at the full-service center-to-be? Doesn’t that duplicate the library’s work, and therefore precious programming time and facilities should be designated otherwise?

Likewise, what about learning diabetic cooking skills in the center’s possibly-to-be-upgraded kitchen? But if the Fair Haven Community Health Center, which is planning its own renovations and may have capacity to do that, should such a program – along with activities like yoga and meditation, and other mental and physical health related offerings – also be instituted at Atwater?

By the time the gathering drew to a close, no consensus on this issue was achieved, although Weinreb made the point that a clinic is very different from a full-service community center.

“Some healthy copying could be good,” he said. ​“This environment could be more inviting, with overlapping services. This is not a transactional space; it’s a hive.”

The city is going to collect the ​“visioning” materials and reconvene residents to look at a provisional plan in the months ahead, with work, depending on the scope, extent, and, of course, the cost, possible to begin later this year.