Cheryl Green Center Set to Reopen in 2023
The community center in Harbor Gateway will hopefully open in the spring
After being closed for nearly three years, the Cheryl Green Center in Harbor Gateway is scheduled to reopen its doors in 2023. Mike Lansing, the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of the Los Angeles Harbor, said the community center closed down in 2020 for renovations.
While he doesn’t have a set reopening date, Lansing said he would like to see it open by spring, preferably April 1.
“We’re close to getting all the permitting done with the City of Los Angeles,” Lansing said.
The facility, which opened in 2009, was named after Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old Black girl who was murdered by Latino gang members in 2006 as part of a racially motivated killing.
“At that point, City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, and the South Bay Boys and Girls Club came together and said we need to bring facilities into this neighborhood that is lacking them,” Lansing said.
Hahn, now a Los Angeles County Supervisor, said that is important that the facility reopens.
“I will never forget Cheryl Green’s funeral and the heartbreak on her mother’s face,” Hahn said via email. “I decided to open the Cheryl Green Center to provide a place where young people could build friendships and prevent this kind of violence in the future.”
Senior Lead Officer Maligi Nua Jr. of the Los Angeles Police Department Harbor Division said it is difficult for children to move from different streets in that area because of gang activity. However, he said that the center has benefitted the area. Nua also sits on the Boys and Girls Club Advisory Board.
“The kids from that area were getting programming and services provided for them,” Nua said. “And it kept them active and engaged in positive programs.”
The Boys and Girls Club of the Los Angeles Harbor inherited this location in 2019 when the South Bay Boys and Girl Club shut down. It consisted of one modular building, which is a type of temporary building. It was donated by the City of Los Angeles in 2007. Prior to that, it was used by the LAPD Harbor Division, Nua said.
“Since [the center] has been closed, we’ve had kids that unfortunately have gotten involved in certain things that perhaps if it was open, they wouldn’t have,” Nua said.
The Boys and Girls Club of the Los Angeles Harbor closed the site in 2020.
“We hated to close the site,” Lansing said. “But for safety reasons, and for lack of a quality facility, we had to. … It’s in a highly dense area of Harbor Gateway, we promised them that
we would come back and get this done, so we’ve been working on this for over three years.”
Lansing said the closing of the facility had nothing to do with the pandemic. The modular building was old and needed to be replaced.
“It was on an angle,” Lansing said. “You could easily put your foot through the flooring. It was rundown, the outdoor area, the asphalt was cracked.”
The Boys and Girls Club will replace it with two new modular buildings. Because the buildings don’t need to be constructed from the ground up, they won’t take as long as constructing a new building. However, the Boys and Girls Club is laying new asphalt and expanding the plumbing and electrical on the site, because one of the modular buildings is much bigger than the original one. The fencing and lighting will be improved as well.
Lansing said that the site is very small, but his organization hopes to get approval by the city to move part of the property forward to make room for a sports court. He said that Councilman Tim McOsker is supportive of this.
How quickly the facility will open will depend on how long the permitting takes.
“Given that it’s limited construction, and we already have the modular buildings lined up, and finalizing the contractors, once we get the permits, it shouldn’t take that long to get the actual work completed,” Lansing said.
The funding for the project came from the state of California, after state Sen. Steven Bradford wrote a grant application requesting the funds.
“We received a grant of almost $1.2 million,” Lansing said. “This improvement will cost us approximately $700,000 of that.”
After that, the Boys and Girls Club will use more of the funding to outfit the modular buildings and build the sports court, leaving some money for start-up staffing. After that, the club will need to use its own money.
Lansing said that when the Boys and Girls Club of the Los Angeles Harbor took over the facility, there were an average of about 25 children a day using it. Once the larger facility is completed, he anticipates it will average more than 60 children per day.
Since closing in 2020, the Boys and Girls club hasn’t used the site as a traditional club site but has used it for other things.
“We started a weekend wellness food distribution program back in the summer of 2020,” Lansing said. “Each Friday we’ve been distributing food out of that site to local families that were in need of food assistance.”
The club has also used the site to give out food and gifts during Christmas and Thanksgiving. Now, the club only gives away food at the Cheryl Green Center on the first Friday of the month, but opened seven food pantries in other clubhouses, so that it can give out food every day.
The center’s potential
Activist and former city council candidate Rick Thomas said he was very disappointed when the Cheryl Green Center closed in 2020.
Thomas said that in the area around the center, there are a lot of children, but no good place for them to go.
“They’ve got nowhere to go, they’ve got nothing to do,” Thomas said. “I’ve fought for the last two and a half years to get this place open again.”
Once it reopens, Hilda Chacon-Herrera, regional director of Harbor City/ Harbor Gateway Boys and Girls Clubs of the Los Angeles Harbor, already has a lot of ideas for programming. These include tutoring, college-bound and career-bound programs, a game room, and a music program.
Thomas wants to bring in producers to tell children how to get into the entertainment business, or into radio. He also wants to invite a woman he knows that helps children raise money for college. He wants to get students apprenticeships with a carpenter’s union and the Los Angeles Fire Department.
“We want to do things [at] Boys and Girls Club that just aren’t playing basketball, coming in, watching TV and playing on video games,” Thomas said. “We want to start building community here.”