Boys & Girls Club to buy former home of Health & Racquet
WOONSOCKET – The Boys & Girls Clubs of Northern Rhode Island is negotiating to buy the former Woonsocket Health & Racquet Club from an East Greenwich development company that bought it less than a year ago.
BGCNRI President and CEO Gary Rebelo said the old racquetball club would be an ideal site to replace its existing facility on 72 Kendrick Ave., a few blocks away.
Rebelo said he’s been thinking about larger quarters for the Woonsocket facility since it merged with the former Cumberland-Lincoln Boys & Girls Club in 2018 to form the BGCNRI.
“I noticed right after we merged that the building we currently have is too small to serve the needs of Woonsocket,” he said. “It’s not a small building, but if everything goes properly, this would give us a little over twice the square footage.”
Rebelo said BGCNRI is attempting to iron out a purchase and sales agreement for the health club with Gaspee Real Estate Partners, which purchased it from Lt. Gov. Daniel McKee in December 2018 for $575,000. Rebelo said he believes the two sides are close to striking an agreement, except for “a couple of contingencies.”
About 165 youngsters a day converge on the Kendrick Avenue facility to participate in team sports, after-school programs and other activities.
“We do programs that a lot people don’t realize,” said Rebelo. “We do healthy habits. We have healthy cooking classes for parents in the evening once in a while. We’ve done a lot of community programming in that building. Currently we even have the civil air patrol once a week.”
Located at 600 Social St., the old racquetball club is also
well-suited as a successor site for Kendrick Avenue because it’s so close – just a couple of blocks away. Rebelo says that anyone who’s currently a member of the club can still walk to the new location if that’s the only way they have of getting there.
“What makes the old racquetball club even more appealing is the kids that walk to the club currently will still be able to walk to the club,” he said. “That building’s
about 1,000 feet away from the current building.”
If all goes according to plan, the existing facility – the former Kendrick Avenue School – would probably be sold, with the proceeds added to the building acquisition fund.
While McKee built 600 Social St. for the Woonsocket Health & Racquetball Club in 1980, the business closed down in 2013. After that the building was leased to Michael Reynolds, who ran it for several years as the Rhode Island Athletic Club.
A former Lincoln resident, Reynolds dissolved RIAC in 2017 to take a job as general manager of the Lancaster Barnstormers, an Atlantic League baseball team located in Pennsylvania.
After the building was sold to East Greenwich-based GREP in December 2018, the company renovated the building. Among other things, the company ripped out the indoor swimming pool that was one of the marquee features of the building, which was originally erected with about 28,000 square feet.
The facility is now believed to house about 23,000 square feet, but Rebelo says the site is quite flexible, partly because a good chunk of the space was originally designed to accommodate several racquetball courts. The courts are two stories tall, extending from the basement to the ground floor. They can be subdivided into two-level spaces.
“One of the benefits of the building is each racquetball court is 800 square feet, but it was designed to be an office or anything else if ever it needed to be a different type of building,” said Rebelo.
“Those courts are two stories tall, so now we could add a floor in there and we’ve got an upstairs and a downstairs.”
There are no plans of bringing back a pool, but Rebelo said the facility would have “a proper two-story teen center with a half-court basketball court” and an indoor play area on another side of the building for pre-teens.
One champion of the plan is Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt.
Like Rebelo, Baldelli-Hunt says she’s cognizant of the growing club’s need for more space. Because only a certain number of people are allowed in the building at one time, Baldelli-Hunt says the club sometimes has to wait for children to leave before others who are waiting outside are allowed in.
“It’s nice to see that girls and boys within the community are using our boys and girls club,” the mayor said. “We want children in the community to be engaged. It’s better for them to be occupied after school than to have too much free time on their hands.”