Building a game-changer
YMCA/community center to house more than just exercise equipment
With great size, comes great responsibility.
That twist on the Peter Parker principle is a good fit for the newest YMCA in South Florida when it opens on Fort Lauderdale’s Sistrunk Boulevard.
Dubbed the L.A. Lee YMCA/Mizell Community Center, the $20 million building is expected to open in September and will bring 100-120 jobs to the historically Black community’s Main Street.
The still-under-construction facility aims to honor the painful past, navigate today’s turbulent waters and ready itself for the future. The YMCA’s solutions to those challenges manifest over an expansive four stories and 65,000 square feet that will house various spaces for continuing education, business training as well as health/wellness.
The new YMCA, with massive windows overlooking the street scene and the downtown skyline, is rising where the Von D. Mizell Community Center was for decades and where Provident Hospital stood from 1938 to 1964. During the Jim Crow era of American apartheid, it was the only hospital in Broward County that offered medical care to Black people.
And that’s where the great responsibility comes into play for the worldwide organization started in 1844 as the Young Men’s Christian Association to promote a healthy “body, mind and spirit.”
The building
Smack dab in the middle of Sistrunk’s busier corridor, the new facility will include: A food hub with 10 vendor booths, a 14,000 square foot chef’s kitchen and possibly more food booths and food trucks outside under a covered patio.
An outdoor swimming pool for water exercises and drowning prevention instruction.
■ A gymnasium/ basketball court and wellness center with workout equipment.
■ A child care center with after-school programming.
■ A black box theater and terrace for performances (which can also be rented for events).
■ Retail bays for vendors, including a possible barbershop.
■ Shared work spaces to serve as a business incubator (with resources to help emerging entrepreneurs with business plans, marketing, etc).
■ Multi-purpose rooms for everything from book clubs to neighborhood meetings.
■ Classrooms where Broward College will offer instruction and training.
“We’ve been serving this community for the past 75-80 years,” says Sheryl A. Woods, president and CEO of YMCA South Florida, from her Fort Lauderdale office.
A block and half away from the new development at 1409 NW Sixth St. (aka Sistrunk Boulevard) is the now closed L.A. Lee YMCA Family Center at 408 NW 14th Terrace, which Woods says had outlived its usefulness and was shuttered for good just as the pandemic started last March.
Jay Anderson, the YMCA board chair, agrees. “It was an aging facility,” says Anderson, senior director of finance at Ryder System. “It was over 50 years old. We were restricted by size and the age of the facility.”
Around 2016 the YMCA started looking for ways to expand.
“The trigger for that was when we went to the city to talk about expanding our footprint ... we really realized that we were landlocked,” Woods recalls. “Our biggest programs space was the gymnasium, and you know you can’t put kids and seniors in the same room. So it really restricted a lot of our programming. And the community wanted more programming.”
Like the old YMCA, this new one is named after the Rev. Lloyd Alexander Lee, director of Fort Lauderdale’s Northwest YMCA for six years starting in 1950. When he arrived in South Florida, that YMCA for Black people, which opened in 1942, was housed in a wood frame shack. Lee is credited with leading the fund drive to open the YMCA familiar to today’s Sistrunk community.
The history
The city of Fort Lauderdale offered YMCA South Florida a plot of land that has been pivotal in the history of Black people in Broward County.
Though the Von D. Mizell Community Center, which the city owned, had been closed for years, longtime residents still remember when the site was Provident Hospital.
Dr. Von D. Mizell, a Black physician and one of the founders of the South Florida branch of the NAACP, was behind the establishment of the 15-bed hospital in the 1930s. He went on to serve as medical director while Dr. James Sistrunk was chief of staff.
“How do today’s kids even know about Provident Hospital?” Woods asks. “If they don’t have a grandparent or if the grandparent doesn’t talk about it, how can we help the community remember that history? So we sat with [artist] George Gadson and George came up with some pretty creative approaches that will be part of a display we’ll have in our lobby.”
Gadson’s sculptures appear all over South Florida, including the Broward County School Board building, the E. Pat Larkin Community Center in Pompano Beach, Florida Memorial University in Miami and the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center (also on Sistrunk Boulevard).
Gadson decided to create a five-foot bronze wall sculpture.
“When you look at it, you see an abstract stethoscope,” Gadson explains. “But I didn’t want to do a literal stethoscope. That’s kind of boring. I’m creating work that really captures the essence of what the place was on the land.”
He’s also proposing to add a bronze medallion depicting Sistrunk milestones.
“The challenge with this entire project — and it’s a good challenge, but it is a challenge — and that is capturing the history of the Fort Lauderdale Black community, which is so rich,” Gadson says.
The YMCA’s Woods adds that the now shuttered facility nearby at 14th Terrace also has a rich history, one that the planners heard about in town hall meetings.
“There are a lot of people in that community who have a tremendous history of when they grew up in that Y and they had Friday night dances at that Y,” Woods says. “So they asked how can we get more dances? And we had to make a decision: basketball or dances. And now we’re not going to have that problem.”
The debate
But there were critics almost from the beginning of the plans to move the YMCA onto the site of the former Mizell Community Center and Provident Hospital.
“Well, the naïve self that we are, we thought, oh this is amazing,” Woods says. “Because that is very special to one of our other areas of focus, which is healthy living, youth development and healthy living.”
Bobby R. Henry Sr., the publisher of the local Black community newspaper the Westside Gazette, was vocal in his opposition early on.
“We wanted a health care facility that would meet the needs…of that population, which has high levels of hypertension, obesity, cancer, diabetes,” Henry explains. “The fact is it should have been a center that would meet the health needs of a community. And the health needs include economic, not just a social setting.”
Commissioner Robert L. McKinzie — whose district 3 includes neighborhoods to the north and south of Sistrunk Boulevard as well as stretches of Melrose Park and Rock Island — recalls community town hall meetings sometimes becoming quite heated. “I’d say there were about 14 to 15 naysayers and others, a cross section of the community. Some tempers flared.”
Nadine Hankerson, an economist who has worked with Caribbean nations and West African countries, still gets hot under the collar about the new YMCA site.
“My thing with the YMCA is ... probably one of the most racist organizations in America that has yet to do atonement for its racism. You sat there off of 14th Street for almost four decades. You wouldn’t even put in a paved parking lot. So, you take a racist organization, and you sit it on the land, and then you say how great thou art? Come on, ya’ll got to do better than that.”
Both Hankerson and Henry feel that the YMCA carefully curated and redacted the community feedback that was reported to the Fort Lauderdale City Commission.
“Certain people picked ... didn’t include those who were opposed,” says Henry. “The underhanded moves were moves that were made to generate an audience to support that YMCA. It really went against the grain of all those that sat down at the planning table, of what we wanted to see on Sixth Street. That really, really created a rift in the community.”
And Hankerson adds that there is only one way to heal that rift.
“First of all, you got to tell the truth,” she says. “Then move forward to ensure that the history that should be reflected in that spot is important and is locked down in history for another 100 years. Here’s what they can really start doing: Is switch the brand. The brand is Provident, then Mizell, then the YMCA. They’ve taken that brand and switched it.”
But Commissioner McKinzie feels that is exactly what was done, justin a different order.
“The community wanted to make sure we kept the history with the L.A. Lee name, the Mizell ... name and Provident Hospital,” he explains. “Those there had to be a part of it or it would not work.”
And he counters that the new YMCA and its promised programs received “overwhelming support . ... It is the best thing that has happened in Fort Lauderdale in such a long time, particularly in my district. Everything they threw made the project grow. We had to have all those things to get to the finish line.”
And then, speaking of his efforts to usher the project through the city commission and the Fort Lauderdale Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), he adds, “My fight was one of passion. I had the vision right out of the box. This neighborhood has been deprived for 40- something years from institutionalized discrimination. We want the same thing that other communities want.”
The classes
While the town hall meetings with residents were going on (“Education kept popping up,” recalls Woods), the YMCA approached Broward College about offering training.
“I went to Broward College and met with President Armstrong at the time and he said, ‘Hands down. Slam dunk. Absolutely,’ ” Woods says.
Broward College will use most of the space on the top fourth floor, along with a shared workplace for beginning businesses that can’t yet afford an office.
The food hall
That economic development extends to food service training as well with the restaurant-grade kitchen.
“How do we activate the street,” Woods says the YMCA asked itself. “Because so much … of our feedback was the community saying, ‘We remember when Sistrunk was a bustling hustling place, you know?’ It was so busy and people were out enjoying all the nightlife of Sistrunk.”
It was also important that they try to bring healthy food options to the community, so they tapped private chef Rachel Shapiro — the former chair of the Florida Food Council and current vice chair — to head it up.
“I think they reached out to me because I understand the gaps in our food system,” she says. “I’m really passionate about training people to be entrepreneurs … and use their gifts to live a happy healthy and fulfilled life.”
She is also the president and founder of the Do Well, Do Good Corporation, which is working to establish apprenticeships and entrepreneur programs.
Since August she’s been having virtual meetings with educators, chefs, civic leaders and executives for non-profits to come up with sourcing guidelines and decide what kind of vendors from the Sistrunk community they should include.
That group is also hoping to stage some outdoor farmers’ markets. The shared kitchen can be used for chef training and also serves the food vendors in the food hall bays and booths.
The theater
When the YMCA realized they would now have space for performing arts spaces — both the terrace and the black box theater — they reached out to Cathleen Dean.
In fact, Dean was the first staffer hired for the new facility and may be best known for her documentary “Wade In The Water: Drowning In Racism” and the Miami franchise of the 48 Hour Film Project.
“The YMCA is going to have a comprehensive arts program,” Dean explains. “Not only the performing arts, but film and fine arts. We are looking … to do plays that are taken from the stories of the community and turn those into a theatrical performance.”
She adds that she’d like to also eventually offer photography, film making, spoken word and intimate concerts.
“And we’re looking to do experimental stuff. One of the first things that we are doing … is we’ve come up with a program called What’s In The Box, a sort of digital stage highlighting artists from those different [artistic disciplines].”
The theater will also pay homage to South Florida’s segregated past. The Victory Black Box Theater was the movie theater for Black people in greater Fort Lauderdale throughout the ’40s and ’50s.
“The most important part of what I am doing … is to amplify the talent and the voices of the community,” Dean says. “Beating the streets. Calling people. We have a group of community ambassadors. We’ve already heard from people from South Africa to London. We’re going to let the world know what kind of talent we have in the Sistrunk community.”
Artists can submit a presentation (a maximum of two minutes for performances and up to six jpeg images for artwork) at bit.ly/2M7cOH5.
The pool
“One of our key initiatives is drowning prevention,” says YMCA board chair Anderson. “And the statistics we’ve seen continue to highlight that South Florida is at the epicenter of drowning across the nation. And the 33311 ZIP code is at the higher end of drownings in South Florida.”
Woods says the community was very clear that a pool was a must-have.
“People shouted at the top of their lungs: We must have a pool. We couldn’t agree more because of living in South Florida. But here’s another cool thing … the Y is probably one of the largest after-school programs in South Florida and so a lot of our schools in the surrounding area, we run [their] after school care. [Trying to get principals] to see the Y as part of their building too is really important to us.”
But she also wants to see adults learning to be safe around water.
“In a lot of cases their parents don’t know how to swim, so we have our fingers crossed that we can also teach a few adults how to swim,” Woods says. “We can see a lot of lap swimming, water exercise and probably a lot of fun on that pool deck with parties and birthdays.”
The gym
Anderson says the YMCA provides services that commercial entities don’t, like the fitness center. “There are other gyms, but the type of programming we do at the Y is different. It has a different feel than just going to fitness classes at a neighborhood gym.”
There will also be an exercise studio for activities such as Silver Sneakers chair aerobics classes, as well as yoga and Zumba for various age groups. The wellness center will have treadmills, rowing machines, weight machines, free weights, etc.
The legacy
Commissioner McKinzie believes that “Sistrunk can look just like Flagler [Street in Miami], just like Las Olas, to offer the amenities like any other corridor of the city. It is worth the investment. We have a first class product second to none.”
“[The YMCA] has already spurred so much more economic interest. There is so much excitement because of what we did here, because of that investment. Look at what happened when we did not put the money over here.”
From the YMCA’s point of view, this new facility could be a leader for the organization.
“There’s no other Y in the country doing what we’re doing right now,” says Woods. “That’s what makes this very very special.
“The Y is kind of a magical place anyway. People come and you learn about other people. It’s an inclusive organization. It’s a diverse organization. It’s an all-encompassing organization. To be able to capture that, to give back to this community, on steroids, I think is very special.