Former downtown YMCA to reopen after new year
DANBURY — The former downtown Danbury YMCA will finally reopen shortly after the new year as a renovated recreation center specifically for the city’s disadvantaged youth.
The yearslong, $2.5 million renovation upgraded the gymnasium, performance stage and meeting space and repairs to the community pool will be finished in a matter of weeks, said Jim Maloney, president of the Connecticut Institute For Communities.
CIFC partnered with the city and state to buy the building four years ago in an attempt to save the gym after the Danbury YMCA announced it was selling the vacant branch.
Residents said the facility could be redeveloped as something other than a public community center, so the CIFC and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy stepped in to close on the property.
“When we found out this facility was for sale and potentially would be lost for community use ... the governor was quick to say he did not want that to happen and wanted to help us to save it, which we have done,” Maloney said. “This, in fact, will be the only public gymnasium exclusively for young people in the downtown area and critically it will be the only public swimming pool in the city of Danbury.”
Officials hope the revamped facility will be the future home of a new Danbury Boys and Girls Club, but that organization is still under development and leaders were unable to say when it might open.
For now, the campus behind the St. Peter School will become a new gymnasium for those students and it will be home to some of the Harambee Youth Center’s programs for lowincome, minority children in the heart of Danbury.
The gymnasium will be open to young adults as well as a workout room on its second floor, but an exact program or prices are still being worked out, Advancement Director Joe Walkovich said.
Through a partnership with the Danbury War Memorial recreation center, adults will be allowed access to the pool for workouts and the center can offer senior swim classes or swim lessons, Maloney said.
All of those programs will give young people in Danbury more opportunities for enrichment and learning, Mayor Mark Boughton added.
“That’s really what it’s all about: It’s about preparing our children to be successfully academically later on,” he said.
Last week, the CIFC and Boughton unveiled the new Danbury Community Center with its new name, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy Hall. They praised the bipartisan effort to raise more than $5 million in state and private funding for the YMCA and work at the Danbury War Memorial.
“I tried to turn (Maloney) down about having this building named after me and I did that even before I knew it was Boughton Street, but he insisted,” Malloy joked last week.
Malloy recalled that he wasn’t even allowed into the building when they announced the purchase because it was deemed too unsafe. Now it will return to service to help expand the city’s efforts to offer more services to Danbury’s neediest youth.
“If people are forced to live in communities that can’t provide the services necessary to support individuals in poverty, we lose those individuals not just for a generation, but ongoing generations to come,” Malloy said.
“The only thing we did was to respond, quite frankly, in an appropriate way to a community that had demonstrated so very well that it itself was capable of being a true partner in what we undertook to do.”