It’s been over two years since children could swim, play, or exercise at the St. Mary’s Rec Center in Mott Haven. More than two years since the Senior Marlins swim team practiced there, since residents played pool.
According to the parks department, it will likely be at least another two more.
The seventy-year-old Recreation Center building has been closed for construction since May 2022. At the Bronx Community Board 1 meeting on October 15, Rebecca Byrnes, Chief of Architecture and Engineering for New York City Parks, tried to explain why the expected completion date is now 2026.
Designed in 1948 and opened in 1951, St Mary’s was the first indoor recreation center in New York. The initial scope of the current renovation primarily addressed issues that were related to the age of the building, including a full reconstruction of the ground floor lobby, and an elevator to all floors to make the center compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It also included updated restrooms and a new fire alarm system .
But the building was in more serious need of renovation than the city knew. New problems have been discovered at each stage of the renovation, said Byrnes. Asbestos in the walls of the lobby. Water wearing away the mortar of the facade and soaking into the brick walls. Flooding from Hurricane Ida in 2021. Faulty electricity. Broken door frames.
The original contract for the Rec Center renovation, for $8.3 million, should have been completed by November 2023. But, by March 2024, the expected completion date had stretched to April 2025. As of this month, the predicted date has been pushed again, this time to “early 2026”.
This follows a pattern: the first assessment for the project actually began nearly a decade ago, in 2015, and overshot its projected 2017 completion date by three years. The following “procurement” phase took another two years, instead of the intended one. The parks department’s “Capital Tracker” tool shows the design and procurement phases finished, while the construction phase is only at 48% completed.
But progress is being made, Byrnes told Board 1. The fire alarm system is finished. The updated bathrooms have new flooring and finishes, but lighting and some fixtures are not yet installed. When excavators for the elevator shafts hit bedrock, construction slowed again.
The repeated delays have disrupted a center that had 7,000 members and served approximately 1,500 children a week.
“We’ve tried to stay engaged and busy in the community while the center has been closed,” said Farrell Coates, the parks department’s head of recreation. This included Kids in Motion, which sent a recreation worker into the park five days a week during the summer and served 17,000 young people between April and October this year. The Bronx division of parks has also been concentrating its mobile activities in the area to make up for the closed building, with Movies Under the Stars, the Urban Park Rangers program, and the Playmobile mobile recreation unit, which visited the park 12 times this summer, Coates said.
“Summertime is great. You have all those things, and I really appreciate that. But winter time, where do we put that?” said Ngande Ambroise, Chairperson of Board 1’s Municipal Services Committee.
Ambroise worried whether stopgaps would be made available if the construction continues to drag on.
“That’s where my concern is, is that you’re giving us 2025, 2026. What else is going to come out of that again? We had the same conversation 2024, 2023,” he said. Jessenia Aponte, Bronx Commissioner for New York City Parks, said she would discuss collaboration with the local YMCA to provide indoor services over the winter.
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