New hope for Navy Yard Clubhouse
Last week news leaked that the recently shuttered Navy Yard Boys & Girls Club could be getting a new lease on life.
The real estate company Alloy Development, which bought the property for $15 million, announced that they have formed a partnership with Madison Square Boys & Girls Club to temporarily restore the site’s after-school services. Alloy has donated $2 million for the temporary resumption of clubhouse after-school services for at least the next two years. After those two years, Alloy has plans to construct a new building, which will have a permanent community recreation facility with a still-to-be-determined site operator.
“This is definitely great news: Our community needed it,” David “DJ Disciple” Banks, a local parent, told the Amsterdam News. “I’m excited that now kids have a place that they can go to after school.”
The Navy Yard Clubhouse location at 240 Nassau Street in Brooklyn is directly across the street from NYCHA’s Farragut Houses. The clubhouse has for decades provided after-school services for kids in the Downtown Brooklyn, Navy Yard, and DUMBO neighborhoods.
Alloy CEO Jared Della Valle said in a press release that his company was acutely aware of the clubhouses’ community importance and has worked closely with Madison Square Boys & Girls Club to get after-school programming restored by early 2024. Della Valle added, “As we work to get Madison operational, we’re also eager to begin a robust community engagement process so we can sit at the table with our neighbors and learn from them about how this site can best serve seniors, children, and other residents for many years. We are eager to begin this work.”
When the clubhouse site was originally sold, fears were that the location would be turned into some luxury building and be closed off to local residents. The Madison Square Boys & Girls Club Foundation had been forced to sell the Navy Yard Clubhouse because it faced hundreds of child sexual abuse lawsuits filed under the New York State Child Victims Act (CVA) against a former Foundation volunteer; claims were that the volunteer abused children beginning in the year 1948 and continued doing so up until 1984.
The Foundation filed for Chapter 11 restructuring in June of 2022 to save itself and said it found it could get the most money to pay the claims against them by selling their Navy Yard Clubhouse.
Samantha Johnson, a local Farragut Fort Greene Coalition activist, said she’s mostly pleased to hear that clubhouse services will be temporarily restored. But she found it a little worrying to see that the Madison Square Boys & Girls Club Foundation is currently being brought back on to manage the site.
“We, as a coalition, anticipated that this would be the default––so to speak––to have Madison Boys & Girls Club again. But we also do feel that it is a concern because there were no bids giving other nonprofits the opportunity to run this building. We are a bit taken aback because this project has so much more potential and we feel like this is kind of turning to the default, this is bringing back an organization, back into the space where trust has been lost. We as an organization feel very slighted by that and we want to try to express that we, although we understand this is what the community initially asked for, we’re trying to figure out what are the next steps.”
Alloy is urging community members who want to talk about the future of 240 Nassau to get in touch with Elizabeth Graham, the firm’s community liaison at egraham@alloyllc.com.
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