Pain is palpable after Navy Yard Clubhouse closing
The shuttering of the Navy Yard Boys & Girls Club––which serviced the Downtown Brooklyn, Navy Yard, and DUMBO neighborhoods––has led to a broad dispersal of the children who used to attend the site.
The building at 240 Nassau Street now stands closed and empty. The commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield has been contracted to accept proposals from developers and organizations interested in purchasing the location, which is directly across the street from NYCHA’s Farragut housing projects.
For now, the children who took part in Clubhouse activities are off attending summer programs at Fort Greene’s P.S. 067, at the Farragut Community Center, and even at the nearby The Church of The Open Door. There weren’t exactly enough spots in the varied summer programs for all the former Clubhouse kids to go to, so some kids have spent most of their summer close to home. With fall quickly approaching, the next challenge is to find out where former Clubhouse kids will be able to go for afterschool and extracurricular services.
“The idea of what is yet to come is very scary,” community activist Samantha Johnson acknowledged, “because there won’t be any community-focused space. As gentrification and other things start occurring, we’re finding ourselves in complete battles for spaces and services when we’re in a very ‘rich’ area, so to speak, that has an image of having resources. But when you’re in the middle of NYCHA residences and you’re in the middle of developers, who wins?” Johnson points out that the Clubhouse building was not only a space for neighborhood children, it had also become a community resource. There were pantry services, and it had a meeting space: It was a facility that catered to people of varied ages.
The loss of the space for the children is the most obvious, but everyone is going to notice the difference. With the former building available to be sold or leased out, a new owner could renovate the property or completely demolish and redevelop it.
Dorian Muller, a former Farragut resident who remains concerned about his former neighbors, was the first to raise the alarm about the closing of the Navy Yard Clubhouse. He remembers playing basketball there when he was a child. “So that’s why I said to myself that I was fighting for this Boys & Girls Club,” he said. “I didn’t ask nobody no questions; I didn’t start to talk about I’m going to fight. I just said, ‘Listen everybody, I’m fighting whether you’re going to walk with me or not.’
“You know, we lost a daycare center in Farragut to a federal halfway house,” Muller added, referencing the conversion of the former Farragut Tenants Day Care Center at 104 Gold Street into a 161-bed halfway house for federal prison parolees. “And you know why we lost that? It’s because we’re poor: Poor people lose everything. It’s because the downtown area is very inviting. And once you had 9/11, everybody wanted to live in that 11201 and that 11205-area code. These are some of the richest and most expensive area codes right now, even though we got people that’s in poverty across the street from the DUMBO area.
“It’s called DUMBO now, but when I lived there, it was called the Dots, with big rats. It smelled like eggs, and we just used to throw rocks against the dirty water.”
The trauma of gentrification
The Madison Square Boys & Girls Club Foundation is selling 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 those claims against them by selling their Navy Yard Clubhouse. The building could be sold for between $15 to $25 million.
This past July 28th, the Foundation announced that the U.S. Bankruptcy Court had accepted its reorganization plan, and it will be able to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“The confirmation of our plan is a significant step that puts us on a clear path to emerge from the reorganization process and continue serving New York City’s most vulnerable communities for decades and generations to come,” Tim McChristian, executive director of the Madison Foundation, said in a press release. McChristian said he hopes Foundation abuse survivors will be able to “continue to heal from the harm they suffered,” and he promised that Madison would continue “to support our community as one of the longest-serving providers of afterschool programming and youth development programs in underserved communities in New York City.
“We are highly optimistic that the Department of Youth and Community Development will approve our ability to continue to provide afterschool programs in the new school year at a local school to be determined,” he added.
With the Navy Yard Clubhouse shuttered, fears are that the former building could become yet another luxury rental. Since 2004, more than 20,000 new apartments have been built in the Downtown Brooklyn area where, according to the apartment listings site RentCafe, monthly rents now average $4,048 a month.
“In terms of gentrification, nobody deals with people having to move out, nobody deals with the trauma,” The Church of The Open Door’s Rev. Dr. Mark V.C. Taylor expressed to the AmNews.
He said the situation echoes the many times Black people are mistreated and damaged by the larger society, but nothing is done about it. There is little reflection on the pain that’s been caused. “So, a lot of times, when services are lost, when churches are closed, nobody deals with the trauma, nobody even asks about it.
“What is really so … I don’t even know the right words to describe it: crazy, insidious. What is so striking about the situation is that one person’s actions are impacting a whole community institution and impacting all of the kids, not only who have come but who will come.”
Samantha Johnson had helped form the ad hoc Farragut Fort Greene Coalition to try to save the Navy Yard Clubhouse. Now she says the Coalition is thinking about the future: “We’re thinking about what it means to have transparency and accountability in our community. We’re thinking about how we build this out to where the Coalition is a central source for information and how do we deal with issues in the community like loss of spaces, community-based work, and therapy. We’re really focused on the Boys & Girls Club right now, but we don’t know if we’re going be talking about another community center in the next few years, you know, we don’t know what we might be doing. So, our Coalition is very intentional about trying to get information out to the best of our ability.”
Those interested in contacting the Farragut Fort Greene Coalition can reach them via email at FarragutFortGreeneCoalition@gmail.com.
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