Inner-City Youths Seek a Place to ‘Break’ Away

Singing, chanting and break-dancing, about 100 youths demonstrated outside City Hall on Wednesday in an effort to persuade the city to help find a new home for a popular inner-city youth center forced to close to make way for a commercial construction project.

The demonstrators were patrons of the Youth Break Center, where young people gather to practice and perform break-dancing and paint graffiti art without defacing property.

The center was established in December, 1983, to give the young people something to do other than get involved in drugs and gang violence, director Carmelo Alvarez said.

“We’re kind of a non-traditional youth center,” Alvarez said. “We originally started out (with more traditional activities) but it didn’t turn out that way, because all the people that came requested breaking and popping (a type of mime).”

Building to Be Razed

The center has been renting an auditorium and stage at 715 S. Park View St., but the building is scheduled to be torn down to make room for an office complex, restaurant and parking lot. The property’s owner, realtor Jack E. Huntsberger, said Wednesday that he will donate the building to the center if the youths can arrange to have it moved to a new site.

Alvarez said he has approached about 20 property owners, but none has offered a lease. Nor has he had any luck soliciting aid from private foundations.

“The breaking, graffiti and rapping (rapid talking to the beat of music) are considered non-traditional,” Alvarez said. “A lot of prominent people don’t want their name affiliated with that. The march is to show that break-dancing is valuable. In a way we’re helping the city because we’re helping the kids stay off the street.”

Sheryl Grace, a spokeswoman for City Councilman David Cunningham, whose district includes the center’s present site, said more study is needed before any city money can be made available.

No Help Yet

“We haven’t discovered an avenue with which we could help Mr. Alvarez at this time,” she said. “We are not aware of any city dollars that are available to them. . . .”

Grace added, however, that Cunningham and his staff “are not opposed to helping them.”

Olivia Mitchell, director of the mayor’s Office of Youth Development, said it would take one to two years for city officials to review the request and decide whether to lease land to the center.

“They think that bureaucracy can move (quickly), which it cannot,” she said. “Each of the processes takes time and he (Alvarez) would just not get it (the land) fast enough.”