$1.8-Million Gift to Move East L.A. YMCA Out of Its Cramped Quarters

Crowding up to 20 students at a time into its two rented little rooms above a discount grocery store on 1st Street, the East Los Angeles YMCA turns out 500 adult graduates a year from its English language, job readiness and typing courses.

But it expects to triple its student body, offer year-round swimming in a new indoor pool and have preschool child care for the first time when it moves into a new $2.4-million headquarters in the fall of 1988.

Plans for the new East Los Angeles center were announced Thursday when Lawrence Wolfe, vice president of the Weingart Foundation, handed over to the YMCA a check for $1.8 million toward the cost of the facility. The YMCA has already begun a campaign to raise the remainder of the money. The buildings will be on a 1.5-acre site on Whittier Boulevard near Soto Street.

‘Meet a Critical Need’

John Ouellet, president of the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, said the new facility “will meet a critical need” in East Los Angeles, a 16-square-mile area with a population of 217,000 that includes Belvedere, Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, City Terrace and unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County.

YMCA officials calculate that 87% of the residents of those areas are Latino. Forty-six percent of the households have annual incomes of less than $15,000, and 41% of the population is 19 years old or younger, with less than half of them finishing high school.

“In addition to increased programs for schoolchildren, we will be able to provide child care for preschoolers, and we will have more classrooms for teaching English language, literacy, and job readiness,” Ouellet said.

Sheriff Sherman Block, who attended the check presentation ceremony at the Los Angeles Press Club, said the new facility is “absolutely essential” for East Los Angeles.

“We are, in effect, competing for the minds, the hearts and the bodies of our young people with those negative forces in the community, the dope pushers and the gangs,” Block said. “To have the ability to provide some options and some opportunities for more productive, constructive activities will make the difference in the future.”

2 Buildings to Be Remodeled

Raul Alvarez, executive director of the East Los Angeles YMCA, said two of the three existing commercial buildings on the site will be remodeled to provide eight classrooms and a preschool child-care center for 60 children. The third building will be demolished to make way for a 25-yard indoor swimming pool, showers and locker rooms.

“With the new headquarters, the East Los Angeles YMCA will serve about 7,000 children and adults in this area,” Alvarez said.

Since it was founded in its present cramped quarters in 1982, the East Los Angeles branch of the organization has also used facilities at four neighborhood schools for some of its programs, which include day care for schoolchildren, summer camp and fitness programs, Alvarez said.

The grant from the Weingart Foundation brought to $9.2 million the total given by the foundation to the YMCA in Southern California since 1977, Wolfe said. The foundation, established by the late Los Angeles real estate developer Ben Weingart and his late wife Stella, contributes to social welfare, arts, education and children’s programs.