Better Times In Store for Pasadena Y

Phone the old downtown YMCA on Holly Street and they answer heartily, “Centennial Place.”

Although the letters “YMCA” are still bolted to the stairway entrance, although fluorescent lights still shine gloomily in worn hallways, although dejected men--out of work and out of luck--still flop on beds and stare at the ceiling in midday, there’s energy and optimism in the air.

Change is coming.

The 79-year-old building has been sold and will be converted to a low-income, single-room occupancy hotel called Centennial Place. Construction workers now mingle with “Y” boarders, who will be provided temporary housing elsewhere while the 16-month renovation project gets under way.

The change comes after five years of negotiations during which the building’s fate hung in limbo. After plans collapsed for a combined YMCA and YWCA recreational building downtown, the new owners, a consortium of nonprofit groups, stepped forward to rehabilitate the structure, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“It’s going to be a really great building,” said Doug Grant, an employee of the Los Angeles Design Center, one of the partners involved in the rehabilitation. “It’s going to be a lot newer, a lot cleaner and a lot safer.”

Built in 1910, the 125-room downtown Pasadena Y was part of a national YMCA building boom between 1900 and 1916, said national YMCA spokeswoman Celeste Wroblewski in Chicago. During that time, 290 new YMCA buildings opened, most of them residences, including a 1,821-room YMCA in Chicago in an 18-story building where residents where charged 30 cents a day.

Role Changed With Demographics

The dormitory-style buildings were meant to provide affordable rooms in a wholesome environment for young men leaving farms to hunt for work in the nation’s growing cities. By the 1920s, YMCAs were the main providers of rental rooms for single, low-income males nationwide, Wroblewski said.

But that role changed as demographics changed. Faced with older, high-maintenance buildings, most in deteriorating urban cores, many local YMCAs began to sell their property and get out of the housing business.

The number of YMCA beds nationwide continues to drop, with 20,671 last year, compared to 73,906 in 1946, Wroblewski said.

In Pasadena, YMCA officials followed the national trend. In 1985, they devised a $15-million development agreement with the YWCA that would have eliminated the housing program, sold off the YMCA building and combined recreational operations in one building at the YWCA site.

That agreement fell apart in December, 1988, when the YMCA could not secure bank financing to build a larger building for the combined operations. The YMCA then went on alone and sold its building to the Los Angeles Community Design Center, an organization that has rehabilitated three downtown Los Angeles hotels, and the Pasadena Housing Alliance, a nonprofit group composed of All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena Presbyterian Church, St. Andrew’s Catholic Church and Union Station.

Under a complicated, $12-million financial agreement that includes city loans of $4.4 million, the four-story YMCA building will be reinforced against earthquakes and the number of rooms will be expanded to 142. Asbestos will be removed in some areas and additional common bathrooms and kitchens will be built. Room rents will run from $249 to $319 a month, a slight increase from the $225 to $319 rates charged by the Y.

A 1960s addition called the Bacon Wing, which contains parking, handball courts and a running track, will be demolished. The Janss Corp., a real estate development firm, may build an office building on that site.

The coming renovations have invigorated many of the Y’s remaining 58 tenants, who weathered eight months in the building while escrow proceedings dragged on.

Fresh Start for Some

Although some complain of the long wait, others have caught the spirit of renewal. Some, like 18-year-old John Barry, a blond Pasadena native, plan to leave the Y with $4,000 in relocation money to chart new lives for themselves.

“No way,” Barry said when asked if he will return as a tenant when work on the building is completed.

“This has been an experience that will remain in the past,” Barry said. “I’m going to get a car and a decent job . . . I want to be a lawyer. For someone in this place, that’s incredible.”

Last December, Barry said he left his mother’s home for a cheap room at the Y because of family problems.

“Everybody here is older than me, and it was weird at first,” Barry said. “I was green.”

Going Without Food

Like many other unemployed YMCA tenants, Barry said he went without food at times, once for four days.

“You’re not allowed to have food in your rooms, so basically you eat out, if you do eat,” he said. “A lot of people here don’t. This isn’t the Ritz.”

Now, Barry holds down a graveyard shift maintenance job at the Y and credits his girlfriend, Joanna, with helping him through the rough time.

With his relocation money, he pledged to buy her whatever she wants. Said Barry with quiet intensity, “I owe her that much.”

For Oscar Williams, 38, a muscular laborer and former coal miner, staying at the YMCA was nothing new. Because of the cheap rents, Williams said he often sought YMCA housing in New York, Chicago, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania.

“But this is one of the worst-run ones I’ve ever been in,” he said of his two years at the Pasadena Y.

Decline of Services

Twenty years ago, the Pasadena YMCA housed mainly single working men, said former tenant Henry Marin, now the head maintenance man there. Clean sheets arrived every week, clean towels daily, and maids cleaned each room every morning.

But those services ended over the years. Tenants had to provide their own sheets and towels and pick up after themselves.

Even regular maintenance was halted during the five years the YMCA sought to rid itself of its four-story building, said Grant, project manager for the renovation. Holes in the ceiling went unpatched, broken tile in the bathrooms remained, dilapidated kitchen areas were abandoned, and roaches ruled the hallways.

In March, the Y recreation programs were halted and the basement pool was drained. Now, rows of dusty, abandoned lockers remain in the unused basement. Furniture and equipment litters the first-floor gymnasiums and exercise machines, gutted of their computer mechanisms, sit abandoned in a workout room off the lobby.

Looking for Work

Williams said friends teased him about living there, but he stayed put, waiting since February to collect the relocation money. Jobs have been scarce, despite his membership in the Laborers International Union of North America. Because he lacks union connections and construction skills beyond those of basic, manual labor, Williams said he may look for work in Las Vegas.

“If they don’t let me work, I’m going to be out there with the homeless,” he said. “A few dudes I know couldn’t keep their dues up, and they’re pushing shopping carts.”

Although Williams faces an uncertain future, John Flynn, 65, plans to move into Pasadena Manor, a nearby retirement home that will temporarily house up to 30 of the YMCA residents. Angelus Estates, another nearby board-and-care facility, will also house Y tenants who wish to return to Centennial Place.

For Flynn--a former USC book buyer, insurance salesman and radio actor who graduated from the UC Berkeley with a degree in Far Eastern civilizations--ending up at the YMCA was “a quirk of fate,” he said.

“I never planned it,” he said. “It was just one of those things that happened.”

Hates to Move

After a job as a live-in attendant in a Pasadena home turned out not to his liking, Flynn quit and took a room at the YMCA. He stayed for two years because he hates to move, he said. Now, with a job in the Fairfax District that he commutes to by bus, he has established a routine: arrive back at the YMCA by 6 p.m., walk to Plaza Pasadena, work a few crossword puzzles, return to the Y, then bed.

Flynn said he doesn’t spend that much time in his room, but that could change when the renovations are completed. Flynn and others could well return to a building upgraded to the stable, inviting atmosphere it had in the 1970s, said maintenance man Marin.

“It needs a lot of work,” Marin said, “but I think it will totally change when they revamp it and keep a stronger hold on it.”