Lodgers to Say Goodby to ‘Y’

When the old downtown YMCA finally closes next month, Wilbert Williams will be one of the last to leave. He will linger as long as possible, saying his goodbys, taking one last tour of the halls.

And then he will walk out the door.

“I’ve still got my fingers crossed that something will change,” Williams said, standing in front of the 68-year-old building that he has called home for more than three years.

“See that?” he adds, pointing to a sign above the door. “That says Young Men’s Christian Assn. It makes you think you can count on God. The YMCA has always been very fair to me. I never did want to move out of there.”

Williams, 48, is one of 15 long-term residents, some of them homeless, who will lose their quarters when the facility closes May 17 because of financial troubles. Opened in 1923, the YMCA in recent years has served as a temporary refuge for people who are down on their luck, but like many of the people it serves, it, too, has fallen on hard times.

“We just don’t have the resources to keep the building open,” said Gerald L. Nutter, president of the Orange County YMCA. “It’s sad, because a lot of these people are like family.”

The YMCA, at the corner of Civic Center Drive and Sycamore Street, has long served as a gym for local residents. A full schedule of aerobics and aquatics classes are held at the building, which houses a swimming pool and Jacuzzi, sauna and steam rooms, an indoor running track, and racquetball, volleyball and basketball courts. But equally important are the 83 rooms that are rented out for $15 or $20 a night, providing much-needed accommodations for those who walk the streets.

The demand for the rooms is so great that officials say the occupancy rate is close to 90%. While officials are working with local churches to secure new homes for longtime residents like Williams, hundreds of men who have come to depend on the historic, three-story building for temporary boarding will no longer have that option.

“It will hurt,” said Dave Roy, a 34-year-old unemployed man who spends at least one week a month at the YMCA.

“A lot of people can’t afford motel rooms because they cost at least $35 a night,” he said. “It’s real rough staying in a motel with the income a lot of these people have coming in. This place is very reasonable and it takes you off the street.”

When he’s not staying at the YMCA, Roy sleeps underneath the entrance of a government building just a block away. He says the time he spends at the facility helps to rejuvenate both body and spirit.

“I come in for three or four nights just to get some rest and catch up on sleep,” he said. “After you’re here a few days, you get cleaned up and you feel like you’re back into the reality of what being a man is supposed to be like. You’re out of the nightmare of the streets and have a roof over your head.”

Neil James has lived at the YMCA for the last three months. After spending seven years living on the streets of San Francisco, James came to Orange County to try to rebuild his life.

The 41-year-old man, who described himself as “brokenhearted and downtrodden,” was referred to the YMCA by a mental health facility.

“I’m in a daze about this place closing,” James said while sitting on the front-door steps. “It affects me a great deal, because I don’t have a lot of income and don’t know where to go or who to turn to.”

James said he has made many friends during the three months he has lived at the YMCA. He attends weekly Bible classes and receives daily help at the facility’s drop-in counseling center.

“This place has helped me put my life together,” he said. “I could have stayed here indefinitely.”

Pete Armentrout, 30, has been staying at the YMCA for the last two weeks, trying to get back on his feet financially.

“There isn’t much out there besides this place,” Armentrout said. “It helps out a lot of people who are just getting out of prison. It’s better than being out in the streets.”

Although the Santa Ana facility will be closing, YMCA officials are hopeful that the building’s new owner will convert it into a low-cost, single-room housing facility.

“Our preference is that the buyer will maintain the facility as a resource to the community for single-room occupancy,” Nutter said. “It looks promising that that will be able to happen. But even if it does happen, there will probably still be a period of time during the transition that the building will be closed.”

YMCA officials are talking with several organizations that have expressed interest in buying the building, Nutter said.

For Wilbert Williams, who has become one of the YMCA’s most popular tenants, the building’s imminent closure disrupts the comfortable living arrangement that he has enjoyed since he was forced to retire from his job at a state unemployment office in Fullerton because of arthritis.

“They are friendly people, nice people. I never had any worries. They always had fresh paint and clean carpets and tried to help the tenants,” he said.

Williams said he will miss the afternoons spent joking around with newfound friends, many of whom frequently come to him to buy cigarettes for a dime.

“I think that I’ll be the last one to move, the last one out that door,” he said. “I hate to see it happen, because I was planning on staying here at least another 10 years.”