Community Building : The year-old Salgado Center--the first on Santa Ana’s west side--has become a magnet for young people. The city, say advocates, needs more like it.

Years ago, when its planners tried to imagine who would benefit from a community center in Rosita Park in west Santa Ana, they might have pictured Eric Gomez.

Gomez, 13, is an eighth-grader at Irvine Intermediate School in Garden Grove. He began going to the Albert D. Salgado Community Center a few months after it opened last January.

Now he plays basketball in the center’s gym every day after school. He serves as a teen volunteer, working with kids who drop by to play or do homework. And he’s changed his mind about what he wants to wear.

“I just started dressing regular because when I used to dress baggy I didn’t like it that much because a lot of the gangsters, they thought I was involved in a gang, but I wasn’t. So I just stopped doing that and got involved with the gym.”

Gomez says some of the teenage boys he knows have followed suit.

“Since they started coming here,” he says, “they left those baggy pants and started being, I don’t know, more friendly. . . . I don’t think they bully [people] around no more because they have something to do and they feel better about themselves.”

In the year since it opened, the Salgado Community Center has become a focal point in the lives not only of Eric and other teens, but also of people from many walks of life. Some 200 children, teens, adults and senior citizens use the center’s gymnasium, game room, multipurpose room and outdoor lap pool each day.

The $3.3-million, 18,000 square-foot facility has become, in the words of one city official, the “pride of the community.”

The center is also the site of school district meetings, cultural events and countywide amateur boxing matches. It has been rented out for weddings and first Holy Communion parties. There’s been a baptism in the lap pool.

More than a dozen outside groups regularly use the facility: a coalition of labor unions holds a monthly breakfast forum; the Vietnamese Student Assn. of Orange County conducts tutoring sessions there every Sunday.

“We love the center, and we’re happy to see the improvement in the community,” says Roy Melcher of the Westend Community Oriented Police, a neighborhood crime-prevention organization that meets in the center’s multipurpose room.

Melcher, a longtime Santa Ana resident, says that before the center was built “it was pretty rough at this particular location.”

“The residents didn’t like coming here. People don’t want to go to parks if there’s crime there.”

While there used to be some gang activity in Rosita Park, Santa Ana Police Lt. Bill Tegeler says the biggest problem from a police perspective was that the park wasn’t being used.

Now, he says, “there’s something for the kids to come out for, and . . . parents can be confident that the kids are going to be safe here and [that] there are specific activities that they can take part in.”

Tegeler says that the activities provided by a community center help prevent young people from joining gangs.

“Many times we tell them, ‘Don’t join a gang,’ but we don’t give them an alternative. So unless you give them an alternative, they’re going to be getting into trouble, or who knows what they’re going to be doing. One of the things the city wants to do is provide some positive outlets for the community, and this is a great example.”

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The Albert D. Salgado Community Center, named after a Santa Ana community activist who coached Little League, was a long time coming.

City Councilwoman Patricia A. McGuigan, a 34-year Santa Ana resident whose sons played Little League in Rosita Park in the ‘70s, says the center was in the planning stages when she joined the council in 1981.

“That’s how long it takes to get one of these things built, to get the money for it,” says McGuigan, who is more than pleased with the new center: “It’s the pride of the community.”

The long-awaited community center--the first to be built on the west side--has become a magnet for young people.

The lure?

Basketball, karate classes, indoor volleyball, aquatics and teen dances. The teen club and a family club also offer activities and excursions. Skateboarders even use the center’s front sidewalk and parking lot curb to practice stunts.

“It’s a great place for the kids,” says Carmen Nunez, whose daughters, ages 12 and 13, and 8-year-old son are regulars. “We were waiting six months for it to be completed. We were wondering, ‘What is this big building?’ It’s beautiful.”

Visitors enter the modern white building with aqua-green and red trim through a domed lobby. To the right is the gymnasium with a full basketball court. Behind the front desk is a small room for playing table games and to the left is a multipurpose room with a kitchen. Outside in back is the four-lane lap pool.

Says director Juan Lara: “The center is a safe and fun location away from home where [young people] can spend as much time as they like, interact with friends and just know they’re welcome here and [that] they’ll be out of harm’s way.”

Cleve Williams, executive director of Santa Ana’s Recreation and Community Services Agency, uses the Salgado Community Center as an example of excellence in the park system.

Williams, who arrived in Santa Ana about a year ago after serving as director of parks and recreation in Oakland, says the city is sorely lacking in community centers.

The Santa Ana public school system has about 52,000 students, he says. “When you look at those numbers compared to other cities with comparable numbers of students--Oakland and Minneapolis--Oakland has 24 community centers, and Minneapolis has approximately 50.

“Here, we have eight.”

The Jerome Recreation Center, built in 1968, in the southwest corner of the city is the only one besides Salgado with a gymnasium; half of the centers are one-room buildings of about 800 square feet.

Williams says the city would like to build a 25,000 square-foot community center on a 10-acre site at Delhi Park on the city’s east side. It’s estimated it would cost $6.8 million to build the center and develop the park around it.

There’s no money available for the project, but it is hoped that a combination of federal, state, city and private funding can be found.

Even if another center can be built, Williams says, the need for more facilities is immediate and will always outstrip the ability to build them.

“Obviously, it calls for a much more aggressive and more innovative approach for us trying to meet the needs of our young people,” he says.

The bottom line, Williams says, is to help keep young people off the streets.

Williams says he and Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters cite Project Pride--a program that encourages youths to stay in school and to avoid gangs by providing after-school activities--and other after-school programs as a contributing factor in the reduction in youth crime in the city.

Marilyn MacDougal, executive director of the Santa Ana-based nonprofit groups Drug Use Is Life Abuse and Project No Gangs, is an enthusiastic supporter of community centers.

Whenever teenagers are polled, she says, they generally complain that “there’s nothing to do.”

“So any time a center opens that offers positive alternatives, then it’s a value,” she says. “We need more centers, not less; we need more alternatives, so they can’t say, ‘I have nothing to do.’ ”

MacDougal says it’s important for those running the centers “to listen to what the kids want, so they’ll use it.”

And she stresses the need for parents to encourage their children “to come in and try these centers out. . . . When [kids] find something there that works for them, then they’ll stay.”

A community center should be “a safe zone, a place where you can go and know you leave your gang stuff on the porch. If you’ve got a negative issue, leave it outside the door, and adopt the goals and mission of that center,” MacDougal says.

In so doing, she says, “you become a community member, if only for the time you’re in that building. But I think, eventually, it spreads. Maybe not the first time or the 10th time, but if you use the facility enough and interact with positive people, you’re going to take it back outside and spread the message.”

Eric Gomez has seen evidence of that.

He was among a handful of teenagers gathered behind the center’s gymnasium in September when a staff member talked two of the boys out of getting into a fight.

“Instead,” Gomez says, “we decided to just play football and forget everything else.”