A city-owned building in Brooklyn — once used by the NYPD as an application processing center, but which most recently sat vacant — is getting the finishing touches of a $10 million gut renovation. It's been a project about three years in the making, and will open this fall: the police department's first stand-alone community center.
The center, at 127 Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York, will be open to all but geared toward young people ages 12 to 19. The NYPD is partnering with The Child Center of New York, a non-profit organization, to provide programming for the building.
The Chief of Community Affairs, Nilda Hofmann, is well aware that the target audience of the center may harbor trust issues with police. Many young people in the neighborhood, and nearby Brownsville, report negative interactions with officers on the street and in their experience of being surveilled on social media.
"If the young people come in through that door, that's really what's important to us," Hofmann said during a tour of the site, adding that she was prepared to have hard conversations, and listen to criticism, from young people.
"Any type of relationship and trust only happens with time," Hofmann said.
The NYPD is hoping a state-of-the-art facility, designed with community input, will help draw young people in. The three-story building has basketball courts; a gym with cardio equipment and free weights; a music studio; a dance studio; counseling rooms; and classrooms for after school programs like tutoring or SAT prep. Hofmann herself helped choose the furniture — pieces that were fun and colorful for teens, she said — which sat in boxes this week awaiting assembly.
The community center fits into an era of policing when the NYPD is attempting to be more community-oriented, such as with its neighborhood policing program. And the community affairs bureau, which Hofmann leads, has long been tasked with building relationships in neighborhoods by attending or hosting community events. But Hofmann said it's significant for the NYPD to have a center of its own.
"This is ours," she said. "This is a space where we say, 'Come to our house.'"
Police Commissioner James O'Neill, who toured the building on Wednesday, said the point of the site was not just to keep young people busy, but to provide something meaningful in the neighborhood.
He cited recent community meetings in a small group of focus precincts, those with poverty and crime rates higher than the city's overall, where teenagers spoke of needing more opportunities and spaces specifically designed for them.
"Young people, especially in the nine precincts we visited, they want to feel valued," O'Neill said. "And we have to invest in them."
The center is something unique for the entire neighborhood, said Councilman Rafael Espinal, who represents the area.
"This is the first full-fledged community center that the City of New York has really invested in for East New York," Espinal said. "This has never been done for this scale."
But he acknowledged the historically tumultuous relationship between the NYPD and East New York, where 80 percent of residents are black or Latino and where the poverty rate is more than twice as high as the city's, according to data from the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York.
"I do believe the NYPD does have a large task at hand," Espinal said. "They're going to have to do a lot of outreach and break down a lot of barriers. But it's going to be up to community leaders like myself, and non-profits and other folks, to bridge that relationship."
The center is significant, Espinal said, because it will provide services to young people that previous generations did not have.
The NYPD aims to cut the ribbon on 127 Pennsylvania Avenue by the end of October. When its doors open, the public will have access to it seven days a week.