Parks Dept. Hopes to Use $51M to Demolish/Remake Rec Center; Preservationists Infuriated

The NYC Parks Department is one step closer to formalizing a plan to demolish the historic Tony Dapolito Recreation Center and replace it with something new, after Mayor Eric Adams earmarked $51 million for the project in his proposed budget. Preservationists, namely the prominent local advocacy group Village Preservation, are livid. Instead, they want the money to go toward repairing the 117-year-old structure.

The beloved rec center, which opened at Clarkson Street and Seventh Avenue South in 1908, has been closed to the public due to poor conditions since 2021. Last July, the Parks Department estimated that repairing the existing building would cost $100 million, a figure that the agency balked at.

This February, the department confirmed that they instead want to demolish the rec center and reconstitute some of its services nearby. This would likely include: relocating its outdoor pool to another location in the abutting J.J. Walker Park, building a comparable gym at a mixed-use building across the street, and “preserving” the pool’s famous Keith Haring mural in some form. Now, the proposed budget infusion would ostensibly help them move forward.

Yet Village Preservation’s executive director, Andrew Berman, who toured the structure on April 23 with Chelsea City Council Member Eric Botcher, believes that repairs to the existing recreation center are actually quite feasible.

Upon noticing the $51-million figure in the recently proposed $115-billion city budget, Berman dared to hope that the money would go toward repairing Tony Dapolito, he told Our Town Downtown. Those hopes were dashed in recent days, he said, when he discovered that the Parks Department’s overall demolition plans hadn’t changed. He also argues that since the rec center is located inside a historic district, it has limited landmark protections, which he thinks would be improperly bypassed by the Parks Department’s demolition plan.

Berman sent a letter to various public officials, including the Parks Department and Mayor Adams, after he toured the rec center’s premises. “As we have previously expressed, and as we can now reaffirm following the site visit, none of the physical issues present at the recreation center are insurmountable, nor are they unique to this building,” he wrote.

“Just about every 19th- and early-20th-century building in New York City faces structural and/or material issues such as steel framing deterioration, water infiltration, spalling brickwork, etc., that lead to damage to historic materials over time,” he continued. He argued that buildings with similar architectural characteristics, such as Grand Central Terminal and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been “repaired and adapted for new uses” over the decades.

“What’s different here is that the City of New York has much vaster resources to bring the building up to contemporary conditions,” Berman told Our Town Downtown.

The $51-million item in the proposed budget that would more or less flatten the existing center, Berman said, is “outrageous” and “unjustifiable.” He added that he believes the poor state of Tony Dapolito’s facilities derives from years of “neglect” and “delayed maintenance” by the Parks Department itself. Berman also made reference to the very name given to the center: Tony Dapolito was a local Community Board 2 member for more than 50 years and, German said, “fought to preserve community institutions like this.”

Village Preservation is mounting a letter-writing campaign, which Berman says has generated thousands of letters, in order to protest the Park Department’s plans. They’ll also be attempting to convince the City Council, as part of the budget approval process, to see if they accomplish the aforementioned nudging of the $51 million toward repairs instead of demolition.

Reached for comment, a Parks Department representative told Our Town Downtown that the agency’s “top priority is public safety.”

“We have heard the community’s desire to bring back recreational programming to the neighborhood,” they said. “We are looking to improve upon the previous amenities, so that we can deliver meaningful improvements that meet recreational needs of current and future generations.”