GINIA BELLAFANTE writes in a recent NYT article how a renovated community center in Manhattan's Lower East Side is using differentiated membership rates to insure the entirety of the diverse community is served. Here are some excerpts:
. . . the experiment underway at the Manny Cantor Center
on East Broadway — an effort to convene the well-off, the middle class
and the poor, the neighborhood’s 90-year-old Jews and 30-year-old
Chinese immigrant mothers — seems almost mythic, the resurrection of a
city that exists now largely in fantasy.
 |
| The Manny Cantor Center (Manny Cantor Center website) |
The
center, which recently underwent a $55 million renovation, has a large
and impressive gym to which fees are paid on a sliding scale. Families
living in one of the area’s many public housing projects pay $10 a
month; those living in one of the neighborhood’s many middle-class co-op
developments, built by labor unions in the middle of the last century,
might pay more; and those living in $2 million lofts in the building
that used to house The Jewish Daily Forward pay the top rate of $87 a
month. The gym opened a few weeks ago, and so far the project’s intent
would seem to have been realized, with approximately a third of members
coming from public housing, a third coming from the co-ops and a third
from luxury properties on the Lower East Side. Art classes at the center
will have a similar fee scale.
What is inspiring about the center is how little it seems motivated by
noblesse oblige. As part of its commitment to communitarianism, the
center houses both a Head Start preschool program and a private
preschool for those in the area who can afford it. The classrooms are
side by side. . . .
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