A Community Center for All Income Levels, New York Times, February 27, 2014

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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New Recreation Facility Debated, Reston Connection, February 21, 2013

Reston Community Center solicits public input on a new indoor recreation center at Baron Cameron Park.

 By Andrea Worker

Reston Community Center invited the public to bring their wish lists to an open forum meeting on Monday, Feb. 11, to discuss the potential development of a new indoor recreation center at Baron Cameron Park. In 2012, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors transferred 68 acres at the park to the Fairfax County Parks Authority, and Bill Bouie, who is both a member of the Reston Community Center Board of Governors, as well as the chairman of the parks authority Board told the assembly that the Reston Community Center is “an interested party” in the Fairfax County Parks Authority’s Master Planning Process about to begin in March. “We are looking ahead to FY 2015’s budget, and in partnership with the FCPA our hope would be to develop an indoor facility on the site,” said Bouie, to a meeting room packed with individual residents, as well as plethora of local organizations, including the Reston Association, Reston Interfaith, Sustainable Reston, Reston Accessibility Committee, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, the YMCA, Reston Runners and more. “Reston continues to grow and that growth means we need to respond and expand our recreational offerings.”  . .

A representative from Reston Accessibility Committee presents remarks to crowd at Reston Community Center at the organization's meeting to discuss future needs and development. Photo by Andrea Worker.

Several attendees made pitches for additional venues for performing and cultural arts programs, whether at the Baron Cameron site or elsewhere, but the number one request was for a multi-use aquatic center to be the focal point of the potential new facility, featuring a 50 meter pool with “lots of lanes and a real diving well.”  . . .

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RCC Considering New Indoor Pool/Rec Center, Reston Patch, February 11, 2013

By Karen Goff

Reston Community Center, Fairfax County Park Authority taking public feedback for potential facility at Baron Cameron Park. 

Reston Community Center is exploring the idea of building a new indoor recreation and community center at Baron Cameron Park.

In spring of 2012, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors transferred 68 acres at that location to the Fairfax County Park Authority, Bill Bouie, RCC Board of Governors member and chairman of RCC's program committee. The Park Authority will work in partnership with RCC to move the project forward, said Bouie, who is also chairman of the Fairfax County Park Authority Board.

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Five Minutes with Robert E. Simon, Reston Patch, September 28, 2010

Please read Karen Goff's excellent Q&A interview of Bob Simon in the Reston Patch.  He gives some good personal views on where Reston has been, where it is, and where it's going, including the good and the bad. 

The article is here. 

Here's an excerpt: 
  

Q:  How do you think the community is doing today? So many changes are coming.

A:   I get asked this question not infrequently. Do you want the bad first or the good first? The No. 1 bad is New Dominion Parkway. New Dominion is a giant wall that cuts the Town Center in half. Town Center goes from Target to Home Depot. New Dominion cuts it. Everything that side of New Dominion is not town centerish. Garages  are designed so you can never put anything on the ground level.

No. 2 - the village centers, as well as the town center. There is only one village center. This one (Lake Anne). The other so-called village centers, they are shopping centers. . . .

Q:  So what is good about Reston in 2010?
A:   The good is actually the marvelous. I will start with the pathways. We have 55 miles of paths. My successors finished the building of the paths and underpasses, continued the recreation facilities and continue to take care of it.

Second most wonderful thing, the Reston Community Center in Hunters Woods, with that wonderful theater and it is used so well.

And Fountain Square [at Reston Town Center]. Fountain Square is an ideal plaza. I think it is just about perfect.  It is a gathering place, as a plaza is supposed to be. Mixed use, of course. it's got places to sit outside, places to go inside, a skating rink, a movie theatre.

Also good: the recreational facilities and the Walker Nature Education Center.