Closing Center At Harlem NYCHA Complex Would Be Disaster: Seniors

HARLEM, NY — A set of hand-crafted birdhouses that adorn the windows at Harlem's Martin Luther King Jr. Senior Center have been joined by new decorations in the past few weeks: protest signs.

Seniors who rely on the Lenox Avenue and West 112th Street center for exercise, social interaction and meals have been fighting ever since the city Department for the Aging and the New York City Housing Authority announced suddenly that the center would be one of eight in Manhattan to close by the end of June.

With a number of seniors living in the nearby King and Taft public housing developments, closing the center will be a "disaster" 77-year-old Flora Speller said.

“We’ve been fighting very much," Speller said. "We’ve been fighting and protesting trying to keep it open and praying that de Blasio really gets some kind of heart and feelings for us and that he at least considers letting us keep it open.”

One volunteer at the center who was helping serve hot dogs as seniors came in for lunch Thursday said the center is one of the few places in the area where seniors can feel part of the larger community.

"Why would they want to deprive the senior citizens of the only outlet that they have to communicate, to do community work, to socialize and to have what many consider the second home away from home," Jacob Azeke said.

"It is in the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, and they should think of that and try to preserve and save our center."

Gail Smalls, the vice chair at the center, told Patch that she prays every night that the city reverses a decision to close the center by June 28. At the end of May a representative from the city Department for the Aging came to the center an announced the shutdown with "no negotiation, no nothing," Smalls said.

The city said it will bus seniors in the development to a nearby center on West 120th Street, but Smalls said the center's regular clients won't be able to afford the cost of transportation. Smalls also said buses won't be able to help the many King Towers residents who are homebound, who have meals delivered from the current center.

The value the King Towers senior center provides is a sense of community, Smalls said.

"It’s about us not being in the house. If you’re in your home you’re just sitting there waiting to die. I hate to say it but that’s the truth," Smalls told Patch. "You’re just sitting there and if you don’t have family members — we are a family."

The King Towers senior center is one of four NYCHA and Department for the Aging centers in Manhattan targeted for closure by the city. City agencies justified the closures by referring to the centers as "social clubs" or saying they were underutilized, but Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer disagrees.

Brewer sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio and DFTA and NYCHA commissioners Lorraine Cortes-Vasquez and Kathryn Garcia in late May demanding that the city reinvest in senior services instead of closing them.

The borough president doesn't believe that the centers are under-utilized and said that the budget savings from cutting the services will be "minimal."

"This center has got to continue. DFTA, NYCHA always use that 'underutilized' excuse," Brewer said. "They have activities here, they have meals here and they’re known. People will stay in their apartments, they won’t go to the other center. They’ll get depressed, and they’ll die."

Brewer said that her office has not received a response from DFTA or NYCHA, but that they will continue to fight to save the King Towers center and the other centers in Manhattan from closure. Brewer's letter to city agencies in May was signed in support by local lawmakers at the city, state and federal levels who pledged: "We are collectively read to do all we can to help."

"It’s not the first time we’ve been through the same fight, and we’ve been successful in the past, and we’re going to be successful here," Brewer said.