An ambitious new facility in Brooklyn pushes back on lightweight expectations about what’s possible.
In my part of Brooklyn, the hottest new accessory is a bright blue keytag with a retro-chic portrait of a local legend, yours for just $150 a year — $25 for seniors and free for anyone 24 or under. Neighbors rave to neighbors, who rave to other neighbors, proud members of the least exclusive club in New York: the Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center, an ambitious new public space debuted earlier this year by the City’s Department of Parks and Recreation.
A pristine competition-size swimming pool beckons just beyond the arched front entrance, where an efficient and cheerful staff answers questions and a display board shows a packed schedule of fitness classes. One can do laps, or reps upstairs in the gym, as early as 6:30 a.m. and as late as 9:30 p.m., but do come during the day, when playful arrays of windows — tall rectangles arrayed like dominoes along two flanks of of the pool, above half-moons rising from floor level — bring in ample natural light and embrace Flatbush. Digital keypads secure the lockers, attendants spritz tile to a shine and swimsuit-drying machines say to patrons: you matter.
Shirley Chisholm — named after the legendary “unbought and unbossed” congresswoman — got plenty of attention for its cheerful public architecture when it opened in February. It’s product of a streamlined development process, known as design-build, that enabled its construction in half of the typical timeline, after the state legislature in 2019 revisited antiquated procurement laws to integrate architecture and construction for certain public works projects. The facility, designed by Studio Gang Architects and built in three years at a cost of $141 million, is both functional and drop-dead gorgeous, from the mass-timber beams striping the two-story-high ceiling above the pool to the jaunty interplay between gym spaces stacked askew, connected by interior windows and cutaways. Sculpture installations by artist vanessa german invigorate hallways. More than 19,000 people have signed up for a membership.
Some, myself included, switched from a fancier fitness facility — like the acquaintance from the neighborhood I ran into in the locker room who still uses her Chelsea Piers swag backpack. She said she quit that downtown Brooklyn club — where the pool is so tiny that members must sign up in advance for a slot — the day she walked into Shirley Chisholm.
But we’re not the target audience. The new rec center has its roots in former area Councilmember Jumaane Williams’ proposition, dating back to the Bloomberg era, that a place to play and belong could divert young people from gun violence. Williams was hardly the first politician to hatch the notion. The plot twist was that he followed through and secured initial funding.
New Yorkers have reason to assume projects born from such sweeping promises will chiefly generate hype — just witness the Bronx’s Kingsbridge Armory, still vacant despite decades of aborted proposals that included an ice skating facility. Even success stories often don’t stay that way in a city with grand but aging infrastructure and insufficient attention (and sometimes, too little money) dedicated to maintaining what previous generations have created. Take the Parks Department’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park Aquatic Center, built by the Bloomberg administration in its bid for the 2012 Olympics — which was closed for years as its ceiling crumbled.
Expectations decline from there. The only City indoor pool in Harlem has been shuttered since 2019. The rec center in the West Village has been closed for years and is in the middle of a tug-of-war between Parks and historic preservationists about whether it should be salvaged. And City pools and beaches suffered a shortage of lifeguards that reached crisis levels in the pandemic, from which they still have not fully recovered.
Mayor Bill de Blasio saw in Shirley Chisholm, and in the City’s new design-build superpowers, the template for something bigger. In his now-forgotten 2020 State of the City address, he made an expansive promise to also build seven new public rec centers, from Coney Island to Soundview, reopen six closed facilities and eliminate what had been a $25-a-year membership fee for young people.
The Mamdani administration is now spending the capital de Blasio and the City Council allocated. Some of the work involves reviving historic Parks properties — including the only indoor public pool in the Bronx, St. Mary’s, which just reopened after four years of renovations. A WPA relic in Queens, Lost Battalion Hall Recreation Center, also recently reopened. It took nearly a decade to revive from the start of the design process to completion, according to the Parks Department’s capital project tracker.
Design-build opened up new frontiers for speedy, new development with modern standards. After years of opposition from engineers wary of losing business — their case hinged on a licensing technicality — advocacy from City officials, contractors and the unions they work with pushed the legislature and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to make the bill law.
It allows not only the Parks department but also the City’s transportation, hospitals, school construction, environmental, administrative and public housing agencies to bypass low-bidder procurement and instead be evaluated by criteria of “best value” — provided they engage in project labor agreements with unions. The law, reauthorized by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2024 with broad industry support, is again up for renewal in the upcoming legislative session.
Shirley Chisholm was the first fully public building to be constructed in New York City using design-build, and won’t be the last.
A new rec center is nearing completion on the north shore of Staten Island to replace one thrown offline by Hurricane Sandy 14 years ago. The City Department of Design and Construction, Parks’ partner on public works projects, is seeking a team to rebuild the Brownsville Recreation Center in Brooklyn. Parks is also now using design-build to attack the astronomically high cost of building standalone restrooms.
Having proven its success, New York City is well positioned to secure another vote from Albany in favor of renewing design-build authorization. The unknown now is not whether the City can build bigger, better and faster. It’s whether we have the will and the wherewithal to keep these new public works thriving — to not only raise expectations, but keep them soaringly high.
I wanted to dig beneath the facade, to understand how city government built a public fitness facility that matches the YMCA for service and amenities (save saunas) at one-tenth the price of admission, in neighborhoods where the Y is MIA — and what’s more, how officials expect to sustain its glory for the long haul. Is Shirley Chisholm a new toy, looking fabulous for its photo op but likely to face decline due to deferred maintenance and too-lean budgets, as surely as so many other loved-to-death facilities have? Are we doomed to the depression of low expectations and staff shortages? What will it take for the affordability mayor and successors who hail the glory of great public works to not only maintain Shirley Chisholm as a neighborhood treasure, but also elevate all three dozen other rec centers?
I talked to the current and former Parks commissioners, and the former commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction, as well as staff responsible for managing the facilities, to find out. Some takeaways:
Staffing counts. Former Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue, who stewarded Shirley Chisholm’s construction in partnership with former DDC Commissioner Tom Foley, demanded 60 employees from the city Office of Management and Budget to operate the center — staff its front desk, clean the locker rooms, run classes from Core of Steel to Soca Fitness. (Lifeguards come from another Parks division, as do specialized maintenance staff such as plumbers familiar with the quirks of more than a century’s worth of swimming pools.) She got 54 — giving capacity for more offerings than usually found at rec centers, for longer hours and enough personnel to keep the building humming.
Local hiring and community conversations led to programming tailored to the area’s cultures and needs; two staffers speak Haitian Creole. And according to Parks officials, budgeting for a new facility allows staffing to be built up from scratch, whereas legacy centers are stuck with whatever personnel they’ve already had, leaving some centers with constrained hours and offerings. In Harlem, the Jackie Robinson Recreation Center, for example, is closed on weekends and only open between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday — leaving limited access to programs like yoga, pickleball, boxing and badminton. “We have other great centers,” says Donoghue, who now leads the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, “but if you don’t have the staffing, people don’t have the things to do.”
Look out for lifeguards. What had been a crisis-level lifeguard shortage — with just 500 or so at a low point, just one-third of the total needed to staff City beaches and pools — is now less of one, thanks to recent steps to reduce absurdly high barriers to pass a test that is unique to the New York City Parks system. But this year’s 1,174 was still not enough, and Shirley Chisholm had to curtail swim hours this summer while its lifeguards helped cover outdoor pools and beaches. To reup essential questions that Julie Sandorf asked in Vital City: Why can’t New York City use the universally accepted Red Cross lifeguard certification? Why can’t young people get lifeguard training as part of the Summer Youth Employment Program?
Change the game, then change it again. Foley had lots of support when he went to Albany to win design-build for certain Parks projects, seeking to ease procurement while also maintaining a rigorous bidding process that doesn’t leave the City open to ripoffs. This process, which had already been used by the state government to build high-profile projects like the new Kosciuszko Bridge, allows for an accelerated, iterative design process, with rendering and refinement going on even with construction already underway. Without design-build, even small changes that crop up during construction force a project back to the drawing board, costing months and millions of dollars. With it, development is adaptive, allowing for continuous consultation not only between Parks and DDC, and between construction crews and architects, but giving local residents moments to weigh in.
“It’s not prescriptive,” says Foley. “I’m not sitting down and giving [a construction contractor] 1,000 pages and saying: ‘Build this.’”
To entice top architecture firms to take a chance on a speculative bid, DDC pays a stipend to finalists amounting to about 60% of what they would actually be paid. Design-build’s end run around construction contract rules also heads off a common cycle in which companies win with artificially low bids, then rack up extra compensation through costly and time-consuming change orders.
All of these factors significantly sped up the timeline at Shirley Chisholm. So while the new rec center had been talked about for 13 years, the procurement and construction were lightning fast by City standards once the City started seeking proposals in 2021. Construction took half the time it takes similar low-bid projects to reach the ribbon-cutting. “All these projects are so important to communities, and the money is scarce,” says Foley.
“People should treat it as an emergency to get the job done.”
Push back on preservationists. From Central Park’s Arsenal to Flushing Meadows’ Unisphere, the City parks system is full of landmarks worth preserving, including WPA and Robert Moses legacies at pools and beaches. But as tempting as it is to extend that logic to every aging facility, building new purpose-built facilities to modern standards like Shirley Chisholm is a better way to make rec centers both functional and financially feasible. (Flatbush, historically a middle-class and in parts wealthy area, had no historic public rec centers to salvage.)
“It’s always cheaper to build new,” says Foley, “and have a more efficient, sustainable building from an operations standpoint.”
That reality sunk in recently at the Brownsville Recreation Center in Brooklyn, a 1950s complex that has been closed for years. Parks had budgeted $20 million to renovate — only to discover while doing initial site work in 2023 that the buildings were more heavily water-damaged than known. The budget ballooned — and by the following year, Brownsville was slated for demolition, to be reimagined from the ground up following the Shirley Chisholm model. It’s now an ambitious $191 million project, with DDC currently soliciting proposals.
Parks meanwhile remains in a standoff with West Village historic preservationists looking to stop the demolition of the long-defunct Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, which had been cobbled together out of multiple structures near Houston Street centered on a 1908 bathhouse. Planning work is already underway to incorporate a new rec center as part of an affordable housing project down the block. Parks wants the Dapolito site to become a new, bigger, better pool along with a playground and sports field. Preservationists vocally object, claiming the existing facility, home to a Keith Haring mural, can be fixed.
Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura seeks a path through the protest. “Preservation — we take that seriously,” she says, noting that historic buildings “give a sense of place.” She says Parks and DDC are working “to see what can be included or nodded to” from the old facility in the new.
Low barriers, high standards. It’s a time-honored political tradition: Local lawmakers love to get things like rec centers delivered to communities as community benefits attached to development deals, a way of showing how they brought home the bacon (while getting their names on the plaques). But disappointment often follows. A City-owned armory in Crown Heights is now the Major Owens Health & Wellness Community Center, opened in 2021 with a dauntingly byzantine membership structure. Under a complex community benefits deal struck by former Councilwoman Laurie Cumbo, the pool is controlled by a private swim school that today charges $64 per child for a half hour, while the fitness facility has a separate operator. Discount memberships are so tightly rationed that low-income residents living on one side of Eastern Parkway are eligible but those who live on the other side or not.
At Parks, every patron is equal, and reducing barriers to access is the priority. The department understandably looks to site its facilities in underserved areas where it might make a dent in addressing health disparities, social isolation and poverty, including by building a job training pipeline that starts with summer youth program teens. At the same time, much like public schools, public rec centers can be destinations of choice — meaning, centers of excellence. That’s the expectation Shirley Chisholm boldly reaffirms.
Getting patrons not only to sign up but keep coming back is one of the stats Parks Department officials track as a management indicator. That means maintaining a feel-good experience. It also means brashly declaring, as the commissioner does, that their offerings are competitive with those at private gyms. “I live in Manhattan, and I have yet to see a deal better than what Parks facilities provide,” says Shimamura.
That’s easy enough when a torn cushion on a weight-lifting machine can still be replaced under warranty, when walls and floors selected for durability are still unscuffed and when an ever-growing City budget hasn’t demanded staffing cutbacks. Shirley Chisholm challenges its community to embrace it as an asset so essential that its decay would be unthinkable. So far, it’s working out.
