Every day an average of 80 kids crowd into the Boys & Girls Club off Cherry Avenue for one program or another—Street SMART, Power Hour or the 100-Mile Club. The building becomes packed. Waiting lists for programs grow. And demand for the Boys & Girls Club goes unmet.
 Tim Sinatra, executive director of the local Boys & Girls Club, hopes a new $7 million facility will allow for a teen center. |
So plans are set for a new building at the city-owned Cherry Avenue site to be designed by Charlottesville architecture firm W. G. Clark Associates. Boys & Girls Club Executive Director Tim Sinatra says the Club’s goal is to break ground in the fall of 2008 on a new $7 million facility adjacent to its current building.
W.G. Clark Associates, whose current projects include an addition to UVA’s School of Architecture, was one of nine firms the Club considered. “There was something about W.G. …He had a grasp and essence of what the Club is about,” says Sinatra. “It’s different from a traditional-type building.”
More space in the new facility will allow for more programs but will also help the focus of existing classes. With a dance group jazzhanding just next to the poetry group that’s sharing space with the fitness-authority program, the kids run into what Sinatra calls “acoustic issues.”
The Club hopes the new building will eventually serve 400 kids a day and provide programs that it can’t in its current building. “One of the things we see as a big need is a teen center, a place where teens can have their own area,” says Sinatra. “From the teens’ perspective, there’s a void in the community [for something] they can call their own.”
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