NYC recreation center named after first Black congresswoman gets groundbreaking in East Flatbush

Residents of Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood will soon have a new place to swim, run, gather and learn across 74,000 square feet in the heart of an area known as “Little Haiti” for its large Haitian population.

On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams and other city officials broke ground on a $141 million recreation center named after Shirley Chisholm, the late congresswoman and presidential candidate from Brooklyn who was the first Black woman ever elected to Congress.

“This is the fruit of her harvest that we're continuing to move forward,” Adams said at the groundbreaking ceremony, held at the Nostrand Playground site at 3002 Foster Ave., where the center will be built.

Officials say the facility, originally announced in 2020 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, will feature multiple fitness areas, an indoor pool, a walking track, a commercial teaching kitchen, and space for a variety of programming, as well as a “media lab” dedicated to late community activist and business leader Roy Hastick, who founded the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 1985, more than a decade after emigrating from his native Grenada.

Construction is expected to be completed in 2025. Partial funding for the center came from capital dollars reallocated from the NYPD budget in 2021, when de Blasio was still mayor.

As part of a new “design-build” initiative from the city — in which design and construction firms collaborate under one contract — the center will be finished two years earlier than it would have under the old “lowest bidder” system, according to the office of State Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who represents parts of East Flatbush and serves as chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party.

The facility could prove to be a pillar in the neighborhood, whose 67th precinct experienced a spike in shootings during the pandemic, NYPD data shows. While those numbers have been decreasing in the last few years, some experts say community centers can help keep young people off the streets and away from violence.

Jumaane Williams, the city's public advocate, spoke about the forthcoming center in the context of the killing of 16-year-old Kimani Gray, who was fatally shot by plainclothes NYPD officers in 2013 about a mile from the site.

“One of the things that the young people said was — as we were telling them, ‘Don't be in the streets right now’ — they said, ‘Well, where do you want us to go?’" Williams recounted. "And we said, ‘That's a good point. Let's try to work on a place for you to go.'"

Some elected officials who spoke at Monday's ceremony highlighted the fact that many of the contractors on the project are in the city’s Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises Program, which helps qualified businesses win work on city-funded projects.

In addition to Adams, Bichotte Hermelyn and Williams, local officials who attended the ceremony included City Councilmember Farah Louis, Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi, City Department of Design and Construction Commissioner Tom Foley and City Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue. A new community advisory board that will have input over the center’s operations also attended, per Bichotte Hermelyn’s office.

New York state has several sites named after the trailblazing “unbought and unbossed” Chisholm, including a state park on Jamaica Bay, a street in Crown Heights, and a state office building in Fort Greene, City & State has reported. A statue of Chisholm is planned for Prospect Park.

This story has been updated with the most recent square footage planned for the recreation center, which was provided by a spokesperson for DDC after initial publication, as well as details from the groundbreaking ceremony.