Oy gevalt.

[captainsblog]

Businesses fail. Something like 80 percent of them do. I make a large part of my living off that 80 percent. Yet, you'd think, some institutions would be exempt from that fate. Governments don't go out of business. Sports franchises rarely fold. Libraries and hospitals occasionally bite the dust, but only after much prolonged teeth-gnashing. And when was the last time you saw a YMCA go out of business?

Well, expand that last question a little to a more Judeo-Christian category, and the answer is: yesterday.

Members of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Buffalo reacted Thursday with concern and disbelief that the center’s Northtowns site on North Forest Road in Getzville will close.

As had been feared by some members, the JCC’s board of directors decided to close the Benderson Family Building by Labor Day in a dramatic effort to pull the agency out of growing debt and improve services over the long haul.

About 125 employees, including about 25 who have full-time positions, will lose their jobs.

The board plans to build a new facility somewhere else in the Northtowns within three to four years.

Why is this multicultural Methodist so taken aback by this news? Because that building, those members, and many of those employees- all of them were a part of our life for most of the dozen years we've lived here. Emily was in full-day child care there from the Monday of our move through the Friday before kindergarten, and then in after-school programs there for six years after that. All of us were members until two years ago, using their fitness facilities and enjoying other programs. In law school, that building was the de facto gym for the Amherst Campus, since Alumni Arena was still under construction for most of my time there. Many faculty and students remained faithful to it even after UB sprouted its own facilities, and even though its shortened Shabbat hours and the Center's observance of the obscurest Orthodox holidays put a real crimp into your workout schedule. (One of my onetime Jewish partners, a quite observant conservative, joked that I knew those holidays better than he did just from my kid being in daycare there.)

This morning's article linked above, and those preceding it in the past day or so, have all pointed to the increasing costs of insuring and maintaining that building in these times. Liability insurance shot up once 9/11 came and other JCC's became high-potential targets for nutjobs.  Of course, this place never put nearly as high a premium on common sense; after 9/11, they made a big deal out of securing the Early Childhood area with keypad locks, but (a) they never changed the code, (b) the code was the last four digits of the Center's phone number, and (c) on more than one occasion, I heard control desk employees shouting out the code to dumb-looking parents standing at the door.

They also got hurt by the tax-law changes that eliminated much of the incentive for charitable giving. It may be against Jewish law to name your children after a living person, but apparently that rule doesn't extend to anything else you can slap a sign with your name on. There were doorways in that building with donor plaques, and I used to joke that we'd eventually see the Chaim Yonkel Memorial Urinal in the Delaware Holland Family Building. But that was all before our fearless President and Congress lowered rates on income and estate/gift taxation, making it easier for Chaim to just spend the money himself or gift it to his kids.

Perhaps, though, the biggest death knell was the place being undermanaged for my entire membership there. The place never had an executive director- Mike was a nice enough guy, but they never promoted him above the title of assistant. That may have contributed to odd decisions like putting tens of thousands of capital expense and thousands more of annual upkeep cost into having an onsite outdoor pool, which at most gets used three months out of the year. Or constantly retrofitting portions of the existing building for new uses instead of building dedicated new facilities (the childcare area included reworked pottery studios and a ham radio room). Or the really strange one after I left, also mentioned in the story: a total locker room makeover just in the past year. I wonder who that got named for.

In the end, though, my memories will be more of the fond than of the bizarre. Our toughest initial adjustment to Buffalo, we feared, would be separating a two-year-old Emily from the only caregivers and friends she'd ever known. The week before her first day, we took her there for a trial run, and she basically marched in and acted like she owned the place.  That familiarity, well supported in the coming months by a very similar group of new caregivers and friends, got us over that bump on the road.  The gym was also a godsend to Eleanor and me- a place where nobody cared how buff you were or how much or little you wanted to work out. It was a dysfunctional sort of family, but family all the same.

The final irony that the locals will get? The current building is named for the local suburban strip mall king, who in recent years has become infamous in local real estate markets for constantly putting up new plazas while his existing ones in older neighborhoods sit, abandoned and rotting. Now the major charitable contribution of Nate Benderson- the JCC with his name on it- is going to suffer the same fate. I wonder if he'll take down his name from the front of the building and slap a BENDERSON DEVELOPMENT FOR LEASE sign out in front of it.

Comments

[bluesilverkdg.livejournal.com]

Wow, I hate to hear this. We also have a big Jewish Center in Knoxville, but it's another "anyone is welcome" type situation. I taught music classes there when I'd first moved down here, and I enjoy going to Cafe Hadassah in the fall to eat, sing and be merry.

That is really tough, and I feel for the ones who have worked there for so long, and put so much into it.

Oh, and I never got your e-mail the other day! Did you send it to Bluesilverkdg@aim.com? If you send it to the same address @aol, it should still get there, as they're pretty much one in the same.

[baseballchica03.livejournal.com]

That sucks. Also, Bederson is slowly but surely going to own the entire county if we're not careful.

Governments don't go out of business.
Ah, but they do! Counties and cities get control boards or go into receivership. National governments in PR systems are expelled through votes of no confidence, and presidents are impeached. Constitutions are rewritten. And don't forget about the coups! We just don't use the word "going out of business." ;)