By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not neccesarily reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News)

Alderman Bob Trane has a vision of a community center in the now-empty Powder House School. Its auditorium and cafeteria could host dances, dramatic productions, self-defense classes, musical performances, and poetry readings. Its classrooms could, for a reasonable hourly fee, provide space for trainers, community groups, arts classes, and anyone needing meeting space. 

Not much youth programming exists west of McGrath Highway. Kids could use the community center’s safe and clean facilities for basketball, soccer, and general hell raising, helping to ease the city’s scarcity of gym space. The grounds could host ethnic festivals, seasonal celebrations, and neighborhood gatherings.

Trane suggests that the Somerville Community Adult Learning and Education center and the Council on Aging facilities, for which the city now pays rent to Tufts University, could be moved to the community center. So could the Recreation Department, whose dilapidated, underused, and costly-to-heat building on Walnut Street could then be sold. A vibrant community center would draw many residents, but the grounds could accommodate parking for 70 to 80 cars.

Community Centers are both an old and a new idea. In European and traditional societies, community was a taken for granted way of life, while the United States has always been poor in community.

Celebration of rugged individualism, and the yearning for the community that it makes impossible have been major themes in our nation’s cultural and political history. This was often more apparent to outsiders. Count Alexis de Tocqueville’s profound meditation on Democracy in America, based on his extended 1831 visit, delves deeply into this contradiction.

A real but barely conscious element in the tension between some long-term Somerville residents and some newcomers is that the former place a higher value on community, while individualism has been essential to the latter’s professional success. I can think of few places where Somervillians of all backgrounds, rich and poor, newcomer and old timer, adults from diverse cultures, all come together.

Community centers have effectively nurtured community at certain times and in certain places. Clinton Childs, an organizer of the first one in the United States, described a community center as “a community organized…to peer into its own mind and life, to discover its own social needs and then to meet them, whether they concern the political field, the field of health, of recreation, of education, or of industry; such community organization is necessary if democratic society is to succeed and endure.

”Mary Parker Follett, a Massachusetts native, was a brilliant but little remembered political writer and management theorist. In the early 20th Century, she advocated for the creation of community enters. In 1916, other advocates formed the National Community Center Association. By 1918 there were community centers in 107 US cities; by 1924, 240 cities. And by 1930 there were nearly 500 centers with more than four million people regularly participating.

Up to and throughout the 1960s, Somerville had little need for a community center. The parish church, the union hall, the fraternal lodge, the neighborhood hangout, and grandmother’s house were all community centers. Nobody thought much about community; they just lived it.

Times have changed. Throughout the developed world, market relationships have weakened, displaced, or dissolved many other kinds of relationships. In response, the Centri Sociali movement has converted dozens of abandoned schools, factories, and military barracks across Italy to community centers. An active Social Center Network is spreading across the United Kingdom. In Singapore, community centers play a role in urban planning.

Winter Hill and East Somerville Community Schools have sometimes hosted evening recreation activities. But for reasons unfamiliar to me, their community-center role, as initially conceived, was never fully developed.

For at least two decades, there has been sporadic talk about creating a community center.
Now is the time.

Yes, we are facing the very tough budget conditions that I have been forecasting for ten years. Yes, construction costs are high. But we don’t have to do the whole thing at one time, and minimal renovation could make some of the Powder House School’s facilities immediately useable.

Selling off valuable assets to pay operating costs is what financial analysts call “eating your arm.” Selling the Powder House School to an organization that pays no taxes would be more like eating your brain.

Whether this extraordinary opportunity is realized will depend on the extent to which the constituencies who would benefit from it become effectively mobilized.