Monday, June 18, 2007

New Y Building Plans

Tributes to Hummer will link the old and the new

You won't have to look to hard in the new YMCA to find traces of the building on Warren Street. Plans not only call for a familiar name to grace the building's centerpiece natatorium, but photographs from the YMCA's past will have a place of honor in the new building and there might even be an architectural detail or two carried over. The main link between old and new will be the late Glen S. Hummer, who coached Huntington teams to 10 national YMCA titles in a 44-year career. “We're hoping to raise enough money for a naming opportunity for our natatorium,” said YMCA executive director Dan Akeley. “We'd like it to be the Glen S. Hummer Natatorium. And our appeal to swimmers and supporters of the program has raised around $400,000 so far.” Plans call for a photograph of Hummer and accompanying text to be on prominent display in the new YMCA, which is being built near Parkview Huntington Hospital. A mock-up of the exhibit will be displayed at the downtown YMCA this weekend for the swim reunion, he said. “We found a couple of really big pictures from the 1940s of national championship teams,” Akeley added. “We'd like to get those in shape and be able to display them, too.” Those 3-by-5-foot prints were found in storage in the YMCA basement, and a search of Y archives has turned up photos of YMCA teams from the 1940s through the 1960s.“We'll have 8-by-10 framed photos of all the national championship teams on display this weekend,” he said, adding that there will be a place of honor for those pictures in the new facility. “We're thinking of having the conference room as the ‘history' room,” he said of the new building. “We are looking into bringing one of the fireplaces from the current building, and possibly one of the windows or some of the tile work.” The fireplace, if it is reassembled in the new building, won't be functional, he noted. Along with photos of the great swim teams, past YMCA directors' portraits might also take their place either in the conference room - where board of directors' meetings will be held - or line a wall in the new building.
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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great article, John - thanks for all your help with the plans for this "affair." And special thanks to the Pittengers who really "took the bull by the horns" and steered everyone in the right direction! It was a delightful evening for all who attended - and those who didn't make the effort missed a special event! Thanks to everyone involved with this effort, and know it was all a "labor of love" for a fine gentelman's devotion to a "cause."
Sincerely - Don & Barb Baer

July 8, 2007 at 5:10 PM

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Welcome

Hello fellow Hummer alumni. We each have memories of the huge influence Glen S. Hummer had on us all. The Huntington YMCA is still conducting a continuing funding campaign for the marvelous new facility which replaces the one we all swam in and more since the team began in 1933. This space is for us to meet and/or meet up again. There were 250 at the reunion on June 16, 2007, coinciding with the newly reestablished Huntington Mile at ole Lake Clare in which many of us swam again. All are invited and welcomed to submit reminiscences here (click on "comments" in the section below.) See some of you, again we hope, at the 2010 Glen S. Hummer Huntington Masters Mile. And visit us on facebook too at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#%21/group.php?gid=100802262318&ref=ts



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Huntington YMCA Building Program

Note: To donate to the fund-raising campaign for the new YMCA (and its Hummer Pool) contact:

Dan Akeley, Executive Director, Huntington YMCA, 607 Warren St., Huntington, IN 46750, 260-356-4200, ymcadan@kconline.com

From The Herald Press12/18/06

Goal: $8 million; In hand: $5.4 million; Yet to raise: $2.6 million

It will take $8 million to build a new YMCA, and that's the amount the Y's fund-raising committee has set as its goal. With the $2 million gift from Parkview Huntington Hospital - seven acres of land worth $450,000 and a pledge of $1.55 million in cash from the hospital's Community Benefit dollars - the capital campaign committee now has $5.4 million in hand, said Dan Akeley, the YMCA's executive director.

That $5.4 million, which includes pledges that will be paid over the next five years, came in as the result of a campaign that began in May as YMCA volunteers contacted potential major donors, Akeley said. That leaves the YMCA with $2.6 million yet to raise. Some of that will come from additional major donors, Akeley said, but the Y hopes to raise $250,000 from people throughout Huntington County who are everyday users (or former users) of the facility. An effort to reach those people will begin in late January and continue until June, Akeley said. YMCA volunteers will begin with personal contacts and later use phone calls and letters to solicit donations.

From The Herald Press, 12/18/06

The inside story: Nearly double the usable space

By CINDY KLEPPER, City Editor

The new Parkview Huntington YMCA will encompass about 52,000 square feet, all on one floor, with two pools, two basketball floors, and an elevated walking track. By comparison, the current facility has about 30,000 square feet of usable space on three levels, one pool, one basketball court, and no dedicated place to walk - although it does have numerous nooks and crannies that may have had a function when the Warren street building opened in 1930, but now serve no useful purpose.

The new building was designed by Moake Park Group, a Fort Wayne-based architectural firm whose work can be seen in the Parkview Huntington Hospital building as well as the Jorgensen Family YMCA in Allen County. Moake Park's design for the Huntington YMCA was intended for a 14-acre site north of Huntington that the YMCA board originally planned to purchase, said Dan Akeley, the Y's executive director. The building and parking areas would have occupied only seven acres of that site, Akeley said, and can be moved to the Parkview site practically unchanged. "The floor plans will basically be the same," Akeley said. "It worked for both sites." The remainder of the original 14-acre site would have held a soccer field, two retention ponds, and a fitness trail. At the new site, retention ponds are already in place outside the YMCA's seven acres. Although there's no room for a soccer field, there's a possibility of additional property being made available for soccer sometime in the future. In addition to surveying members about what they wanted in a new facility, YMCA board members checked out features of other recently built YMCAs.

"We learned a lesson from the Jorgensen YMCA," Akeley said. "They have one pool, and if someone has an accident in the pool, they have to shut down the whole thing." The Huntington Y board decided to go with two pools, side by side. "If somebody has an accident, we can just shut the one pool down," Akeley said. The smaller pool will have a "zero," or sloped, entry making it accessible to people in wheelchairs and others with limited mobility. It's water will be warm enough to be comfortable for swimming and aerobics classes. The second pool will be large enough to be used by swim teams and can also be used to host meets. The gym's two basketball courts can be separated by a curtain. A fitness center will include both free weights and cardio equipment, and an adjacent aerobics/dance area will feature floating floors. A walking track, one-tenth of a mile long, will be suspended around the perimeter of the gym, fitness center, and aerobics/dance area. An expanded child watch area will be located next to two preschool rooms.