Happy Anniversary, Seattle YMCA
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How times have changed.
Men don't swim nude anymore at the Seattle YMCA.
The only religion-based facility at what's officially known as the Young Men's Christian Association is a prayer room. It's furnished with pews and crucifixes from the chapel that was lost during a demolition-and-remodeling project a couple of years ago at the headquarters on Fourth Avenue.
The YMCA's hotel, once a refuge for the homeless, has been upgraded into sparkling apartments for young adults who need stable housing and job training.
And Seattle pioneer Dexter Horton will either be spinning in his grave or smiling down from the heavens Wednesday - when the local men's organization he helped conceive celebrates its 125th birthday - because 75 percent of its employees and 51 percent of its members are women.
But he'd have to be impressed by the more than 150,000 members, 1,500 employees and 8,000 volunteers who are celebrating the Seattle YMCA's anniversary mostly by doing community-service projects in area neighborhoods.
What they are celebrating is not so much a membership organization as a national institution started 150 years ago in the United States, a group founded by people with deeply held Christian beliefs that now seeks broad secular appeal. Today, many people know the nonprofit association as a place to work out, attend summer camps or learn to swim.
But if Horton had his way, Y members who wanted to swim could take a flying leap into Elliott Bay. And he might have grimaced a couple of years ago at the sight of treadmills and dumbbells and sweaty bodies in the elegant rooms off the lobby that look on to Fourth Avenue through leaded-glass windows.
The organization he helped form had a single mission: To instill and promote Christian values in young men who had migrated from family farms in search of jobs in the booming, beckoning frontier town.
The "C" in the YMCA of 2001 appears to drive the organization's programs less and less as the association fights to stay relevant in a changing social climate. Some oldtimers at the YMCA once scoffed at plans to expand day-care services for children, fearing those services would break up nuclear households by making it easier for liberated women to work. This year, the YMCA is raising money to build living-room-style family centers, complete with couches, microwaves and books, at all of its 16 branches.
One hundred years ago, young men might have gathered at lunch to discuss Biblical verse.
Today, YMCA board member Connie Haslam and about 40 other downtown workers can be found folded in on themselves at midday yoga classes.
"That's always impressed me; they've stayed current," said Haslam, an attorney.
Has that meant abandoning the Christian focus that defined the YMCA's existence?
Yes and no.
Those values still inform the Y's mission, even if the word "Christian" rarely appears in the association's literature and Bibles are scarce in the association's wood-trimmed corridors.
Seattle YMCA President and Chief Executive Officer Neil Nicoll describes the organization's goal as "to help each individual grow in spirit, mind and body."
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"We always understand that life is a gift, and to do less than our best to help each person fulfill their promise would be to sacrifice one of those gifts."
Those "gifts" quite literally wind up on the YMCA's doorstep everyday.
At 33, Arthur Dennis still waxes sentimental about the day he visited the organization's offices.
Dennis' downward spiral started early, he said, when he was a teen coming of age in Los Angeles. He had dropped out of school and spent time in a California prison for drug possession.
"I was already pretty much developed by the streets when I got here," Dennis said.
At 22 and by then living in Seattle, something changed in Dennis.
A friend from the streets recommended they look into the Y's housing, study and employment programs for young adults in transition.
"It was just one of those days, you know - you're out on the streets and pretty much exhausted with it," he said. "I just had a revelation, like, let's go. And we went."
Dennis enrolled in classes to earn his high-school equivalency diploma, and got a job and a temporary place to live. The Y assigned him a case manager to follow his progress.
"I didn't turn back," he said. "They spun it all around for me."
With a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Dennis works as a case manager through King County. His caseload includes about 35 troubled teens and young adults.
Serving women
Today's YMCA really has two faces, though - one male, the other female.
It is just as likely to serve people like Tartisha Dedrick. Dedrick, 26, works at one of the reception desks in the downtown Y. But in 1994, she was an unemployed drop-out living in Seattle with her grandmother and 3-year-old daughter.
"I didn't have much respect for adults," she said, recalling those days. "I wanted to live the fast life."
Dedrick decided it was time to grow up. She first enrolled in a GED program at the Seattle Urban League to complete her high-school education. When her teacher at the Urban League left that job, Dedrick was referred to the YMCA's program.
At the Y, a counselor bought Dedrick her first dictionary. Dedrick worked half of the day at a Red Cross clerical job arranged by YMCA staff, and she studied the other half. But the benefits of the program were more than material.
"I think the Y helped me most of all to be self-confident," she said.
When Dedrick's West Seattle apartment was destroyed by fire in January, the Y put her in one of its transitional housing units, at a home for single-parent families, while she looked for a new place.
But on April 1, the staff at the Y surprised Dedrick with a new job as resident manager at the home. Now she can live there long-term with her daughter, who's 10. Dedrick said she, too, plans to work with young people, perhaps as a counselor.
A more proactive organization
The YMCA, with its layers of programs catering to different age and economic groups, is much more proactive than the Y people knew in the first half of the century.
Staff and volunteers can often be found working in schools and community centers, not just Y branches. The organization is raising $1 million this year to fund 16 youth-development directors to work full-time with students in high schools.
Maybe the Y needs to keep reaching out to ensure its own survival. In the early 1980s and then again in the '90s, fund-raising campaigns fell millions of dollars short, threatening plans to expand and upgrade facilities. The once popular but worn-around-the-edges Camp Orkila on Orcas Island drew such little interest in the 1970s that the board considered selling it.
A growing budget
The city's recent economic boom helped turn things around financially. The Y's budget has climbed from $17 million in 1992, when Nicoll took the helm, to $42 million this year.
The Y depends heavily on the whims of the public, who pay to use its programs and services, including a swimming pool and newly remodeled fitness area. Those fees accounted for $23.3 million, or 55 percent, of its budget last year.
Nicoll said the recent economic downturn probably wouldn't hurt the Y's budget.
So the Y continues its major growing spurt.
A $14 million remodeling and expansion project at the 70-year-old downtown headquarters was completed a year ago.
The building used to be a joke -- visually charming with a distinctive copper roof and wooden telephone booths in the hallways, but utterly labyrinthine.
"We had a 1930s building trying to do 1990s programming," Nicoll said.
Haslam knew this all too well.
"The first time I went there, I wound up in the men's locker room by accident," Haslam said.
Nicoll said the YMCA is in talks with people in several outlying neighborhoods where there's a demand for a Y branch, including sections of Auburn and Lynnwood. The organization also is expanding its pre-teen education programs, with improved summer camps, workshops in the arts and leadership training. It will also expand services for 18-year-olds moving out of foster homes.
A loyal following
Despite all of the growth and effort to stay relevant to younger people, the YMCA has managed to keep a loyal following among its older members.
Frank Pritchard, 80, a lifetime board member and regular at the downtown Y, remembers taking the East Queen Anne streetcar downtown to do calisthenics and swim when he was 9.
He remembers going to YMCA camp for boys age 9 to 12, where participants graduated from the rank of "friendly Indians" to "warriors."
The Y dropped that terminology for obvious reasons, Pritchard notes.
"They've been sensitive to these things, and they've made changes to stay ahead of the curve," he said.
The YMCA has generally been regarded as a tolerant place, but that all-welcoming attitude took time to develop. The organization hasn't always known how to handle the increasing diversity of its membership.
Before the Depression, some board discussions revolved around creating separate housing facilities for white, black and Asian users. On the other hand, the Y has sponsored English-as-a-second-language classes since 1907.
But it took almost a century for the Y to drop its men-only policies for the swimming pool. Women gained equal access by the 1970s.
Pritchard recalls when - for reasons few can agree on - men were allowed to swim naked in the YMCA pool.
"Nobody thought about it," Pritchard said. "It's taken me a number of years to get used to going into the Y pool with swimming trunks on."
Starting Metrocenter
The Y started its Metrocenter in the politically volatile early 1970s, and almost immediately it drew criticism from old-line members who did not approve of some of its programs, which ranged from employment services to environmental conservation to a forum on nuclear war.
"I remember several business leaders resigning because they thought this Metrocenter we started was too liberal," Pritchard said. "But the Y persisted with it, and that helped bring the image of the Y in concert with the rest of society.
"There are a hell of a lot of organizations out there dying out because they couldn't change."
Tyrone Beason's voice message number is 206-860-1598 and his e-mail is tbeason@seattletimes.com.