More than six years ago, Fayetteville residents approved a series of bonds totaling $226 million. This extension of the city's 1-cent sales tax stretched across 10 issues, including parks, and some of that park's money is here in a renovated Yvonne Richardson Community Center on East Rock.
If you want to find a quiet time at the Yvonne Richardson Community Center, this might be the only time. Early afternoon on one of the first days of the school year, the newly renovated center adds more than 3,800 square feet, upgrades another already existing 9,500 square feet, and, as architect Audy Lack explains, emphasizes the center's place in the community.
"We saw comments, numerous comments about, 'I really didn't even know what happened in that building.' The building was set back off the street. No openness architecturally. And so if you didn't use the building or didn't really know, then you wouldn't really have a reason to know."
Lack is principal at MBL Architecture, the firm that led this expansion. He says the public input received through meetings and surveys inspired the renovation to reach physically closer to the community.
"One of the greatest things from a public standpoint for this building would be to bring it forward to the street. So we wanted to bring it forward to the street, open it up with class into the new classrooms and provide this front porch."
The front porch leads visitors into a corridor of windows. Lack describes this space as the center's crossroads. This allows the outside to embrace the interior.
Standing in that corridor, Lack moves toward an important space at the center, the basketball court.
"So if you remember the facility, this was the original front door. And as you then come into the vestibule and moving these doors back and into the gymnasium, we didn't do a lot with the existing gymnasium, but a few key features. The new court is set up to really enhance the play here. The old court had degraded over time. And so this is just a beautiful maple court."
Lack says he and his colleagues and the city heard during public input sessions leading up to the renovation how important the basketball court, the center itself, and the community supporting and supported by the center has been to more than a generation of young people in Fayetteville.
"And as we started really getting people in here, we started hearing the stories. Quinn Childress was on the board at the time. And when he started to open up about what this center had meant to him as a kid, I mean, my eyes welled up and it was just beautiful. The impact that this place has had to so many people."
The refurbishments for the center included important structural work, upgrades to heating and cooling systems, enhancements to offices, new sinks closer to the crafting areas. But there is also a shiny new teaching kitchen. Audy Lack says, going into the renovation process, the multiple rounds of public input underscored the desire for a kitchen where there could be cooking classes.
"They were trying to do it in the gym without a sink, without a kitchen, without anything that was trying to teach kids how to prepare some food and how to do this and sustain life."
The kitchen sits adjacent to an open community room and can be separated by a see-through partition, allowing for smaller, more intimate classes or much larger kitchen presentations for the entire space. And this teaching kitchen is made with its target audience in mind.
"The stoves are actually a little bit lower than standard kitchen height to teach the kids. And we worked with, you know, even in selection of the stove tops so that we try to keep them from getting crud beside them and stuff like that. So it's just some little things. But ultimately it's a fully functioning semi-commercial kitchen."
It looks sort of like one of those trophy cases you might see in a high school gymnasium lobby, and includes photographs of Fayetteville's past and artifacts connected to former Razorback basketball coach Nolan Richardson and his late daughter, Yvonne, the center's namesake.
"A lot of thinking about Coach Richardson and the memorabilia that was available to show, to spark interest in kids when they come in and they see the Darius Acuff basketball here, they might just think, hey, I could do something. This could inspire a whole generation to do something that, you know, a lot of people probably aren't telling them they could do."
And if those items can inform the future, Audy Lack says there are ideas for the center's very future. He says he'd like to see restoration of the stream by the center, much like that stream was restored across the street at the adjacent Buddy Hayes Park.
"I think we see a parallel or an emphasis to the idea of restoration kind of permeating through this whole project. So we see, you know, the invasive species removed, we see the steps down to the creek. So we can really celebrate nature in this park. And I think we have to really ideologically idealize the idea of restoration of relationships in this community and that this project and the development of Buddy Hayes Park, the restoration of the stream all kind of fit into that."
Audy Lack is principal at MBL Architecture and spoke with me at the Yvonne Richardson Community Center earlier this month. And you can hear much more about Buddy Hayes Park by looking for Jack Travis' story about the park that aired earlier this year.
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