All Wet

A neighborhood activist from the West Side Community Action Network Center sent a memo to city officials in February listing many troubles that still bedevil the center: window seepage, rusting structural beams, poor air quality caused by mold and mildew, rusty lights, sloppy caulking along the floor, faulty drainage that causes water to puddle on changing-room floors, lack of ventilation, uneven steps, an elevator that often doesn't work, grungy floors and a leaking roof.

Residents hate the exercise area, which lack of space limits to nothing but a few treadmills and stair-stepping machines. Nautilus equipment is crammed into a tiny area near the reception desk, where self-conscious exercisers are vulnerable to gawks and stares from every visitor. A few more pieces of equipment are stashed across from the reception desk. The center's planning was so severely compromised that the project's last architect was unaware there was going to be an exercise area in the building at all.

"That would have been a nice thing to know about," the architect quips. "I was wondering what that mirrored wall was for."

No private office was included in the building's design, so the center's director works in the reception area. Upstairs, an undersized conference room was inexplicably equipped with partitions to allow three simultaneous meetings. The Coalition of Hispanic Organizations tried to meet there several times but found that, even undivided, the room was too cramped. The group now gathers instead at Penn Valley Community College. "It was just too small," one member says. "We had to find another place."

The building has no roof gutters -- a problem the city may remedy, according to Mark McHenry, deputy director of the parks and recreation department.

"There's not one downspout there," agrees Adriano. "With that curved roof, the water just rolls down like Niagara Falls. And in the wintertime, that parking lot's a skating rink."

By the time the city got serious about building a West Side community center in 1992, the neighborhood had lost all patience with promises. In the 1970s, when the city widened Southwest Trafficway, it bulldozed the community center where Aguirre had played basketball and billiards as a boy. West Side residents responded with anger and protests, he remembers. City leaders pledged to build a new center but didn't for years.

"We got nothing," Aguirre says. "Nothing." Just a pathetic wading pool in Jarboe Park.

"We didn't have anything, and we were one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kansas City," remembers Cris Medina, executive director of the nonprofit Guadalupe Center, which provides social services, programs and youth sports activities on the West Side. "The community had been here for years, and we just really felt neglected and overlooked." The Guadalupe Center leased the old gym at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, but it was cramped and had no air conditioning.

In the late 1980s, the city's parks and recreation department determined that Kansas City didn't have enough community centers. Parks officials created a plan to fund six new community centers by persuading voters to pass a special vehicle tax. City officials approached community leaders, asking for help in persuading citizens to pass the measure.

Lali Garcia, a West Side activist since her father helped organize a political club in an old barber shop on Southwest Boulevard in the 1960s, played a key role in getting West Side voters to pass the referendum. As a great-grandmother, Garcia thought the community center initiative sounded like a great idea. As president of the La Raza political club, she joined other community leaders negotiating with then-mayor Emanuel Cleaver and his parks board president, Ollie Gates: They'd ask their people to vote for the plan if the city promised that the West Side would be the first to get a new community center. It was a deal -- West Side residents thought.

"I was really involved with trying to get people to vote for it," Garcia says. "We talked it up at meetings and churches and made phone calls. We went door-to-door, telling people, 'Look, if you vote for this, it's going to be good for the community."

In 1992, voters approved the vehicle tax. West Side residents believed they would soon have a building to be proud of. They petitioned the city to name it the Tony Aguirre Community Center. Residents felt the shy, modest man deserved the recognition after working with the community's youth all his life. "I didn't believe it," he says quietly about the moment he learned of the honor.

Tony Aguirre was born on the West Side to parents who had immigrated from a tiny pueblo in Mexico. He and his six siblings grew up during the Depression in a crowded house at 2311 Holly, just down the street from Observation Park.