Hangout. Art gallery. Sports facility. Y not?

By Casey Gillis

Published: November 15, 2008

Pat Farmer starts most of her days at the Altavista Area YMCA.

“I usually meet friends,” Farmer says as she sips on her coffee in the Y’s lounge area. “We talk, read the newspaper, kind of get ready for the day.”

The Altavista Y’s second floor lounge has become something of a hangout for the early morning workout crowd.

Farmer usually goes there a few times a week after her morning water aerobics classes.

The space was designed with senior adults, the fastest growing part of Altavista’s Y, in mind. About 600 to 700 of the Y’s 3,000 members are seniors, says Executive Director Steve Jester.

The lounge is peppered with chairs and tables, and the work of local artists hangs on its bright yellow walls. A bookshelf sits near the entrance and acts as a free library, operated on the honor system, for members.

Farmer, who has lived in Altavista for more than 60 years, says the lounge was something she and her friends lobbied for when the Y’s newest building went up in 1994.

“We spent a lot of time at the (old) Y doing the same thing,” she says. “But usually we were in Steve’s office. It was like this, but we’d sit on the floor.

“This is much better.”

Jester says there’s a common joke among officials that if you’ve seen one YMCA, you’ve seen one YMCA. No two are alike.

“What this community feels like they need is what this YMCA does,” he says.

It has some elements you’d expect: a workout room, indoor pool, aquatics classes and child care programs (pre-school, as well as beforeand after-school care).

But the Y has also taken on the role of a community center of sorts. Area groups, like the local chapter of the Disabled American Veterans, meet in the conference room. The basketball court was recently utilized for a Veteran’s Day ceremony, and dance classes are regularly held in the multipurpose room.

There are two ways to look at it, Jester says. On one hand, they do receive less funding because they are in a small community. (Altavista’s population was 3,425 as of the 2000 census, and its one of the smallest towns in the U.S. to have its own Y.)

But because the community is so small, “you’re kind of the only game in town,” he says.

“(The people) look to you to provide leadership in lots of different areas.”

That includes the arts.

The Altavista Arts Council — which was established in 2000 by longtime resident B.B. Lane in honor of his wife, Minnie, and his mother, Myrtle Bell Lane — is run out of the YMCA.

Jester says the idea arose after Minnie Lane arranged for renowned pianist Gustavo Romero to perform at a local church.

“B.B. saw how happy that made Minnie, and he started thinking about promoting the arts in Altavista.”

Lane donated $1 million and chose the YMCA as the council’s home because of Minnie’s longtime involvement there, Jester says.

Arts programs are a growing trend at YMCAs across the country. According to the YMCA of the USA’s Web site, arts and humanities became a core program in 1998, and today there are more than 750 YMCAs that provide arts programming.

The Altavista Arts Council is behind a slew of area activities. It sponsors the Altavista Little Theatre, hosts book clubs for children and adults, holds occasional poetry readings, and regularly displays art in the lounge.

It also organized the outdoor summer film series, Vista Flix, and runs an artist-in-residence program in the elementary school, which sends a different artist to work with the kids every month.
“When somebody gets those juices flowing and comes in with an idea,” Jester says, “we’re fortunate that we can say, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Like when Farmer approached him about letting a group of her friends play bridge there because it’s in a central location and is handicapped-accessible.

“The last piece of the puzzle has really been (something for) senior adults and the arts-related programs,” says Jester.

It’s a long way from the Altavista YMCA’s beginnings. The center opened in 1972 as an addition to the town’s war memorial building.

“It really started off as swimming and sports, mainly for kids,” Jester says. “We wanted everybody to be able to be a part of what we were doing. We put it in the center of town.”

The original Y housed a small gym and an indoor, junior Olympic-size swimming pool.

They added childcare to their list of services in the 1980s, and expansion came again in 1994, when construction began on the new building. It sits a block down from the original, separated by a handful of softball and baseball fields.

All childcare services and aquatics are now run out of the original space, which is called the Family Center, and everything else is done in the new space.

The entire complex is 65,000 square feet and takes up about three city blocks.

It’s a source of pride for Altavista residents, says Farmer.

“It’s such a nice place. When people come in from out of town to little Altavista, we bring them to the Y.”