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CLEARWATER — In 1972, the city converted a restaurant and nightclub into Morningside Recreation Center, creating a neighborhood focal point for southeast Clearwater.
Kids learned to swim there, adults did pottery, seniors gathered to gab and exercise.
Those scenes will be history after today. The center — a casualty of budget cuts in tough times — is shutting its doors.
The closing will save the city about $250,000 a year. For those whose lives have been enriched at the center, however, the effect of the closing can't be measured in dollars.
"This is like a hub," Denise Der Garabedian said Tuesday. "It's a community place where I over the years have met friends, my son has met friends. And that sense of community is going to be gone."
Der Garabedian, 56, has been coming to the center for 16 years. She has taken exercise classes, done tap dancing. Her son, now 19, came to the center to learn karate and for art camp.
Tuesday, she and other enthusiasts were taking advantage of the pottery studio's few remaining hours. Der Garabedian was glazing a salad bowl that will be a Christmas gift.
"I've gone past the anger to the sadness," she said of the center's closing. "I think everybody needs a creative outlet, and I found mine here."
Plans call for the center's pool and tennis courts to remain available to the public. And the city has set aside $3 million in Penny for Pinellas funds for a new recreation center, to be built between 2010 and 2020.
But the center as it has been known will be no more.
Nancy Stoner, who gave her age as "over 55," has been using the center for about five years and led exercise classes that also served as a fellowship of sorts for a group of about 10 older women.
"We are always so happy to see each other," Stoner said. "And when someone is not here, we call. We look out for each other."
Stoner hopes to continue the classes at the Long Center, which is 3 miles away, but worries that some women who have been walking to the classes for years won't want to make the trek.
Tricia Baker, a former vice president of Morningside Meadows Homeowners Association, joined with others in the neighborhood to lobby the city to keep the center open.
In budget talks, City Council members said they took no satisfaction in closing the center, but stressed that with revenue evaporating, something had to give.
That doesn't mollify Baker, a mother of four whose kids have used the center.
"It's going to be depressing and sad for us," without the center, said Baker, 34. "It's a real injustice."
Will Van Sant can be reached at vansant@sptimes.com or (727) 445-4166.
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