Until recently, Darrell Waddell, 16, and Kevin Baldwin, 15, say they had no place to hang out but the streets.
The teenage boys live in Brooklyn Homes, a sprawling public housing development in South Baltimore with 500 homes and more than 1,000 children.
Yesterday, they played bumper pool as music thumped in the background. Younger children swarmed around them, playing pool (or attempting to), pingpong and air hockey. Nearby, two children watched The Little Rascals.
The Brooklyn community center was officially christened a Boys & Girls Club of Metropolitan Baltimore yesterday, making it one of three clubs the national group will have opened in less than a year in an effort to boost its profile in Baltimore and provide youths a safe space to hang out and benefit from its education, prevention and other programs.
The first Baltimore center opened last summer in Park Heights in the C.C. Jackson Recreation Center and is run jointly with the city's Department of Parks and Recreation.
A third center will open next week in O'Donnell Heights, a 900-unit public housing development in Southeast Baltimore. That center will be run in coordination with a Police Athletic League program.
The Brooklyn Homes center has been open since the beginning of the year.
The center, in an existing building, has been renovated and painted and filled with computers and games and other activities.
Toyota Financial Services presented the club with $50,000 yesterday and has served as a partner, donating volunteer hours and equipment to the center.
The center has been welcomed in an often-overlooked neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, but one with great needs.
Rosalie Pack, a 37-year resident of Brooklyn Homes, previously ran an after-school center in the space but had to close it when she was told she needed a license.
Now, Pack, 65, is working at the Boys & Girls Club and says the club has the funding and resources that she could not get when she ran her place. "They're able to do more than we ever could afford to do," she said.
Pack, who runs a Girl Scout troop, said the troop will now have a space in which to meet.
"There's nothing here," said Pack of her neighborhood. "The Boys & Girls Club, it will help the children grow."
The opening of the three clubs marks the emergence of the Boys & Girls Club of Metropolitan Baltimore, a group that formed about a year ago with the specific purpose of developing a strong presence in Baltimore.
The group had never had a strong presence in the city.
Until this year, the only club left was one run in partnership with the Salvation Army, in Franklin Square.
"We were committed to the kids of Baltimore," said Dave Ross, regional service director of Boys & Girls Club of America.
The three locations were based on finding the right partners and areas where needs were the greatest, said Kenneth Darden, executive director of Boys & Girls Club of Harford County/Metropolitan Baltimore. "We want to be wherever there's a large contingency of at-risk children," said Darden. "That's where we need to be, and we try to go to places where others tend not to go."
The centers will have the full array of Boys & Girls Club programs, with an emphasis on its drug- and violence-prevention and education programs, said Darden.
Judy Artis, director of the Brooklyn club, said that since it opened at the start of the year, children of all ages have come to watch movies, use the computers in a laboratory and play pingpong or other games.
And older teenagers come to work or tutor the younger ones, earning community service hours for school.
Jeffrey Tillman, 18, is a senior in high school. The center gives him a place to hang out during teen time - 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. - as well as a part-time job.
"It gives me something to do," said Tillman. "You have some things to do around here, but not much."
"I can learn life skills to take me to other places so I can have better experiences," he added.
Kenneth Berry, 13, agreed. "It's a way to make sure the kids stay off the streets and stuff so they don't get into gangs," he said.
Berry said he comes most every afternoon now.
And there he was yesterday, bouncing on a chair as he watched The Little Rascals.
sumathi.reddy@baltsun.com
