Plant City said goodbye to the beloved Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center Tuesday morning during a special demolition ceremony.
Mayor Rick Lott said it was the first time commissioners had ever come together to pay homage to a building. Every commissioner showed up to take part.
Few locations held the heart of the community like the MLK recreation center and while many reminisced about the happy times held within its walls, they also looked forward to the new state-of-the-art facility that will soon be in its place.
“This is a place where memories happened for all of us,” Commissioner Mary Mathis said. “It’s a bittersweet moment.”
Mathis shared stories of being dropped off at the front door as she hurried inside to attend dances at the center, dancing the night away with friends under the close supervision of its chaperones.
The center has always been a staple in the community for local youth. La’Tosha Lewis worked at the center for six years from 2004 to 2010 and said the MLK center always acted as a safe haven for kids throughout the community.
“We had so many different programs here,” Lewis said. “It gave them a place to go before and after school, during the summer, it kind of helped them stay off the street. We had our after school programs, computer lab and ceramics. We had so many activities here to keep our kids active and engaged and that’s so meaningful. It was a safe and happy place for them to come and be OK.”
She said the community center was used for a variety of purposes over the years. Weddings, community meetings, fashion shows, games, parties, baby showers, anything the community needed to host, they came to MLK to do it. While it is definitely sad to see the old building go, she said it is well past due for an upgrade.
As an excavator tore into the corner of the building Tuesday morning the gathered crowd let out a round of applause. During the ceremony bricks from the center were preserved for the community members to take home so they would always have a piece of the historic venue. Lewis is planning to keep hers on her trophy shelf at home.
Edith Best, 56, has been going to the center since she was in junior high school. She is placing her brick for all to see in her living room. She said the center was “the gathering place for young ones” and continued to act as a watering ground for all age groups.
“This was a meeting place, it was part of the community,” Best said. “If it’s going to look like what they say it will, I would love to see that. I would also like to see someone from within the community that knows all that has gone on here, the history here to have the opportunity to represent it.”
Pastor Calvin “Pee Wee” Callins Sr. of Greater New Hope Anointed Ministries said without the MLK Rec Center he never would have learned to swim. He’s been coming to the venue his entire life and said it was a home for “ so many of us” during the summer. “I’m going to put this brick in the church so when young people ask about this, I will tell them how this brick meant so much in my life, how it made me into the man I am today,” Callins said.
The new facility will be nearly 30,000 square feet and the conceptual design shows a proposed gymnasium with two full courts and four cross courts.
The ribbon cutting for the new facility was originally scheduled for July 2019.
“Our city has a motto that is ‘Preserving the past, embracing the future," City Manager Bill McDaniel said. “I’d say you could look behind us and see that we’ve preserved this past about as well as we can. The building may be going, but I think what we can say in honoring that part of the motto is while we move forward we embrace the history, we embrace the importance of what this center has meant throughout our city. And we’re embracing the future by building a facility that is unlike any other in the city inventory of assets.”