Bluestone leaves legacy 27 years in the making 

The Mosholu Montefiore Community Center (MMCC) embodies an energy that courses throughout its three-story building on DeKalb Avenue and East Gun Hill Road in Norwood. Kids in MMCC summer camp T-shirts walk single file within the halls while a crowd of teenagers is ushered into a room to fill out forms for the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program. At the entrance to the center, senior citizens chitchat over what’s next on their agenda. For all intents and purposes, the building is constantly breathing, with the community serving as its lifeblood.

At its heart is Donald Bluestone, the executive director hired in 1989 determined to grow the center further.

“I came in like a bull in a China shop,” recalled Bluestone, 70, a bespectacled pragmatist with an undeniable New York accent. He spoke to the Norwood News from his office adorned with medals, quirky proverbs (“I said maybe, and that’s final”), and old photos of MMCC’s little league teams.

The trinkets and milestones represent 27 years of leadership by Bluestone, who will serve one more year at the helm. On July 1, the organization’s Board of Directors received his retirement notice.

Bluestone’s certainly not coasting for the year, though there will be periods of reflections. Among them is a legacy built upon seeing more children walk into the center and exit as adults. Indeed, under Bluestone’s run, many MMCC alums have now enrolled their kids there. In some instances, some adults Bluestone knew as kids are now grandparents.

Through sheer common sense, Bluestone expanded the membership numbers at the Norwood center and beyond, with some 35,000 participants registered at MMCC’s network of centers across the Bronx and Manhattan. It’s grown as a $26 million not-for-profit, from $1.5 million in 1989.

MMCC functions as an education annex, offering arts and crafts, swimming, sports, and Head Start classes at discounted prices. It’s also seen a new wave of elderly residents benefitting from MMCC’s daily lunches, exercise classes, holiday parties, trips, and a legal clinic.

“People used to accuse me of building an empire,” said Bluestone. “But I always saw it as expanding services all the way around.”

These services were seldom at MMCC, established in 1942 by several neighborhood women and later expanded with help from Montefiore Medical Center.

For Bluestone, who had sent his kids to MMCC, the question on expanding services was rooted on a personal level: “What do my kids want?” he asked.

Among his primary changes was introducing a little league team sponsored by MMCC. With young ball players traveling to nearby Riverdale to play and practice, Bluestone began a program that brought some 200 young people to sign up. Demand certainly exceeded Bluestone’s expectations since he had guessed 60 would register. Longtime staffers at MMCC were equally impressed “with the changes because there were no changes ever,” according to Bluestone, and became coaches.

“He was a visionary in terms of the type of programming he offered to the community,” said Susan Memberg, a long-term board member. “He had his ear to the ground, meaning he would listen to what the community needed and would always attempt to provide programming for what the community needed.”

Other changes would soon follow, including an expansion of programs offered on Sundays, usually a time reserved exclusively for social dancing among its senior citizen population back then. Bluestone, thinking the building was sorely underutilized over the weekend, began to open it for everyone. “We had art classes, dance classes, karate classes on Sunday,” said Bluestone, seeing its expansion benefit plenty of nearby residents.

With new services in demand, Bluestone worked to clear out the clutter in some of MMCC’s rooms, where a third of the rooms were simply used for storage at one point.

Bluestone holds a master’s degree in human services, though he understood the power of outdoor recreation well before adulthood. Growing up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, Bluestone’s endless summers saw him whisked away from the urban milieu and to more scenic pastures in upstate New York while enrolled at the Washington Heights YWHA. In sixth grade, he attempted to skirt the summer camp experience, against his father’s wishes. But father knew best and forced him to go. Looking back, the younger Bluestone called it the “best summer of my life.”

Indeed, the bonds with fellow campers sealed his appreciation for camp, an experience that’s become a staple to MMCC, given its offering of a day camp where Bronx children trek to New York’s countryside for a daily getaway. “My goal is to get kids to the country,” said Bluestone, who notes camp can be the “best experience of your life or the worst.”

“When it connects with them, it’s forever. The friends they make are forever; the counselor relationships are really forever,” said Bluestone.

Transitioning out will be easy, thanks to his second-in-command, Rita Santelia, MMCC’s associate executive director who will officially become the executive director next year. It also helps that Bluestone is drafting a kind of how-to manual on MMCC’s rules and procedures.

When it’s all over, Bluestone will experience something that’s been rare in his life: summers off.

“It will be my first summer off ever,” he said.