Last week, outside of the COVE, a basement-level youth center in the Knox-Gates neighborhood, a dozen young men stood around laughing and play fighting. Inside the COVE, a couple of young girls played ping-pong with staffers who outnumbered their clients.

These lighthearted scenes show a neighborhood and community center slowly healing after a summer of violence and rough transitions.

Two weeks earlier, across the street from the COVE on Gates Place, a young man named Michael Santiago was shot in the back. He spent his 18th birthday on Sept. 25 in a Bronx hospital bed and now faces life paralyzed from the waist down with a bullet wedged next to his spine, not to mention drug charges.

The shooting rocked COVE staffers, who said Santiago had visited the youth center on a few occasions during the summer and seemed quiet and respectful. Though they didn’t know him well, the violence hit a little too close for comfort. Since then, neighborhood youth have shied away.

“It’s been difficult and pretty rough in light of what’s been going on the neighborhood,” said new COVE director Sean Davis as he sat in his sweltering office. “It’s odd, you never get used to something like that, but at the same time, you got to come to work.”

Davis took over the COVE in early August when the Knox Gates Neighborhood Association ceded management of the struggling youth program to Mosholu Montefiore Community Center (MMCC), which offered stability, resources and a proven track record.

The transition hasn’t exactly been smooth, said Davis. But he’s looking forward to the challenge of turning things around in a difficult environment.

“I tell my staff,” Davis said, “if you can make it work here, you can make it work anywhere.”

The Beginning

Knox-Gates, bordered by parks to the north, south and west and bustling Jerome Avenue to the east, is a triangular island of a neighborhood, plagued by typical urban problems like unemployment, drug dealing and a reputation, unfortunately largely deserved, for violence.

Leo Lewkowitz, one of the founding members of the COVE, moved to Knox-Gates in the early 1970s. Soon after, Lewkowitz and other residents started a neighborhood patrol to combat crime. That lasted about a year and then morphed into other community-building efforts that mostly involved throwing neighborhood parties, said co-founder Lyn Pyle.

Pyle said the COVE started in 1988 in response to Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” anti-drug campaign. The idea was that you can’t just tell kids to say “no,” you have to give them an alternative to say “yes” to.

A Jamaican man named Winston Johnson, the owner of 3424 Gates Pl., where the COVE was originally located, offered to let the fledgling group use the basement of his other building next door (3418), which was larger, but filled with garbage. More importantly, it was cheap. Johnson charged them $1 a year.

Pyle, other residents and neighborhood youth raised funds and went to work transforming the dumping ground into a youth center, complete with bathrooms and a kitchen area. They turned the walls into murals.

“I helped with the painting and the setting up of the whole situation,” said Cynthia Diaz, who was 15 when the COVE was born and still lives in the neighborhood. “It was good being a part of something bigger than us. It provided us with an alternative to getting into trouble.”

The youth came up with the name, which stands for Community Organization with a Vision for Excellence.

Through a series of grants, the COVE (officially managed by the Knox-Gates Neighborhood Association) began providing youth services, mostly alternative after-school programming, with a social activism bent. But primarily, the place was simply a safe haven, a protected cove from the turbulent waves of the city.

Transition and Violence

Funding, always an issue for small non-profits, became even tougher once Mayor Bloomberg, who favored bigger youth organizations, took over, Pyle said.

Then, three years ago, “we hit a real crisis,” Pyle said, after a couple of private grants ran out. The COVE also suffered from management issues and nearly collapsed altogether. By 2006, the program was run mostly by volunteers with full-time jobs, and fatigue set in. Finally, earlier this year, Pyle and other COVE board members, decided to approach MMCC and ask them for help. There were rumors that MMCC had forced a takeover and some community members were unhappy (another obstacle for Davis and his crew), but that’s just not true, Pyle said.

“It was that or close down,” Diaz said. “There’s really nothing in that area besides the COVE. [The transition] allows it to be on more secure footing.”

Albo is glad the COVE will remain open, but laments neighborhood activists losing control. “For me, it’s over. It means I’ll never have any say in what happens there.”

But it allows the Knox-Gates Neighborhood Association, free from the day-to-day management of the program, to focus on other community projects.

Violence, however, remains a constant problem, much of it fueled by the thriving drug trade and local rivalries, police and residents say.

Lewkowitz moved to Riverdale in 2003 because he didn’t want his girlfriend coming back to Knox-Gates alone at night.

After living in the neighborhood for 26 years, Diaz isn’t concerned for her own safety, but she and her husband often worry about her 17-year-old sister, who lives with them.

In early May, four young men were shot (none died) across Mosholu Parkway in front of Tracey Towers, apparently the result of an ongoing rivalry. Knox-Gates youth were arrested for the crime, but no charges were pressed. A couple of weeks after that a young man on Gates Place was found with an illegal handgun after his mother called police. In the first week of June, a 38-year-old man was shot and killed in the woods near Knox- Gates.

Susie Albo,a COVE co-founder who said petty but violent rivalries date back to when Knox Place youth used to fight with Gates Place youth back in the 1970s and ’80s, is worried about retaliation for the shooting of her godson.

Start of Turnaround

Enter the new staff of the COVE. After a successful August evening program, which saw about 15 to 20 youths (including Santiago, on occasion) show up to hang out at night, the COVE took a hiatus until Monday, Sept. 17. (Santiago was shot Sept. 14.)

Though numbers have been low, Davis is positive things will turn around. “From where we started, I think we’ve come a long way,” he said. “It seemed like every day we were getting hit by something. I’m not really getting worked up about the numbers.”

Davis previously resurrected an after-school program at Evander Childs High School, saying he “went through hell,” but eventually made it work. He wants his staff – which, including Davis, is now four people – to focus on outreach and working hard. “Things aren’t just going to be handed to you.”

There are hints of a rebound. Taking advantage of the newly-installed cable, Davis and a group of neighborhood youth sat around the other night watching the reality series “Kid Nation,” yelling at the television the whole time.

“It was like a real family atmosphere,” he said.

Ed. note: A sentence was removed from the original version of this article.