Speaking in front of a crowd of community leaders, lawmakers, and youth activists at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Edenwald YMCA, Mayor Bill de Blasio explained why the new facility will progress his goal of making New York the “fairest big city in America.”

“For all of us who have spent a lot of our lives at Ys, we know the passion that people bring to the work,” de Blasio said at the ceremony on Aug. 20. “The fact that so many Bronxites are about to benefit because of what will be built here is truly, truly inspiring.”

The 50,000 square-foot facility, which will be the Bronx’s second YMCA after one in Castle Hill, will be located at 1250 E. 229th St., nearby the heavily populated Edenwald and Baychester housing projects. The hope, according to officials, is to create a recreational space for potentially wayward Bronx youth.

The Edenwald YMCA will have two swimming pools, basketball courts, a rooftop garden, an afterschool program, a diabetes center, and GED services.

Former teacher and longtime advocate for the Y, Shirley Fearon, told attendees at the ceremony that having the Y offer GED training for local residents was one of her main stipulations during the planning process.

“The GED program, we gotta get the people together,” Fearon said. “We tried to get them together in high school, but where that fails–There’s so much involved in this.” Along with Al de Castro, Fearon co-chairs the North East Bronx Community Coalition, who have been petitioning local politicians for a community center in the northeast Bronx since 2009.

The $60 million project, which received $24 million in funding from the YMCA, was spearheaded by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who also represents the neighborhood. Heastie called it his “proudest achievement.”

“I was a teenager when we first started talking about this,” Heastie said. “I’ll be 51 next month. This is a long time coming.” Heastie credited de Blasio for taking the reins of the project, following lukewarm support from his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.

“Everytime we thought it was coming, it would kind of drift off again,” Heastie said of the preliminary stages of the project. “We’re finally here.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.