Gertrude Smith was awed.
She and her husband of 62 years, George, had just finished their own walking tour of the sparkling new Menlo Park Senior Center in the city's Belle Haven neighborhood.
All she could do was stare.
"They've got everything around here," Smith said.
And she's right.
"It's a real nice place," her husband agreed.
For almost 16 years, the Onetta Harris Community Center next door has put in double duty as a recreation and social destination for both young and old. No longer.
On Saturday, the city hosts a grand opening party to celebrate the completion of the senior center at 100 Terminal Ave.
Workers on Wednesday, however, were still applying the finishing touches to the $2.6 million, 11,000-square-foot building when the Smiths decided to take an early peek.
The center's front doors open to a semicircular reception desk. A small conference room sits immediately to the right, alongside the center's administrative offices.
To the left of the reception desk, a large lounge stretches out in front of a fireplace, circled by five tall columns and capped by a high, conical ceiling. Sun filters through translucent skylights. Glass doors open to a narrow concrete patio overlooking the community center's swimming pool.
Five rooms fan off from the lounge.
An expansive dining and multipurpose room offers enough space for 250 people. A professional kitchen capable of pumping out enough meals to feed all those people is visible through a wide pass-through window.
One corner of the dining room looks through glass walls to the grassy baseball field at neighboring Kelly Park. Two pool tables and five card tables stand ready in a separate room adjacent to the dining room.
An arts and crafts room, complete with a kiln, a computer room with space for five personal computers and a smaller multipurpose room complete the deck.
"I think it's by far going to be the nicest public facility in Menlo Park," said Mary Dupen, the city's director of parks and recreation.
The center is one of dozens of neighborhood improvements the city has undertaken in Belle Haven since the mid-1980s as part of a larger redevelopment project. Renovation of the Onetta Harris center is scheduled next.
It made the list after years of agitation by seniors who were eager for more space than the cramped quarters they shared at Onetta with dozens of teen-agers and other youths.
"The seniors didn't have a place to do their functions and they were all grouped together with the kids," said Margaret Greer, an early proponent of the center. "And seniors don't always get along with kids."
Although the center's location makes it most accessible to the estimated 1,200 seniors over the age of 50 who live in Belle Haven, Dupen said the facility is open to the city's entire senior population.
In explaining why Belle Haven was chosen to house the center, Dupen said seniors in the predominately low-income neighborhood generally have fewer immediate recreational and social outlets than seniors living in the city's more affluent areas.
"There's a lot of isolation in that neighborhood," she said.
Questions the Council raised in December 1991 about whether the city could afford the center's $200,000 annual operating cost brought an outcry from seniors who feared the project might be shelved.
The Council gave assurances it wouldn't, and construction on the one-story building began shortly after the groundbreaking ceremony on Nov. 25, 1992.
According to Dupen, concerns about the operating costs persist.
But she and the center's social supervisor, Maryanne McDaniels, expressed confidence that a combination of county funding, outside grants an volunteerism will enable the center to maintain its busy schedule of classes and activities.
That's important, said George Smith, because "the worst thing when you retire is to sit down."
--Rufus Jeffris
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