Haven for Bronx Kids That Hosted Historic Gang Peace Summit Faces Shutdown

The 66-year-old South Bronx clubhouse that hosted the famous gang treaty credited with the birth of hip-hop is heading to shut down in August, and it’s already for sale .

The closure plan for the Joel E. Smilow clubhouse — which offers programming along with dance and music studios, a rec room with pool tables and a computer room — was first reported by the Mott Haven Herald . It comes after its operator, the Madison Boys and Girls Club, founded in 1894, reached a bankruptcy settlement last year.

In that settlement, the club agreed to pay about $22 million to a trust covering 149 people who sued under the New York Child Victims Act alleging they’d been abused by Dr. Reginald Archibald, a pediatric endocrinologist who volunteered from the 1950s through the 1980s at other clubhouses it ran.

A “Confidential Offering” brochure from real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield, posted online by the Hoe Avenue Alumni Association, calls the site “an outstanding opportunity to invest in a blank slate repositioning or development project” while a public listing from one of the firm’s agents notes “the property will be delivered vacant.”

The sales brochure’s “Location Overview” describes the club that’s about to shut down as “a beacon of hope and opportunity for youth in the community” that “plays an integral role in fostering a sense of community pride and empowerment.”

The shutdown of the Hoe Avenue clubhouse “is a heartbreaking decision, and we wish we had another way to address our financial obligations,” Madison Boys and Girls Club executive director Tim McChristian said in a statement last month. “Our Board of Trustees and I are confident that these actions are necessary and will secure Madison’s future.”

The clubhouse has about 350 members, according to Madison Boys and Girls Club spokesperson Daniela Ritter. Young people also participate in afterschool enrichment programs that feature academic support and service projects, including clothing and food drives and volunteering. The 37,000-square-foot clubhouse also has a swimming pool, but it’s been dry since prior to the pandemic due to needed repairs.

“They had everything from kung fu to computer class,” Marilyn Johnson, 62, told THE CITY in a phone interview on Monday, noting her children also benefited from cooking classes, field trips and other activities at the clubhouse during the 1990s. “All these things that was, I think, transformative in our family’s lives because it makes such a difference. People didn’t have to pay for child care.”

Bronx elected officials including Borough President Vanessa Gibson and Rep. Ritchie Torres responded to the closure news with a statement saying they were “extremely disappointed to learn about the potential sale, and “deeply concerned by the lack of meaningful engagement and transparency from the Boys and Girls Club and its Board of Directors.”

According to a city stipulation in a restrictive covenant that’s part of a 15-year funding agreement from 2015, the property can only be used through 2030 “as a community and recreation center that is dedicated to providing the children of the City with educational and recreation programs in a safe and nurturing environment, and which is operated for the benefit of one or more not-for-profit entities.”

‘A Safe Haven’

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely Black and Puerto Rican youth gangs like the Savage Skulls, Black Spades and the Savage Nomads claimed different pockets of the South Bronx.

As their turf fights became increasingly violent in the summer of 1971 with a wave of beatings and battles where bats, knives, guns and even grenades and other explosives replaced fists, one gang, the Ghetto Brothers, began to shift away from violence and toward activism as well as music.

The group organized clothing drives, cleaned apartment buildings, advocated for youth employment and better health care, and set up a free breakfast program, inspired in part by the Black Panther Party.

They recruited Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin , a self-proclaimed former drug addict, to be its peace counselor, a modern-day violence interrupter.

But after Benjamin was murdered on Dec. 2, 1971, in Horseshoe Park on East 165th Street and Rogers Place as he tried to de-escalate a rumble between rival gangs, his mother, Gwendolyn Benjamin, helped convinced his fellow Ghetto Brothers to temper their impulse for vengeance and push for the peace her son had died trying to establish.

Ghetto Brothers leaders Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez and Carlos “Karate Charlie” Suarez reached out to Felipe “Blackie” Mercado, president of the Savage Skulls, one of the Bronx’s biggest gangs. After lining up his support, they convinced the leaders and warlords of 40 gangs to meet in neutral territory, at what was then called the Hoe Avenue Boys Club of America — now the Smilow clubhouse.

“There were too many things going around in that neighborhood and the boys club was a safe haven. It was a neutral place. Nothing would jump off over there,” recalled Eddie Guzman, 68, a former member of the Royal Javelins gang who’s now president of the Hoe Avenue Alumni Association advocating for the clubhouse to stay put.

“Right after that big meeting, [the club] started a tournament and [rival] gang members were playing each other in basketball there.”

That truce was later credited with opening up the neighborhood that had been cut up into gang territories, thus allowing young people to move around the borough and gather at the house parties where hip-hop was born 50 years ago. A street about a mile from the clubhouse was renamed in honor of Black Benjie last year .

But Will Estrada, 68, a former member of the Royal Javelins who was present at the treaty, where the 40 largest gangs each sent a handful of representatives to the clubhouse’s neutral space, rejected that account.

“Some people think that after that meeting, that peace was established. But the ones that really made peace with each other was the three gangs that killed Black Benjie,” said Estrada, referring to the Seven Immortals, the Mongols and the Black Spades.

“Remember the gangs from different neighborhoods were at war with each other…when you live in one block, three blocks away there’s a rival gang; a few blocks away from that, another rival gang.”

Estrada, who later wrote the memoir “ The Dancing Gangsters of the South Bronx,” continued: “It was scary as fuck. We’re surrounded by enemies and we didn’t know what to expect,” he said.

The clubhouse, he recalled, was where “We used to always play ball. It was a place where we stayed out of trouble. It gave us a positive place to go and be at peace,”

Guzman, for his part, remained a member of the Royal Javelins after the treaty was struck, and was shot in a gang altercation in 1972.

He counts the clubhouse as a place that saved his life.

“They took time to talk to us. They didn’t lecture. They pulled you to the side, helped you look for jobs, helped you go to school,” Guzman recalled. “They weren’t like people that were afraid of gangs. They didn’t mess around or bullshit you.”

Without the club, he said, “I’d either be dead or in jail.”

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