When plans were underway for a new Lester Community Center, Walter Casey, its recently retired director, had one request — keep the existing circa-1980 building open until the new one is finished.

“They need something to do. They need something to be engaged in,” Casey said of the children and young adults who use one of the city’s busiest community centers. “Why not work on one part of the building and let the other part still function?”

Casey was among those turning a shovel of ceremonial dirt Tuesday, Dec. 12, at the groundbreaking for the new $19 million Lester Community Center in Binghampton just a few yards from the 43-year-old original.

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As Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and Memphis Parks Director Nick Walker led a group of more than a dozen construction contractors, neighborhood leaders and others in the groundbreaking, a solitary figure on the nearby basketball courts was getting some shots in, on a brisk but sunny fall day.

Casey had been director of the community center since it opened in 1980.

“They are going to have a full gym with bleachers. For a long time we had to use folding chairs,” he said. “They will have an overhead walk. When the gym is tied up, they can go upstairs and walk on the top.”

It will also have multi-use rooms, a fitness room, a tech lab and an indoor walking track.

Walker says Lester is in the top five of the city’s 31 community and senior centers in terms of its use, and No. 1 for the number of neighbors who use it for walking.

Lester hosts the third-largest summer camp for children and has the second-largest after-school program.

“When you go through the list of programs, it is literally the center of the community,” Walker said. “It was vitally important that we keep it open.”

“They used every square inch of this building,” said council member Worth Morgan, whose district includes the area of Binghampton.

Morgan referred to the center as a “sanctuary” along a busy part of Tillman that has seen a lot of city-funded intervention in recent years.

The community center and surrounding Howze Park is near a police precinct.

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Across the street, the new Tillman Crossing residential development — once a rundown and abandoned set of circa-1948 brick apartment buildings known as Tillman Cove — is near completion.

With doors open in the new units Tuesday, workers walked from one to the other putting finishing touches on the apartments. City leaders get a tour of the development next week.

The city bought the abandoned apartment complex in 2016 after its former owners served eviction notices on tenants in a complex where the grass was at times as tall as the squat apartment buildings. From there the city recruited Elmington Capital to build on the site.

Just west of the park and community center is the old Lester School at 320 Carpenter Street, which is still in use.

It is now Cornerstone Prep Lester, a Capstone Education Group charter school that is part of the state’s Achievement School District. It serves kids in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade.

“This stretch of Tillman has really improved from the private retail development and across the street is the [Collage] Dance Collective,” Strickland said. “That was the long-range plan that predates me as mayor. I think we’re executing on this and Binghampton is a great community.”

The nearby Shelby Farms Greenline crossing at Tillman got a new marker in October honoring former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton for his work on the greenline and the bicycle lanes that are now a prominent feature of Tillman.

The bike lanes on the same side of Tillman as the community centers — existing and planned — have a buffer of median planters, parking spaces and street markings from the two lanes of auto traffic.

Walker said the parking area for the new community center will be off Mimosa Avenue instead of off Tillman Street to aid in the coexistence of pedestrians and cyclists with cars and trucks.

Parks investment focal point of Strickland’s tenure

The groundbreaking is the latest in a series of ceremonies in Strickland’s last month. He leaves the mayor’s office at the end of December after two terms.

He will cut the ribbon Saturday on the new Gaisman Community Center, the third all-new community center built or begun during Strickland’s tenure. The Ed Rice Community Center in Frayser opened in June 2022.

The parks division projects during Strickland’s tenure total $200 million, including $75 million that is part of the Acclerate Memphis slate of capital projects across several city divisions.

Walker says it’s more than the city has spent on parks in 20 years.

When Mayor-elect Paul Young takes office in January, Walker hopes the new administration will continue the work at Lester with a new indoor aquatic center that would replace the current outdoor pool.

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The parks division has two similar facilities at Bickford Park and Hickory Hill community centers.

Walker says the one at Lester would be more centrally located than the other two. It would be modeled after the aquatic center at St. George’s Independent School Compton Aquatic Center in Collierville, where swim teams across the city now practice and compete.

“We tested it and the indoor aquatic facility at St. George’s would fit where the old community center and the aquatic outdoor pool exist now,” he said of the Lester site.