Legacy Wall being developed at Sewickley Community Center

Jaryd Boyer believes the legacy of the Sewickley Community Center is something to be celebrated.

As a borough resident and the center’s first employee in more than 30 years, the recently hired program director is working with board members and local business owners to develop a Legacy Wall.

The wall will feature photos and mounted content of key community center milestones, along with QR codes that will send visitors to a cloud account that contains more data and pictures.

Images and information used for the Legacy Wall are coming from the Daniel B. Matthews Historical Society.

Headquartered at the St. Matthews AME Zion Episcopal Church, the society has been working for years on the digitization of photos and other media documenting African American culture and experiences in the Quaker Valley area. Cloud storage is provided by forever.com.

Boyer said it was important for him to raise awareness of the center and highlight its historical significance.

He drew inspiration for the wall from a similar one at The Buhl Club in Sharon.

Boyer called Buhl’s wall a pristine example of how to showcase a club’s history. It also appeared to have sponsorships.

“This is what we need to do at the community center,” Boyer said. Estimates to create such a wall were around $100,000.

Boyer sees the wall as a multi-year effort. The current plan is to create a template and use the wall as a fundraising tool for the center. The template costs about $5,000.

“The goal behind it is to inspire people,” Boyer said.

Stratton Nash, community center board vice president and historical society president, said SCC tried doing something similar to the Legacy Wall before, but it wasn’t as organized.

It was among a plethora of projects considered during center renovations years ago.

“We were doing a number of things and we couldn’t focus on it,” Nash said. He credits Boyer with bringing the project to the forefront.

“We always wanted to do this,” Nash said. “This has always been in the works. If he wasn’t hired and he didn’t consider this to being his first initial project, then we wouldn’t do this. He is to be given credit in prioritizing it and proud that this is his first project.”

Nash selected the content for the wall. He said there were some tough decisions and not every major person made the cut.

“There’s a whole bunch of people that you could imagine that is left out of this thing,” Nash said. “That’s why it’s the first rendition.”

Brief center history

The center was established by the Young Men’s Club, with support from the Sewickley Valley Ministerial Association and local citizens, as the Sewickley Colored Community Center in 1935.

Meetings took place at the Triumph Church along Frederick Street. It formally opened in its own building along Division Street in April 1939.

An athletic field along Chadwick Street was donated to the center in 1944, seven years before the center moved operations to its current location.

The center was a focal point destination in the community — serving about 20 percent of African Americans residing in Sewickley during the 1940s — equating to about 700 Black residents.

A woman identified in center records as Miss Margaret Campbell purchased and donated a building next to the field at 15 Chadwick St. in 1951.

Flourishing programs and activities immediately expanded. The tennis court was completed in 1952, led by long time devoted tennis instructor Edgar “Ed” Grey.

A building fund was launched, and in May 1959, construction was begun on a gymnasium, game room, and combination nursery-teen room, which was completed in 1960.

The outdoor swimming pool project began in 1968 and was completed in 1971.

A lull in center activities was most evident beginning in the 1980s through 2005.

Sewickley’s African American population has since declined from around 50 percent during the 1950s to around 3.9 percent in the 2010 U.S. Census, according to a feasibility study created by Nash.

There has been a resurgence in youth participation from multiple communities within the past few years since Boyer brought his Premier Youth & Community Center operation to Sewickley.

Wall work

The center has partnered with Sewickley businessman Mark Rengers and his gallery along Beaver Street for professional mounting of Legacy Wall content. Their design work started in April.

“All the legwork’s just about been done,” gallery manger Melanie Vera of Ambridge said. “Now it’s just getting the materials printed and installed.”

Rengers, president of the Sewickley Chamber of Commerce, said he is thrilled to be a part of the project.

“This center needs more eyes on it because there has always been a great need for it, especially in this community,” Rengers said. “Anything we can do to be a part of this is amazing. I believe there is a major purpose going on here. There’s not enough community centers. … The intent of this wall is to get the word out of the profound history that this center has, and then that wall can grow.”

Aliquippa artist Marlon Gist, who grew up in Sewickley and played at the center in his youth, was tapped to draw an artistic interconnecting line to the images on the Legacy Wall.

Gist, a 1990 Quaker Valley graduate, said he is grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the community institution and hopes the project expands.

“We had a big group of friends so we had fun all the time roller skating, shooting pool, playing basketball, swimming, just running around outside playing whatever in the yard,” Gist said of his time at the center.

“It’s really not a great vision right now for me from what it used to be. I’m glad that Stratton is back. He knows how it went down and everything. He’s the perfect person to come back and revive it. The center was everything.”

Gist’s work has been featured at Mark Rengers’ gallery.

“His work is very amazing,” Rengers said. “It’s very Americana, but it’s Black Americana. There’s a lot of historical (emphasis).”

The wall is expected to be unveiled at the center’s Juneteenth celebration at 1:30 p.m. June 21.

The event follows a 12:30 p.m. round-table discussion of the film documentary “Their Story.”

The documentary centers around African-American history in Sewickley and how much the borough became a multi-cultural and diverse community.

It features highlights from hundreds of hours of interviews of church and community leaders and others who grew up in Sewickley during the 1950s through the 1980s.

“There was a very respectful harmonious coexistence, and there was a whole lot less tenuous and less strife than there was in many areas in and around Pittsburgh,” Nash said.

The documentary confirms a lot of content in the book of the same name written by Bettie Cole.