By Emily Nonko
The empty, worn-down building at 349 East 40th Street in the South Bronx has had many lives.
It was constructed during the mid-1930s as a Public Works Administration project and opened as the Mott Haven Health Center. Forty years later, following a nonviolent takeover of nearby Lincoln Hospital by the Black Panthers and Young Lords, it reopened as the People’s Detox Center, where a group of radical doctors and community leaders pioneered gender-responsive drug recovery, as well as acupuncture as an alternative to methadone to treat heroin addiction.
“This was an act of determination from the community that was trying to create its own answers and solutions to the problems affecting it,” says Mychal Johnson, a co-founder of South Bronx Unite, an organization formed in 2012 to do similar community-driven work.
In 1978, then-Mayor Ed Koch forcibly evicted People’s Detox Center from the building. It operated as a city-owned health clinic until that shuttered in 2013. For over a decade, South Bronx Unite organizers were determined to bring it back into community stewardship.
This month, a community land trust will close on the building. This September, construction will kick off to make their vision a reality: this time as the Health, Education, and Arts (HEArts) Center.
“It’s like a full circle,” Johnson says. “Where the needs of the community have still not been satisfied … we need to do it ourselves.”
‘We will not be denied or ignored’
South Bronx Unite was born out of a community struggle against a 2012 proposal by New York State and City to grant over $130 million in taxpayer subsidies to online grocer FreshDirect to relocate its diesel trucking warehouse to the South Bronx. Residents sued the city and Fresh Direct for its failure to conduct an adequate environmental review. They lost the legal battle, but founded the organization.
Just a year later, the former People’s Detox Center — which was still a health clinic providing acupuncture but run under the city agency Health + Hospitals — shuttered.
“We were very well informed about the work being done there, and also saw how the structures who owned the building abandoned it,” says Dr. Melissa Barber, a co-founder of South Bronx Unite. Barber used her medical training in Cuba to mobilize COVID-19 response in the South Bronx.
“It’s been abandoned for over a decade, and the feeling was that we needed to get this moving, since we know what services can be done here and what the community needs.”
The South Bronx experiences some of the most severe health inequities in the United States, and is saturated with waste facilities, power plants and warehouses alongside highways carrying diesel trucks. The area is sometimes referred to as “Asthma Alley.”
Between 2013 and 2022, South Bronx Unite led a prolonged, multi-pronged community engagement to reclaim the former People’s Detox Center. They wanted to build excitement and buy-in around the property, “to bring people together to celebrate the concept of a building for us,” Johnson explains. South Bronx Unite hosted an annual HEArts Festival in the building’s cul-de-sac, eventually hosting monthly events outside the property.
They also wanted community ownership. By 2015, South Bronx Unite facilitated the creation of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards. “This was the first Bronx-based community land trust, and it’s very unique because we didn’t start out with affordable housing or land acquisition for housing purposes — we started with a community center,” says Barber, a founding member of the land trust.
Organizers knew they’d have to fight to be heard by city officials, whether it was around the Fresh Direct proposal or future of the health center. In 2015, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the popular South Bronx restaurant La Morada. “One of our members was eating there with his family and called us — we had been trying to meet with him forever,” recalls Barber. “Within 15 minutes, the building was surrounded, like we’re not letting you leave because we need to talk to you.”
She continues: “Press events, city hall marches, we were there … we showed out as a force to say we will not be denied or ignored, this is what we want.”
Building a vision
They also made pivotal partnerships. The Land Stewards worked closely with the New Economy Project and the citywide NYC Community Land Initiative coalition. “They were part of a two-year learning exchange where we did a pretty deep dive training to learn the ins and outs of CLTS, from development to land stewardship to governance,” says Deyanira Del Rio, executive director of New Economy Project.
In 2016, the Land Stewards partnered with architect Nandini Bagchee and her students at the City College of New York to kick off a community design process.
“It started off in this very hypothetical academic space, but that did allow us to do a lot of the community visioning in a very free and fluid way,” she explains. In 2018, South Bronx Unite secured enough funding to hire Bagchee to create a feasibility study.
Bagchee wrote in-depth about the process for Urban Omnibus. With no physical access to the building, South Bronx residents and architecture students mapped the community’s core needs, and visioned the future of the center through experimental, hands-on workshops.
In 2018, the team finally got access inside the three-story, 22,750-square foot building. They were inspired by an expansive skylight and terraces, originally designed to bring sunlight inside to treat tuberculosis.
A vision took shape: bright, comfortable and flexible space to accommodate health, education and workforce development programs, offices, a commercial kitchen and cafeteria, and a grand theater.
“I was interested in how to maintain this idea of flexibility within the programming and the design, while also having some kind of character or identity to these spaces,” says Bagchee.
As the design progressed, the Land Stewards continually laid pressure on the city to release a “request for proposals” for the building’s redevelopment. The RFP finally came in 2022. By then, as Barber puts it, “we had formulated our ideas into realistic pitches of what we could do.”
Elise Goldin, the campaign organizer with New Economy Project, recalled a community visioning session led by the city following the RFP. “The Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards turned out — there were probably 100 community members, food, celebration and amazing community vibes,” she recalls. “And they all had one unified vision, which was the HEArts Center, which was really powerful.”
Making it real
The Land Stewards needed a development partner to show the city their vision was feasible. Alembic Community Development joined the team in 2023 to help develop their RFP. “We see our role as trying to implement the vision that the land spent over a decade facilitating,” says principal Jonathan Leit. They agreed on a 50/50 ownership arrangement, split between Alembic and the community land trust.
The city awarded Alembic and the Land Stewards the property in fall of 2023, a massive win for the land trust and South Bronx Unite. It also marked a significant shift for the project, in which the team had to secure at least $40 million to renovate a building in “really rough shape,” as Leit put it.
“There have been some degrees of separation between the design process, finding the right developer, and then the developer’s own complicated task of trying to keep everything in balance,” notes Bagchee.
Financing was a complex endeavor, which Bagchee sees as unavoidable “unless the government were willing to release funds to the community more directly.”
The team secured financing through federal new market tax credits provided by four different Community Development Financial Institutions, federal and State of New York historic tax credits, city capital funds, and state grants for community and climate resilience. (The center will have geothermal power and LEED Gold certification.) This past December, the state awarded the team a $2.5 million environmental justice grant.
“Months before the project is going to break ground, it’s fully funded,” says Barber. “There were people who outright and blatantly told us it could not be done.”
Closing on the building this month marks the final step before construction. Alembic estimates 24 months of work with an opening in 2028. “This will be a completely comprehensive gut and reinstallation of new systems,” says Alembic principal Mike Grote.
The skylight and an original stairwell will be restored, while new stairs and an elevator will be added. The back of the building will transform into a double-height, multi-purpose theater. Flexible office and programming space will be throughout all three floors, with the second floor dedicated to office and training space for Green City Force.
For the Land Stewards and South Bronx Unite members, there’s no sense of disbelief that their vision is becoming reality — in their eyes, there’s a sense of destiny that the building is returning to community stewardship.
“It brings a lot of joy,” Johnson says. “And [it’s] showing that we cannot stop here, we can keep doing ground-up, community-envisioned projects to create the healthier outcomes we require.”