City officials plan to build a new “full service” community center in Grove Hall, on a city-owned vacant lot across the street from the Jeremiah Burke High School.

Mayor Michelle Wu announced on Thursday the new community center, which could cost up to $60 million. She was joined by members of her administration and Mike Kozu, the co-director of Project Rebuild and Improve Grove Hall Together (RIGHT) who has long pushed for the new center.

“In environmental justice communities like Grove Hall it is especially important that our residents have safe, comfortable, resilient, and inspiring public spaces,” Wu said.

Councillors Brian Worrell, Tania Fernandes Anderson, Ruthzee Louijeune and Michael Flaherty and community leaders also attended the announcement, which occurred under light rain and grey skies. Before the crowd arrived, the site, which had served as a temporary COVID testing site during the height of the 2020 pandemic, was barren except for graffitied concrete barriers and the markings that indicated it was once a basketball court. An auto body shop sits on the skinny parcel next door.

Grove Hall’s only teen center closed in 2016, the result of its conversion into a senior center. “What stands out is the lack of programming and lack of facilities in a neighborhood that’s been hardest hit by violence since the ‘80s,” Kozu told the Reporter in 2021.

On Thursday, Kozu said the new center, which will serve both teens and seniors, will provide a “powerful pathway” to overcoming racial disparities. Before settling on the site, the Wu administration created a process that drew public input from across Dorchester, he added.

Mayor Wu announced the news that Grove Hall will get a new, $60M community center outside of Burke High School on Thurs., Oct. 13, 2022. Gintautas Dumcius photo

Kozu noted the project is across the street from a renovated Jeremiah Burke High School, as well as a senior center and Boston Public Library branch, as well as a Stop and Shop. A new community center will help create a “complex that’s providing a lot of resources” and offers a “safe haven," Kozu said.

The location of the community center across from the school, rather than inside, is key. All of the Dorchester locations currently run by the Boston Centers for Youth and Families are located inside school buildings, limiting access during school hours, as well as after-school programming.

More Dorchester community centers are expected in the future, according to the Wu administration.

“The BCYF Grove Hall Community Center will be a hive of activity for the community and an oasis for youth in the neighborhood,” Jose Masso, Wu’s chief of human services, said in a statement. “I’m really excited that the City will be investing in several standalone community centers in Dorchester and that the community has chosen Grove Hall as the first site of many.”

Forty privately and publicly owned locations in Dorchester were examined as potential sites for the Grove Hall community center.

According to the Wu administration, construction on the new center will start after a community engagement effort focused on its design. Overall, the budgeting, design and construction process is expected to take three years.

Kozu called it a “major victory” but there was still work ahead, with the design process set to get underway.

“It took a lot of people, a lot of effort, a lot of years to pull this together,” he said of the new center. “We’re going to work on the design, we’re going to work on the planning. We want to make sure young people, our seniors, everybody are part of this whole process and create a facility that meets the needs of our community.”

Asked what services the community center will offer, Kozu said that’s “to be decided.” “It’ll be large enough to have a basketball court, large enough to have a swimming pool, large enough to have STEM classes, arts, music, dance,” he said. “It just depends on what people want to prioritize.”

As for what will happen to Grove Hall's senior center once the intergenerational community center opens, that's also to be decided.

Wu told reporters key features of the new community center will include “space for youth, sports facilities, classroom space, educational rooms as well as dedicated space for our seniors.”

“Part of the design process is going to look at what resources need to pulled in from different places,” she said. “We did have some feedback in the original community listening sessions that seniors wanted a dedicated space that they could access anytime and not necessarily be tied to school schedules and availability.”

This post has been updated with additional information.