Patchogue's new YMCA is a true family center

The new YMCA Patchogue Family Center has the customary gym and indoor swimming pool. It also has an indoor track, basketball and volleyball courts, and a two-story rock-climbing wall.

Plus rooms for Pilates, Zumba and yoga classes, a day care center, a teen center - even space where you can sit and have a cup of coffee with friends.

The 54,000-square-foot, three-story facility on Main Street, which opened last month, is "where you meet all your neighbors," said executive director Donna Boyle, who began working for the Y in 1991 as a part-time lifeguard in the Bay Shore facility.

The new YMCA has about four times more space than the old building in Holtsville. That building will remain open with a weight room and indoor pool and will have a summer day camp program, according to Boyle.

The new Y took a year and a half to build at a cost of $20.5 million, she said. Most of the money came from private donors and local businesses, she said, half of it from one anonymous local donor.

In the new facility, the swimming pool is in a glass-enclosed room where water is set at a constant 85 degrees, Boyle said, with an air temperature of 90 degrees. "It's summertime all year round in here," she said.

Just outside the pool room is a two-story rock climbing wall. The rooms for cycling classes, yoga, Pilates and Zumba are on the third floor.

Kim Dominici, 35, of Patchogue, said she loves to take her three children to the new Y. "It's close, and it's clean," she said. And while two of her children, ages 4 and 7, take 21/2-hour swimming lessons, she can drop her 2-year-old off in the baby-sitting room.

The Y is open seven days a week to members and on Saturday nights only to teens until the 10 p.m. closing. Memberships cost $44 monthly for adults and $68 for families.

The 4,800-square-foot gym has 14 treadmills, five elliptical machines, plus stationary bikes, strength-building machines and free weights. On the third floor, a 1/16th-mile track overlooks a full-sized basketball court below. The east-facing windows offer views of downtown Patchogue and the lake on Lake Road.

Just off the gym are three locker rooms - for men, women, and families, where mothers with sons and fathers with daughters can supervise their children. The bathrooms feature bathing suit dryers and separate shower stalls that Boyle said are all compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

"There's nothing country-clubbish about it," Boyle said. The locker rooms are "nice, clean and efficient. You get in and get out."

The preschool child care program uses classrooms in a wing with its own entrance.

The teen center is available free for teens, who must sign a code of conduct before they can play PS3 or Nintendo Wii, watch television, play air hockey or Ping-Pong - or do homework.

At one of the table-and-chair sets near the back of the teen room, Caroline Lamarca, 13, of Bayport, was working on English homework with her friend Brooke Schultz, 13, of Blue Point. Caroline was there for the first time with Brooke, an eighth-grade student at James Wilson Young Middle School, who said she comes to the YMCA every other day to go to the gym or study.

"It's a quieter place to do homework," she said.

Mason Cash, 13, said he started going to the teen center because his mother wanted him to. Now he comes every day after school to play PS3 or air hockey.

"After I started coming, I thought it was cool," he said.