All Wet

It's a hot and sticky July afternoon on Kansas City's West Side. A rusty truck cruises noisily along Southwest Boulevard as men lean out to whistle at the women on the corner. A block away, families gather inside a tiny orange Mexican restaurant for a late lunch. Up 21st Street, near Observation Park, atop the highest hill in the neighborhood, three little girls sit in the bed of a Ford pickup, giggling and combing their dolls' hair. On the park's soccer field, two teen-age boys kick a ball around.

Ten blocks to the northeast, the buildings of downtown Kansas City rise in a haze, but this neighborhood just west of I-35 seems tucked away from the corporate bustle -- rows and rows of small-frame houses occupied by neighbors who remedy the heat with cool drinks on the front porch and keep an eye out for each others' kids.

This is Tony Aguirre's neighborhood -- has been since he was a little kid. Everyone here knows the friendly 73-year-old coach and knows where to find him at 4 p.m. If he's not in his office at the Sacred Heart Church, where his teams play basketball in an old gym, then he's driving his blue van, loaded with bats, balls and gloves, on his way to meet twelve-, thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys for baseball practice at Penn Valley Park.

There is one place you probably won't find Tony Aguirre, though: just down the 21st Street slope, on the corner of West Pennway at the shiny new city-owned community center that bears his name.

From the outside, the long-awaited community center looks exactly like the gem it was supposed to be when first dreamed up a decade ago: beautiful and colorful, reflective of the neighborhood's Mexican roots. It was to be a place for community groups to gather, for kids to exercise, for senior citizens to do water aerobics or share a cup of coffee.

Instead, it's a $4 million catastrophe, a gilded embarrassment that, according to two West Side city councilmen, should be demolished and rebuilt.

"It's terrible. I think it's an insult to the community," says Jerry Adriano, a consultant with the Kansas City His- panic Association Contractors Enterprise, which closely followed the building's construction.

The community itself helped create the insult, but there's plenty of blame to go around. The city faults the contractor. The contractor gripes about the city and the designers. Adriano and his organization -- who pushed the city hard to put an untested Hispanic contractor on the project -- now blame the city and the contractor. The same West Side residents who insisted on an absurdly awkward construction site also blame the city and the contractor. A few even point a finger at Adriano's group.

Meanwhile, new problems keep developing at the community center. In the past year, the city's parks and recreation department has closed the center's indoor swimming pool three times for more than a month each so workers could make major repairs. First, cheap paint and caulking material flaked off and stuck to swimmers' bodies. Then swimmers endured frigid water because moisture had seeped into the pool's heating system. Finally, the pool's metal fixtures started rusting.

Partly because of the closings, usage of the Aguirre center has been just a fraction of what other community centers around town see. Swimmers have shown up in suits, towels and goggles in hand, only to be turned away from the closed pool. But except on the most oppressively hot days, residents don't use the pool much. A yawning teen-age lifeguard usually slumps in his elevated chair, surveying an empty pool flanked by stacks of colorful foam noodles. A pretty fountain spits turquoise water at the shallow end, and an aquatic volleyball court sits unused on the other end. A warning set in tile on the floor reads "NO RUNINNG."

"I've tried to go there to do water aerobics, and when I showed up, the pool was closed," says one community activist. "I've never actually gotten to use it."

People aren't using the Aguirre center's gymnasium, either. Not long after the center opened, basketball players found that dribbles bounced unpredictably. Athletes tripped running up and down the courts. Soil moisture seeping through the walls has caused the floor boards to expand, badly warping the expensive surface. City workers have cut grooves in the wood in an effort to flatten the floor, a temporary fix until they can resolve the moisture problems. Meanwhile, the organizers of the Latino Men's Basketball Tournament last year had to scramble to find other gymnasiums where more than twenty teams, many from out of state, could face off. Now, the gym attracts a few bored kids who want to shoot hoops and escape the heat.

The pool and the gymnasium take up most of the usable space in the center -- the building's fancy atrium and curved staircase leave room for little else. But problems persist in all areas.

A neighborhood activist from the West Side Community Action Network Center sent a memo to city officials in February listing many troubles that still bedevil the center: window seepage, rusting structural beams, poor air quality caused by mold and mildew, rusty lights, sloppy caulking along the floor, faulty drainage that causes water to puddle on changing-room floors, lack of ventilation, uneven steps, an elevator that often doesn't work, grungy floors and a leaking roof.