YMCA of Montclair | 25 Park Street, Montclair, NJ 07042
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Peter Gencarelli walked into the YMCA of Montclair looking for a workout. What he found kept him coming back.
“I feel good because I know once I do my workout, I’ll feel even better,” said Gencarelli, of Bloomfield, who rejoined the Park Street branch four months ago after stepping away for a stretch of years. “It’s a healing place for me in many ways.”
Almost nobody who talked to Farnoosh and Mike for this installment of Farnoosh and Mike Get Healthy described the YMCA of Montclair as a gym, exactly. They described it as a second home, a place where a retired veteran, a new mom and a six-year-old learning to swim are all, genuinely, regulars.
What Makes the YMCA of Montclair Feel Like a Second Home
One building holds all of it. A lobby set up for chess and quiet conversation. A boot camp class running in the main gym. A program called SAIL, short for Staying Active and Independent for Life, built specifically for older adults. A track circling the top floor. A squash court and a boxing gym on the third floor. One of the larger pools you’ll find at a community Y.
None of that variety would hold together without something binding it. Lisa Kievit has watched that binding hold for nearly three decades working across YMCA branches, and she’s now executive director at Park Street. She says the constant isn’t any single program. It’s the people.
“It’s the members. It’s the community, and it’s the community that they create at every YMCA,” Kievit said. “Programs change, needs of the community change, people’s individual needs change, but they all just gravitate together here and really help strengthen one another through all of those changes.”
The Y’s tagline is “For a Better Us.” Spend twenty minutes in that lobby and it stops sounding like a slogan, which matters more once you know how long that lobby has actually been standing.
A Century on Park Street: The YMCA of Montclair’s History
The YMCA of Montclair traces back to 1891. The Park Street branch, its flagship location, opened its doors in 1926, which makes this year its hundredth on that site, a milestone the Y is marking through its own Park Street Centennial program.
Kievit is quick to point out that the building shows its age, in the best way.
“The building is charming, a hundred years old, but there’s so much that can be done so we can continue to grow,” she said. “It’s leaning into the community health aspect, the partnerships with other community agencies that we can better serve our members… and you saw our new reformer Pilates studio upstairs, which we’re so excited about.”
That centennial sits alongside a separate, older chapter of Montclair’s history, worth telling on its own terms. In 1912, Alice Hooe Foster, the first Black graduate of Montclair High School, founded a YWCA chapter for Black women in Montclair, doing it without the backing of a white chapter, which national protocol at the time required first. Montclair’s ended up being the only YWCA in the country not affiliated with a white YWCA. In 1920, the chapter purchased the Israel Crane House, a mansion built in 1796 by one of Montclair’s founding families, and ran offices and dormitories out of it for the next 45 years, housing women who’d come north during the Great Migration looking for work.
The town’s Black YMCA followed a different path entirely. It grew out of St. Mark’s Church and, under Charles Harmon Bullock’s leadership from 1916 to 1935, eventually operated out of the Washington Street Branch YMCA building, which stood until it was demolished in 2004 to make way for a school. Neither institution is the Park Street building Farnoosh and Mike toured, but both did the same underlying work for a segregated Montclair: they gave the town a landing place. For the fuller story, you can find it in the Pod’s own look inside the Montclair History Center.
Back on Park Street, the building Kievit runs is entering its second century with a brand new room.
A New Reformer Pilates Studio Opens at the Y
That studio is the Y’s newest chapter, and it’s being written by someone who didn’t start out as a teacher there at all.
Mercedes Moore is a personal trainer here who also teaches extreme hip-hop, step and aerobics. She’s also added Balanced Body Pilates instructor to her resume.
A reformer is the spring-loaded, sliding-carriage machine that gives this style of Pilates its name, and Balanced Body is the certification most reformer instructors train under. Moore has worked at the YMCA of Montclair for fifteen months, arriving with a decade of training experience already behind her. But she first walked through the doors to learn something for herself.
“I just learned how to swim last year,” Moore said. “There were challenges, but I invested in myself. I invested in a coach that helps me get to the goal a little bit faster, and that’s important.”
A decade spent coaching everyone else, and it took the Y to get her to let someone coach her. Maybe that’s why she talks about the place the way she does.
“I like to call this, the YMCA, the one-stop shop,” Moore said. “You can do so much, and especially for families. Your children can come here. I’ve trained as young as six-year-olds.”
The equipment tells its own timeline. It went in last year. Moore got certified in March. The program launched about a month ago, and demand already outpaces it: more than 100 members showed interest in a demo the first week, but each class holds only four. For now, it runs twice weekly.
Ask Moore what the job is really about and she doesn’t reach for reps or reformers. She reaches for an 88-year-old veteran she’s trained for the past year.
“He’s walking better. He’s standing up tall. He’s building strength,” she said. “His family members identify it, and they’re just like, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”
And on the days he doesn’t feel like showing up at all.
“Let’s talk about it,” Moore said. “We can even walk and talk. That way I’m getting them to still move, but it’s part of the process.”
One client described how a suggested two-mile jog turned into something bigger: “Mercedes encouraged me to sign up for a run… she said two miles. But then I did the 10K. Great motivation. Mercedes is amazing.”
How to Join the YMCA of Montclair
The YMCA of Montclair’s Park Street branch is at 25 Park Street. Call (973) 744-3400 or visit montclairymca.org to book a tour, ask about the new Pilates studio, or just stop by and see the building for yourself. The centennial makes this a good year to look closer at a place most of us have driven past for decades.
