Syracuse University will announce plans today for the construction of a new recreation facility on Marshall Street.

A 3,700 square foot fitness center will be built this summer in the Marshall Square Mall and open for students, faculty and staff when the fall semester begins this August, said Matthew Snyder, a spokesperson for the university.

The M-Street plan will coincide with construction in August 2009, when the university will begin work on a residence hall at 619 Comstock Ave., on the DellPlain Residence Hall lawn. A 10,600 square foot recreation facility will be constructed on the second floor. These additions will expand SU’s indoor fitness space 10 percent by August 2009.

‘I think it’s a really good day, not only for Recreation Services, but for the students at Syracuse University,’ said Mitch Gartenberg, director of SU Recreation Services. ‘We’ve worked hard to expand opportunities where we can for students.’

In addition, Recreation Services is expanding the hours of the Marion Residence Hall fitness center. Starting next semester, that facility will be open an extra 12 hours a week, meaning it will be available from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Currently, it closes between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on those days.

But the most surprising news is the creation of the facility in Marshall Square Mall. Gartenberg and his staff have previously spoken of potential short-term exercise remedies for the overcrowding in current recreation facilities, but never revealed plans until now.

The university will begin construction on the Marshall Square Mall facility in early June in order to have it ready before classes start in the fall. Students will only need a valid SU ID to utilize the facility, following the same entrance procedures at Archbold Gymnasium.

Snyder said surveys conducted by the university showed that students identified the current indoor recreation options as lacking.

‘The spaces were either too old or too crowded,’ Snyder said of students’ complaints. ‘This is something that was very well heard.’

The Marshall Square Mall fitness center will accommodate approximately 50 people at a time, Gartenberg said. He anticipated purchasing 44 machines with ample stretching areas included. Gartenberg predicted 60 percent of the machines will be cardiovascular – such as treadmills and elliptical steppers – and the other 40 percent would be the most modern circuit training machines on the market. He said Recreation Services has yet to purchase the machines, allowing some flexibility in the final decisions.

The facility will be air-conditioned and have television monitors for people to watch while working out. Hours of operation are still undecided, but Gartenberg foresees the fitness center loosely following mall hours, opening at 7 a.m. and closing at 11 p.m. or midnight from Monday through Thursday, with fewer hours on weekends.

‘I think when you combine it with the fact there’s a window in front there and students and faculty and staff and individuals who pass by will actually be able to look into the fitness center and see activity,’ Gartenberg said. ‘I think that will draw people in. For those people who are unaware of it, they will walk by see it and say, ‘What is this all about?”

The mall’s fitness center would have three individual, unisex changing rooms, with showers in each, Snyder said. The idea is to attract students who want to fit in a quick work out during a busy day. That’s part of the reason why Marshall Square Mall was chosen as the site – because of its central location. With the new Martin J. Whitman School of Management across the street, Snyder said the mall area sees a lot of student foot traffic.

‘It’s really designed so that it’s a convenient spot to hit on your way to or from somewhere,’ Snyder said. ‘That’s what the logic behind the changing rooms is kind of driven by. It makes it easy for somebody between work or class to just drop in, get a workout in and get on to the next place they need to be.’

Junior Paul Wachtler said he thinks the university made a good choice in picking the mall. Even though he comes to the mall generally only for Subway or Follett’s Bookstore, Wachtler said the fitness center could attract a large population of students.

‘It should be good because there are lots of fraternities and sororities in the area and it’s a hike to Archbold from there,’ said Wachtler, an information studies and technology major. ‘If it’s good enough, students would come after classes at SOM.’

Meanwhile, the facility at 619 Comstock Ave. will be nearly double the size of the one at Marshall Square Mall. Although it is more than two years away from completion, Gartenberg imagined the glass-enclosed fitness center as a gem for Recreation Services. Not only will it contain cardiovascular and circuit training equipment, but also free weights and barbells.

But the Marshall Street facility will provide the most immediate relief for the typically crowded and rapidly aging Archbold.

SU bought the Marshall Square Mall for $4 million in July 1999 and oversees the tenants that come in and out of the mall. The structure was built in 1981 and has served as a retail and business center since.

Mary Anne Hawthorne, office manager for Willowbank Company, LLC, the company SU contracted to manage the Marshall Square Mall, said the fitness center would occupy open rental space to the left of the University Avenue entrance. The last tenant of the space – the mall’s largest at 2,380 square feet – was Movie Gallery, a video rental store that closed in late 2005. The space has been empty since.

While mall development appears stagnant to students, Hawthorne said, there is a lot going on behind the scenes, most importantly when the mall enabled wifi Internet access for visitors.

‘The mall is here to serve the student body,’ Hawthorne said. ‘We’ve seen an increase in the number of students visiting during the day.’

The planning process for installing a fitness center at the Marshall Square Mall began nearly 10 months ago, long after the university began an assessment of its recreation spaces, Hawthorne said.

The university began the process of re-evaluating the campus recreation facilities as far back as 2004, Snyder said. After Chancellor Nancy Cantor authorized Recreation Services and Student Affairs officials to conduct site visits across the country to schools like the University of Georgia and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Syracuse partnered with Brailsford & Dunlavey, who Snyder calls ‘the No.1 expert nationwide on recreation facilities at colleges and universities.’

Consultants from Brailsford & Dunlavey visited campus last fall and toured Archbold and other indoor fitness facilities. After this assessment and other interviews with student and faculty members, the firm concluded SU needed to add more recreation space, but it was easier said than done.

‘It resulted in the recommendation that yes, we do need to add more space, but also the realization that there’s not a lot of space to put new recreational facilities,’ Snyder said. ‘So this is an approach to build distributed recreational facilities. The idea being instead of having one central location that everyone has to go to, there are smaller facilities that serve a portion of the university of the community and place them in strategic locations on or right adjacent to campus so they can basically take advantage of foot traffic patterns.’

Marshall Square Mall is a perfect example of this philosophy, Snyder said. He said universities across the nation are forced to use creativity when finding room for fitness centers because they are so space-intensive.

‘If they built a fitness center in Marshall Square Mall, all the people who live on Walnut, they would all go rather than have to walk,’ said Kathleen Camerato, freshman education major. ‘I’m in Lawrinson so I don’t care. I come to (Archbold). But it would be a lot less crowded.’

That’s the idea, Snyder said. He said he is looking forward to August, when students step foot on campus and see the new facilities for the first time.

‘I think this is something that’s going to be a really nice new feature for a lot of students who are going to get here this fall and say, ‘Wow, this is something we didn’t have access to,” Snyder said.

Published on April 28, 2007 at 12:00 pm