In Eugene “Thunder” Hughes’ world,there are “jokers,” “dingbats,” and “nitwits.” The first two categories cover a wide variety of folks, but they’re mostly terms of endearment. It’s the last group that’s trouble. Most of the jokers who have trained at Hughes’ Midtown Youth Academy boxing club over the years are good kids who come from difficult home situations and just need a little straightening out. So were the neighborhood children he used to round up and take to Baptist services on Sundays. Before Hughes fell in love with the “sweet science” as a boy, he says he was a “dingbat” who ran around with local gangs near Capitol Hill and got himself kicked out of Armstrong High School. Hughes says it was a group of “nitwits” who started the trouble with him and other Black Panthers that stoked the Watts Riots and landed him a stretch behind bars. Now, at 76 years old, it’s a different brand of dumbassery that plagues the former fighter: developers and investors who come sniffing around his 14th Street NW gym with lowball offers to buy the place. “These nitwits send me all sorts of letters saying they wanna buy it for $170,000, $200,000,” Hughes says. “They can go straight to hell with that.” Last year, a city property appraiser assessed the boxing club’s value at just over $1 million. That’s not bad for a dilapidated, century-old building that hasn’t had any major work done in decades. But while it may not look like much from the outside, the Midtown Youth Academy is one of a dwindling handful of cultural artifacts of the U Street corridor before the boom and a landmark of sorts for fans of the local fight game. It also happens to sit on a stretch of 14th Street that developers seem to think is paved in gold. That leaves “Thunder” Hughes in an interesting position: The nonprofit he’s run out of the gym for more than three decades owns the place, meaning that he can probably stay there as long as he likes. As a dizzying array of pricey new condos and apartment buildings circle the rowhouse-turned-boxing gym and community center, though, the storm of drugs and crime that the academy was meant to protect area kids from has largely subsided. Now, figuring out how it fits into the neighborhood circa 2015 is Hughes’ next fight.

Passersby during winter would be forgiven for assuming that the Midtown Youth Academy has already gone the way of an abandoned storefront two doors down and the rotting skeleton of the old Republic Gardens building not far away on U Street. The structure’s peeling black and yellow paint has seen better days. Faded campaign posters for Ward 1’s Jim Graham and E. Gail Anderson Holness may be from last year’s elections, but they look like remnants of a bygone era posted behind a metal gate adorning the building’s front windows. The only way to tell if the gym is open for business on cold, dark evenings is to check if the curtain has been drawn back at the front door or see if Hughes’s red hatchback is parked across the street. That’s nothing new, according to Lisa “Too Fierce” Foster Cohen, who was a ripe 28 years old when she took up boxing under Hughes’ tutelage in 1996. Foster Cohen went on to win a world junior featherweight championship just a few years later. “Let me just tell you this: The way that it looks now is probably a step up from when I first went there,” says Foster Cohen, who helped spruce up the place with a paint job and a small dressing room before embarking on her professional boxing career. She later opened her own gym in the District and is currently writing a book about her time in the fight game. “It’s also probably 10 steps up from how it smelled.” What the gym lacks in polish, potpourri, and fresh political propaganda, it makes up for in history and personality. A hollowed-out rowhouse that once served as a credit union, the MYA’s wooden floorboards creak with the subterranean sweat, blood, and spit of generations of young fighters. Its walls are adorned with a smattering of photos of Sugar Ray Leonard and other local legends, newspaper clippings about Hughes and his work, and awards and commendations from local officials praising his efforts in the community. You never know who might wander into the place: Former middleweight world champion William Joppy came by one night in January looking for his son, and Foster Cohen—who now splits her time between Florida and the D.C. area—says she checks in on Hughes every now and again. “This place right here? This place is the original,” says Joppy, who met Hughes while boxing as a kid in Hillcrest and still lives in the District. “Old school. There ain’t no places like this no more.” Hughes says the building is worth three times the D.C. government’s $1 million tax assessment. What it would actually fetch if he sold it is probably somewhere in the middle. In 2013, a developer forked over $2.75 million for the unimproved lot at the end of the block and the crumbling storefront next to it. Perhaps better known as “that parking lot across the street from Fast Gourmet,” the property will soon be home to the Lumen Condominiums. The boutique condo building is expected to feature 18 “elegantly appointed residences,” according to property owner Community Three Development, LLC. “Lumen completes the resurrection of this unique intersection and sets the foundation for a new chapter of prosperity in one of Washington’s most cherished locales,” the developer says on the condo’s website. Work on that property, coupled with the construction going on at the northeast corner of 14th Street and Florida Avenue, makes for a lot of action on the small block that runs north from the intersection with W Street. It’s a different type of activity for the corner lot, which was once dubbed “Jemal’s Hookers” in a nod to owner Douglas Jemal and a tip of the hat to either the used car dealership that once occupied the spot or the working women who allegedly used the corner for business transactions after dark. “It used to be real bad around here,” Joppy says of the neighborhood. “There wasn’t nothing but drugs and prostitutes. I can’t even tell you how much it’s changed. I used to come down here, and you could hardly move around. There would just be people up and down the block hanging around, doing drugs.” If the construction crews, shiny new storefronts, and noticeable dearth of opportunities to pay for sex aren’t enough evidence that things have changed, consider the cost of exercise in the small radius surrounding the Midtown Youth Academy. Most fledgling boxers don’t pay a dime to train under Hughes. That makes him a bit of an outlier on his block these days. On the four-block stretch of 14th Street that encompasses his gym, you can enjoy unlimited interval training at Elevate Fitness for $159 a month, pedal ’til you can’t feel your thighs at Ride DC for $130 a month, or grunt, swing kettlebells, and do whatever else it is that people do at CrossFit Praxis for $199 a month. That’s not to mention Vida, the Euro lounge/gym on the 1600 block of U Street ($100-120), and what may very well be the nicest YMCA ($82) this side of the Mississippi.

Hughes’ own boxing career began in the neighborhood where he grew up, a slice of Capitol Hill that was razed to make room for the Rayburn House Office Building in the early 1960s. He trained at Southeast House, a nonprofit community center that, like the Midtown Youth Academy, offered a wide rage of after school programs for kids. “Well, myself, I was a fighter,” Hughes says one early January evening, as he perches himself on an old couch at the front of the gym and eats out of a McDonald’s bag. It’s downright frigid outside and not much warmer indoors, where gospel music rises slightly over the din of a space heater. “I started out wanting to be a preacher, but then I turned around and said I want to be a fighter.” Hughes says he was mentored in his early days by Alfred “Sonny Boy” West, a lightweight who went 48-8 over his career before dying from a brain hemorrhage he suffered in the ring in 1950. While his father—a jazz musician who played trumpet and flute—grappled with heroin and cocaine, it was two women who helped steer Hughes away from trouble. “Back in that time there was nothing but gangs,” Hughes says. “I was in one of the gangs, and I was told, ‘Boy, you better get your behind in there and do something positive,’” Hughes says. “My mother and my aunt, they were the ones that encouraged me to go to church and stay in church, rather than keep on walking out in the street.” Hughes says he won three local Golden Gloves crowns fighting as a bantamweight from 1952 to 1954. He later joined the Marines, where he won an all-service tournament as a featherweight. After time in California and Connecticut, Hughes returned home, and in 1975 he opened a makeshift gym called the 14th Street Academy a few blocks south of his current digs. Depending on who you ask, the space was either above or next to a bar on the corner of T Street. The plot is now home to The Harper, a high-end micro-apartment building. Hughes says he saw the dedication and discipline that boxing required as a way to help local kids stay on the right path. He started by recruiting children of the people he worked with as a city government family and drug counselor. That’s when he developed a trademark tough love approach to the “knuckleheads” he trained, using free time to make sure they were going to school and staying out of the juvenile justice system. “He would always go out there and tell kids, ‘You got one foot in the street and one foot in the gym. That ain’t no way to live,’” Foster Cohen says. Ask people on the local amateur boxing circuit about Hughes, and one of the first things they’ll do is marvel at what they say is his uncanny ability to keep tough kids in line. “They were at-risk kids, but when they came to a boxing event, they were on their best behavior, Genie made sure of that,” Bobby Magruder says of the boxers that Hughes often brought to local events. Magruder was himself an accomplished amateur fighter out of the Hillcrest Boys Club, who won a handful of regional Golden Gloves titles and (unsuccessfully) faced off with Sugar Ray Leonard three times. He’s currently the president and coordinator of the Washington Region Golden Gloves tournament. Gary “Digital” Williams has been covering the local boxing scene as a writer and ring announcer for 31 years. He says he’s watched at least a few fighters show promise under Hughes, only to steer off the straight and narrow track after leaving the academy. Those same kids, he says, would often turn back to Hughes to get their lives back in order. “Boxing is one of those sports that really keeps young people away from trouble,” Williams says. “I’ve talked to many different boxers, not only from Mr. Hughes’s gym but also others in the area, that say that if it wasn’t for boxing, who knows where they’d be. They’d probably be dead, in jail, running the streets, or doing nothing. He had guys in there that I think he literally saved.” After a few years at his original location, Hughes opened the Midtown Youth Academy in 1982. He says he paid $72,000 for the building, which was originally erected in 1912. Although the area was awash in violence and drugs, Hughes firmly established the gym as a safe haven from the criminal element outside. “Gene’s place was off limits,” says Michelle Darden Lee, who worked at the MYA as an administrative assistant in the late-’80s. “They didn’t mess with Gene, they didn’t mess with the kids and it was a safe place for the kids just to be kids.” Foster Cohen was an adult by the time she met Hughes. After a childhood in which she bounced around foster homes, though, she says she came to see him as a type of father figure and thrived under Hughes’s hard-nosed approach. “A person like me going into a place like that and being told that I could do it meant a lot,” she says. “Gene provided a lot for me.”

The sites of Hughes’s current and former gyms straddle the intersection of 14 and U streets, the area that served as ground zero during the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Hughes wasn’t around when the looting and fires broke out in the District, but he was present for the race-related riots in Los Angeles that served as a precursor to the outbursts in the District and elsewhere. After he was discharged from the Marines in 1964, Hughes caught on as a community organizer with the Black Panthers. He says he landed in prison for 27 months after the Watts neighborhood in L.A. burned during the 1965 riots. The trouble started with an incident between white police officers and a black family, according to historical accounts, but many folks blamed poor living conditions, unemployment, and substandard education opportunities in the city’s black neighborhoods. Others say it was a result of decades of housing discrimination and segregation combined with police bigotry. Hughes says the riots stemmed in part from a “territorial” battle among various factions in the neighborhood and across the city. “You got some nitwits who wanna twist things out of order,” Hughes says. “We started going through a whole lot of crap out there in California. Then we got hooked in with the police and all them folks out there, and that’s when we got involved with the burning in Watts. So I did 27 months.” In February 1968, just a few days before the King assassination, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders issued a 426-page report finding that the riots in L.A., Newark, N.J., and Chicago were driven by a lack of economic opportunity for African Americans. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” the commission concluded. Nearly 24 years later, Sharon Pratt Dixon was sworn in as D.C.’s mayor following a campaign in which she pledged to help close socio-economic and other divides. The theme of her inauguration address was “a season where the international city, the federal city, the many neighborhoods, the many constituents, become one.” Invoking her “Yes We Will!” campaign slogan, the new mayor urged the city’s residents to work together to find community solutions to the rampant murder and widespread drug abuse that she said had already cost the District a generation of young people. She also acknowledged community leaders who had already laid the groundwork for that fight. “Every neighborhood in this city is rich with Ph.D.s in survival,” Pratt Dixon said. “Men and women who are architects of hope and promise, such as Eugene Hughes at the Midtown Youth Academy.”