ANN ARBOR, MI - When the Ann Arbor Community Center opened at 625 N. Main St. in 1960, it represented the next chapter for the Dunbar Center, a place where the black community came together.

The Dunbar Center, established in 1923 by the Rev. R.M. Gilbert of the Second Baptist Church and named for black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, had operated at 420 N. Fourth Ave. since 1937, and before that at two other locations in the area.

By the late 1950s, it expanded its mission to serve the broader community and became the Ann Arbor Community Center, using donated funds to construct a new building on Main Street.

Shirley Beckley, 76, who grew up near the center, said she considers it a part of her.

"We started at the Dunbar, and then they built this because we outgrew the Dunbar, so we came here as teenagers and up," Beckley said during an emotional meeting at the center last Friday night, Oct. 5, dismayed that the board that runs the center, unbeknownst to many in the community, decided to sell the property last year.

"This is not your center to sell or lease or do nothing with. It's ours. It belongs to the community," Beckley told the center's leaders, echoing other longtime black community members who learned only in recent months about the $1.6 million sale of the building.

The center, a private nonprofit corporation run by a board of directors, sold the property in November 2017 to local tech entrepreneur Vik Kheterpal, who has spent months rehabbing the building, replacing windows, fixing a leaky roof and making other upgrades.

In May, he moved his healthcare technology company, CareEvolution, into the center's former upper-level space, relocating from the McKinley Technology Centre a few blocks away.

Under a longterm lease agreement, the community center now occupies a much smaller space in the building's lower level, where it continues to do its work without the cost of maintaining an aging building.

Kheterpal said he's committed to preserving the building and the community center has a 10-year lease right now. The full terms of the lease arrangement are confidential.

The center's leaders say it was a tough call to make, but the nonprofit organization has a limited budget and building expenses were eating away at it. They decided maintaining a large building when only 25 percent of it was being actively used no longer made sense.

"The expenses for the building were escalating. Literally the building has been falling apart," said Board Chairman Mike Murphy.

"The amount of the renovations just to get it up to snuff was going to exceed our annual budget, basically," he said, adding the center's leaders are now more excited than they've been in a long time in terms of the opportunity to continue providing services.

"The center is an organization that provides programs and services to meet community needs for individuals and families who need it most, so in terms of the longterm viability for that and what we can deliver, we're in a better position than we've been in years," Murphy said.

"And in terms of the ability to stay in this location, we're in a better position than we were last year."

There still are more building repairs to make, including rebuilding an exterior stair wall that recently toppled, becoming a pile of bricks, but that's no longer the community center's financial problem.

"That wall outside is a pretty good example," said board member Marvin Perry. "I mean, we had roof leaks all over the building upstairs."

Perry said he looks forward to being able to put more funds toward programs to serve youths and help others in need now that maintaining the building isn't the center's concern.

"We look at it as a partnership," Perry said of the arrangement with the new building owner.

Many of the residents who packed into the center for Friday night's meeting to learn more about the situation still weren't satisfied with those answers, arguing the center's leaders should have consulted with them before making the decision to sell last year.

"It feels all shady," Beckley said. "I'm very hurt."

If they had known about the center's financial woes, they said, maybe the community could have stepped up to help.

"I think it was really a breach of trust for this building to be sold," said Tom Miree, the center's former board chairman, arguing the black community should have held onto it as an asset.

"You can't just sell something at your will," he told board members, suggesting they need to have a "come to Jesus" meeting.

Miree was on the board when the center switched from a membership organization to a directorate several years ago.

"In my wildest dream, I would have never imagined that the board would operate as they were the owners of the corporation, because this is a community-based building," he said. "It used to be the center of the African American community."

The center's leaders argue it's a private nonprofit corporation and the board had the right to sell the property.

They said they had their attorney check and there were no deed restrictions preventing a sale.

"It was a membership organization at one time ... but it is not that now," Perry said, though he said he understands from a sentimental and historical perspective why some residents feel the way they do.

Board members said the center still has a right-of-first-refusal option to repurchase the property if it's ever offered for sale again.

City records online show a series of $1 transactions in 1957 to assemble the land for the community center. According to the center, that's consistent with what's on the title work.

The old county jail on Main Street, which dated back to 1837, was demolished in 1958 to make way for the center, which was built on the sites formerly occupied by the jail and two other houses.

Philanthropist Margaret Towsley provided most of the funds to build and furnish the center, and her architect brother Alden Dow designed it, along with a number of other Ann Arbor buildings around the time, including the downtown library and city hall. It's said that Frank Lloyd Wright once called Dow his "spiritual son."

The new center, situated in the middle of Ann Arbor's historically black neighborhoods, provided a licensed daycare facility, drop-in teen center, study hall and spaces for activities, meetings and music. The center also reached out to youths in trouble in schools and courts.

Many of the longtime black community members who attended Friday night's meeting, some of whom recalled going to the center decades ago, lamented that the historically black neighborhoods in the Kerrytown and Water Hill areas have been gentrified, displacing many black residents who used to live near the center.

The center's leaders say that's one reason why the organization has had to move in a different direction and go out into the community more to serve people in need, as the building is no longer centered in a neighborhood needing it in quite the same way.

"Things have changed a lot since decades ago when this was a hub of the community," Murphy said. "The need is all over the place right now, so we've got two buses. We're going out to the community to deliver services. But it's hard -- this community is extremely attached to this building and with good reason. It was an extremely important place to them, and we definitely want to respect and honor that."

The Rev. Yolanda Whiten, the center's president and CEO since 2007, said the former Dunbar Center once provided black laborers who came to town for construction work a place to sleep when they had nowhere else to turn, and the center also provided black youths with an alternative to whites-only youth activities elsewhere.

"The need continues to evolve," she told residents who remember coming to the center as children. "There are children now who have a different need than you had then, and aren't we obligated still to address that need as well? Because those kids are scattered all throughout the county now. They're not in one neighborhood anymore."

The center still operates a food pantry out of the building and provides clothing, snacks, school supplies and other items to many poverty-level students through "caring closets" at nine Ann Arbor schools, among other programs to help people in need, including seniors.

Through its partnership with Food Gatherers, the center reports it provided more than 10,000 pounds of food and nearly 9,000 meals to people in need last year.

"When you all were kids and you had a need, this (building) provided the need," Whiten told residents.

"These kids now today, they need a computer. They need the cable in their homes that they can't afford. They need -- I don't know how much we've spent buying clothes and shoes and all kinds of things that these kids need to go back to school this year."

Some residents recalled the center fell on hard times a little over a decade ago and almost closed, but people rallied to save it. Some said they wished they had the same chance to stop the sale.

Ann Hampton-Hawkins, the center's previous director, pleaded guilty in 2007 to embezzling more than $93,000 from the center, leaving the organization nearly bankrupt. Miree, chairman of the board in 2007, said he believed Hampton-Hawkins actually took about twice that.

Whiten stepped in to lead the organization in 2007 and helped the new board bring the center back from the brink of closure.

The center's mission statement now reads:

"Influenced by a rich African American heritage, the Ann Arbor Community Center is a catalyst for transformation within the city and its greater community. With an emphasis on socio-economically disadvantaged youth and families, the Ann Arbor Community Center, Inc. (AACC) is a vital community resource that provides high-quality programs, information, and services to citizens in need."

Murphy said he understands people's connection to the building and feels their pain, but the center's mission is to serve people, not maintain an underutilized building.

"Historically this has been the neighborhood that it served, but the center and the mission and the services we provide are throughout the community, so the board as representatives of the community and the center had some difficult decisions to make," he said.

Murphy said the board would reflect on how it has handled communicating with the community.

"I certainly regret that we didn't do a better job communicating what was happening," he said. "We understand that and we would like to do better with that in the future, and ... have more community meetings."

Three City Council members -- Anne Bannister, Sumi Kailasapathy and Jack Eaton -- attended Friday night's meeting, along with Kathy Griswold, who will start serving on council in November.

They shared residents' concerns and pushed for greater transparency to keep the community informed.

Bannister, who asked whether the community center had the legal right to sell the property, suggested more research into the 1957 land transaction documents may be needed.

Kailasapathy raised concerns about the center's new confidential lease arrangement to stay in the building. She said without a deed restriction, leases can be broken.

"Since you know how much this community cares, it's really important now to be open and transparent about this and be proactive," she told the center's leaders. "Because the way the real estate market is going in this town, the way gentrification is happening, I'm almost sure that this land is going to be flipped eventually."

Murphy said the center's leaders started looking at different options a few years or so ago, recognizing they needed to do something to address the fact that the building was failing. He said they considered a fundraising campaign, but people typically want to support programs and services, not a building that's only 25 percent utilized.

He said the board didn't want to put the property up for sale to the highest bidder because the building has history and people are connected to it. He said they wanted to find a partner to preserve the building and keep the center going, and they found that.

"We did go through an RFP process to make sure we had market value," he said, adding they received proposals from some interested in demolishing the center and putting up condos.

"The partner that we did end up finding has committed to maintaining the integrity of the building, keeping the Ann Arbor Community Center name on the building, and allowing us the space we need."

Residents asked what's being done with the $1.6 million. Board members said for now it's being invested through PNC Bank.

Kheterpal, who now owns the building, said he has been driving by the community center for years, going back to the 1980s when he attended the University of Michigan, and the last thing he wants to see is a building designed by Alden Dow demolished to make way for another large development. He said he's rehabbing the building in a way that preserves Dow's original vision, not making structural changes.

"On this end of town, I think it would be nice to maintain sort of the old look and feel we have and the openness this area offers," he said, vowing to be a good steward of the property.

Kheterpal said he and his company have a history of supporting the community center, so there already was an established relationship before he considered it as a potential new office space.

Though it's a somewhat unorthodox relationship, he said, having his company and the community center share the building works.

He said his company has more than 100 employees between offices in Ann Arbor and California, and about 20 to 25 employees are using the new office on any given day.

"We're all part of this Ann Arbor community."