Lower East Side fitness center offers immigrants chance to get fit, socialize, featured in The New York Daily News April 23, 2014
As the non-profit Educational Alliance made plans to renovate the Lower East Side building they’d been in for more than 100 years, they decided to add something new to their community facility — a large fitness center.
“In focus groups, people were saying — across race, class, everything — we need a place to work out,” said Rabbi Joanna Samuels, executive director of the newly-renovated space, called the Manny Cantor Center.
Organizers see the community center, which opened this spring, as a place for Chinese, Latino and Eastern European immigrants and other neighbors to get to know each other, get in shape, and learn together.
