Gay Center to Make Its Village Home More Open and Less Noisy

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

The love that now dares speak its name can still sometimes be hard to hear.

Lerner Auditorium, the third-floor assembly hall in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village, is the setting of many events and meetings. It is large and luminous. It's also an acoustical nightmare. The rattletrap air-conditioning system gives users a choice in warm weather.

“You can either be hot and hear what's going on, or cool and not hear what's going on,” Glennda Testone said. No mere idle critic, she is the executive director of the center.

Ms. Testone can afford to be candid about some failings in the three principal public areas of the center - Lerner Auditorium, the Paul A. Kaplan Assembly Hall and the front lobby - because they're going to be fixed. A 14-month renovation is expected to begin by the end of the year. The $7.5 million project is being financed with $3.7 million from Ne w York City and $2 million from New York State. A fund-raising effort will seek private donors for the remaining $1.8 million.

Brian Ripel of RSVP Architecture Studio in Brooklyn and Nicola Mongelli of N-Plus Architecture + Design in Brooklyn are the architects. The center is now receiving bids from general contractors.

Perhaps the first thing noticed by visitors to the renovated center will be what's not in the lobby any longer: a high, forbidding central reception desk that conveys, unintentionally, the message that one must stop and announce one's business, which couldn't be further from the case. Visitors are free to come and go.

Its removal will allow one to walk directly to the elliptical central staircase, designed a decade ago by Françoise Bollack Architects to unify the three-story building, a former schoolhouse from the mid-19th century. “We wanted to remove barriers,” Ms. Testone said.

By removing interior walls on the east and west ends of the lobby, the center will create spaces for its computer center, now on the second floor, and for a cafe, which it has never had. The cafe will seat about 30 people and connect to an adjacent garden. The community center is now searching for prospective cafe operators with a request for proposals.

Just beyond the lobby, the Kaplan Assembly Hall is to be made considerably less claustrophobic by the removal of a false ceiling in the center of the room that contains air-handling ductwork. One of three rows of slender columns that chop up the space has been found to be structurally redundant and will be removed. Hidden windows on the south end of the room will be unblocked.

Aesthetically, the toughest decision about the assembly hall was how to preserve mural remnants from an ambitious art exhibition held in 1989, during the first decade of the AIDS crisis. They include works by Kenny Scharf, Leon Golub, Barbara Sandler and George Whitman. The architects plan to insert new walls in front of the old walls. Openings will be cut into the new walls, framed by LEDs, to highlight large segments of the surviving artwork. (The most renowned work from the 1989 show, Keith Haring's priapic mural in a second-floor men's room, has recently been conserved.)

Upstairs, the acoustically challenged Lerner Auditorium will lose its tin-can ductwork. New insulated ducts will be run through the ceiling trusses. Insulated windows will help keep noise within the auditorium and not within earshot of next-door neighbors. The old floor, which rolls like a calm sea, will be replaced by a smooth new floor on sound-deadening joists.

Acknowledging the inherent eccentricities of the building, Robert A. Woodworth, the director of capital projects at the center, said nothing could be done to eliminate the slope of the auditorium floor entirely. “It'll never be horizontal,” he said, “but we want it to be a plane.”