Administration at Penn State Behrend have announced that their plans to replace Erie Hall with a recreation center have been approved.

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The new building will host the same facilities, along with the addition of more recreational space for the University’s numerous NCAA Division III sports teams. The desire for renovation initially arose in 2014 following concerns regarding the Junker Center’s available recreational space for Behrend athletes.

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“There’s a very high demand for the NCAA sports teams to have time to do their workouts for their sports as well as the general student population and faculty being able to utilize that facility,” said Randy Geering, the Senior Director of Business and Operations at Behrend. Though the Junker Center was only constructed in late 2000, Behrend has quickly outgrown the space it provided. “I don’t know if you work out or if folks work out, but the Jageman Fitness Room is about 3,000 square feet,” Geering continued.

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According to Geering, the University is planning on adding more NCAA Division III sports to the Behrend campus, meaning the Junker Center would not have the capacity to accommodate all of those teams. The current facilities present in Erie Hall are also considered substandard for NCAA sports and even sub-par for basic intramural activities, despite providing the extra space for those activities.

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“Erie Hall was built many years ago in the 1960s. When you look at the facility, it’s not in very good shape. Although we’ve kept it up as best as we can, our desire was to raise the existing [facility] and then replace it. The University was involved in that decision…” Ultimately the decision was made to completely replace the building to create a larger and better equipped facility,  “It’ll be a complete redo,” said Geering.

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While the plans to construct a new hall began in 2014, they did not come to life until Behrend received a $9 million gift from the Student Facilities Fee (SFF), an organization designated for funding non-academic spaces for students. To ensure the creation of the new structure was plausible, Behrend administrators began a feasibility study with a local architect.

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Behrend administrators approached the Penn State Board of Trustees with their study and the SFF funding. The Trustees awarded them with an additional $16 million to work with during the construction process. With $25 million total to work with, Geering, along with other administrators, have started working on dividing the costs of the project and checking the available funding for the items on the administration’s wish list for the project.

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“You have the construction cost, there’s always contingency, there’s design fees, there’s permitting, there’s inspections, the Office of Physical Plan has oversight over projects, so they charge their time. We do a rocket science sheet basically, which would give us the amount of dollars that we actually have for construction including all those other costs,” explained Geering.

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After an appeal to the Board of Trustees in April or May and the formation of an official design team for the recreation center, Geering and the other administrators plan to award a contract to an architect as early as July of 2019. From there, design should last about 12-18 months, with the first ground being broken around the summer of 2020. However, once renovations begin, the various organizations and offices housed in Erie Hall will need to be relocated.

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“We’re just going to have to crunch it. We have a house on Jordan Road, the one on the very end, the grey one with the purple shutters. We use that as a guest house right now. That might be a possible relocation for police services in the interim… It may be that we rent or lease space somewhere else,” explained Geering.

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In addition the parking lot outside the Reed Union Building is also expected to close or be greatly reduced in size for visitors and faculty members during the construction period. The area is expected to become a green space featuring several student walkways, making the space between Reed, the Metzgar Center, and Erie Hall the main quad on campus.

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“If you commute and you park at Erie Hall, and you walk up that sidewalk right next to the street, and then there’s nowhere to go. If you’re going towards Kochel or Burke, you’re walking across the parking lot to get there. If you’re going to the right to science, you have a pathway to go. If you’re going to the Reed Building, you can go that way but a lot of kids don’t; they just kind of go across the parking lot, so it’s kind of always been the missing link in my mind for walkways,” said Geering.

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Plans to build or add a parking structure to the recreation center have been expressed, but final decisions will depend on the final designs for the project and an assessment of the general need after its completion.

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The new center and the green quad may also increase job opportunities on campus. The increase in the size of Erie Hall will create the need for more cleaning and maintenance, and the quad will require landscaping personnel.

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Perhaps the greatest appeal of the center will be the opportunities it presents for the aesthetic of the campus as a whole. “If you think about the location of this building, as you come around the corner onto campus from the Bayfront Connector, you’ve got the beautiful library, and then you get to the Metzgar Center, and then you pull into the Erie Lot, right, you’ve got the tennis courts and baseball fields, and you pull into Erie Lot and you see Erie Hall. It’s all wooden, kind of rundown. We really see this as a showcase, an entrance to campus, one of the first buildings that you see,” described Geering.

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Plans for the center are still being modified and expanded upon, but the new recreation center is projected to open for the fall semester of the 2022-2023 school year.