LAKE PLACID – More than 50 members of the greater Lake Placid community gathered at the renovated village Beach House Thursday evening to brainstorm what exactly the new “multi-generational” Beach House Community Center would provide.

Mary Dietrich, chairwoman of the board of the Lake Placid/Wilmington Connecting Youth and Communities Coalition, organized and hosted the forum to discuss potential programming at the center and its place in the community. Dietrich said the center would be open regular hours Monday through Friday, though it would also be available outside regular hours at the request of community groups.

Potential programming she mentioned included art classes, a community band, book clubs, lunch-and-learns, cooking classes, student-instructed technology classes, coffee house hours, mentoring and a loan closet for items such as cribs or wheelchairs.

About a dozen members of the community offered suggestions or asked questions at Thursday’s meeting, and many had questions or solutions to how the center would logistically fit into community programming and not provide things already offered by other groups.

Marc Walker, the new administrator of Elderwood of Uihlein nursing home, said he views the community center as an ideal place off the campus of Uihlein for his residents. He said Elderwood is expanding into social day care in the community where local children can be dropped off at Uihlein. He also said Elderwood is planning a day program for local elderly people where a 25-mile radius pick-up program would bring them to Uihlein. He stressed how his program could provide a necessary interconnection with the new community center and the local elderly community.

“We would love to invest into an organization like this, a building like this; it does not have to be on Uihlein’s campus,” he said. “The owners are very committed in investing in Lake Placid with this kind of program between kids and elderly.”

Uihlein Activities Director Beth McLaughlin she said she’d love to bring some of Uihlein’s higher-functioning residents to the Beach House Community Center to interact with young people. Dietrich said that was ideal.

Lake Placid Public Library Director Bambi Pedu also attended the meeting and said she and her staff see the new canter as an ideal complement to what the library provides.

“I do get calls for meetings that are just too large for the library,” she said. “We don’t have enough space for it, so we could send it your way.”

Pedu and another community member in attendance expressed how the center should consider offering services for the many J-1 visa student workers who come to the village annually for a period of time while working at businesses in the community. Pedu said J-1 students typically go to the library for services to learn about the community because “that’s what they’ve always been told,” but looking forward she thinks the new center could help as well.

“I think it’d be nice to see some kind of mentoring program for all of the foreign kids who come here,” an unidentified woman said at the meeting. “I think they have a tendency to get taken advantage or led the wrong way. (We should) tell their employers there is a resource for them to come to.”

Lake Placid Library Assistant Librarian Karen Armstrong stressed how the center should host a meeting with local youth to ask them directly what they wanted out of this kind of a center.

Representatives of the Essex County Office for the Aging were also in attendance Thursday and said they were interested in being a stakeholder or partner with the center.

“A lot of individuals may think we are only going to talk about services for older adults,” a representative from the office said. “A lot of our topics, whether it’s advanced directives or community services as a whole, can reach the community as a whole – a single mom, single dad to older adults. We would love to be a stakeholder and a strong partner.”

Other recommendations for the center mentioned Thursday included: a consolidated community calendar, regular music jam sessions, holiday themed parties, Trivia and game nights and a job bank. Both Hannaford and Price Chopper of Lake Placid helped to cater the forum. Renderings of what kind of furnishings the second floor community center could provide and what it would look like were on display at Thursday’s meeting.