Kanawha shelter inundated with dogs

A sudden influx of dogs at the Kanawha-Charleston Humane Association's shelter could lead to dogs being euthanized to free up space.Over the past year, shelter officials and volunteers have greatly reduced the number of dogs put to death. Since the beginning of the year, shelter officials said they've only had to euthanize sick dogs for the most part. As of Monday morning there were 136 dogs in the shelter. Every kennel - even those in the overflow areas - was full. Several cages housed more than one.

And the steady stream of incoming homeless canines wasn't expected to let up any time soon. With no vacancies, and some dogs having been housed at the shelter since early this year, few options remained.Chelsea Staley, who co-founded rescue advocacy organization Dog Bless last year, began working at the shelter as a rescue coordinator and spokeswoman in May. Although summer is always a busy time for animal shelters, she said recent renovations to the facility were partly to blame for the sudden space crunch.

In early June, shelter officials acted on the advice of an outside expert and replaced all of the ceiling tiles in the dog kennel areas.The old ceiling tiles were made of soft, porous material. But the kennels are a warm and humid place, and that made the tiles "a breeding ground for disease," Staley said.During the renovations, the shelter continued to accept stray dogs picked up by humane officers. It's contractually obligated to always accept strays, Staley said.

The YMCA unveiled the court Wednesday as summer campers played hockey, Pickleball and soccer inside the boards. The ice at the rink — one of six in the country inside a YMCA — usually rests on top of dull-gray concrete, which can be unforgiving and slick. But the new court is built out of 17,000 rubber-plastic tiles, giving the surface grip, give and upping safety for users."The surface wasn't conducive to that type of Floor tiles," Bethlehem YMCA Executive Director Derek Martin said. "If we had kids from the high school play lacrosse and make cuts on the concrete, they could run the risk of blowing a knee out. This surface is safe and conducive to any sport."

The $47,000 court was put in in time for the start of the Y's annual summer camp, and Martin said it will be used for other child and adult activities, such as Zumba and roller hockey. The court allows for multiple activities at once and offers an area for floor and roller hockey (both at one end of the rink and across the entire NHL-regulation surface), two full-size basketball courts, an area for games like Pickleball (a racquet sport hybrid) and a space for small-size indoor soccer games.

The court is set to be taken apart with the help of maker Mateflex each hockey season, which runs from the end of August to the end of March. While in use, some tiles could chip and will be replaced with ones from a stock of extras, Martin said. He also said the court is under a 15-year warranty.

Michael Losavio, 10, said what sets the sport court apart from a gym floor is that it is set up for multiple sports all the time. The summer camper said he enjoys playing floor hockey on the same space he plays ice hockey in the winter. Given the choice, he said he likes playing on both.

But this summer, the regulation-size rink is bright with whitish-blue light reflecting off a new light-blue sport court, the first of its kind in the Capital Region.The YMCA unveiled the court Wednesday as summer campers played hockey, Pickleball and soccer inside the boards. The ice at the rink — one of six in the country inside a YMCA — usually rests on top of dull-gray concrete, which can be unforgiving and slick. But the new court is built out of 17,000 rubber-plastic tiles, giving the surface grip, give and upping safety for users.

The $47,000 court was put in in time for the start of the Y's annual summer camp, and Martin said it will be used for other child and adult activities, such as Zumba and roller hockey. The court allows for multiple activities at once and offers an area for floor and roller hockey (both at one end of the rink and across the entire NHL-regulation surface), two full-size basketball courts, an area for games like Pickleball (a racquet sport hybrid) and a space for small-size indoor soccer games.

It was there that he began feeding the homeless in 1985, a 700-night odyssey, as the story goes, that led this former apparel executive, now 69, to start the Doe Fund.He named the organization, a career and life-skills counseling program in its 28th year, after Mama Doe, a homeless woman who died of pneumonia on Christmas Eve in Vanderbilt Hall, the former waiting room that the homeless, who used to congregate on the benches there, called “the living room.” Mr. McDonald still leads a candlelight service for Mama Doe in the main hall every year on Christmas Eve.

It was there, too, that he met his wife, Harriet Karr-McDonald, now 62, who was a screenwriter and actress in 1987 when she spent a week in the terminal with a teenage runaway named April Savino, researching a script about Ms. Savino’s life.

 Yet it was almost by accident that he found himself in late 2010 wandering through a family home embellished with the same flourishes. The Tile House, its local nickname, is an eccentric, Moorish-looking brick folly on the south shore of Long Island, built by Rafael Guastavino Jr., the son of the architect Rafael Guastavino Sr., who developed the tile-vaulting system used in the Oyster Bar, the Whispering Gallery and in hundreds of other spaces, including Carnegie Hall and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Begun in 1912, when the younger Guastavino was working on Grand Central, the house is a riot of tile work: his own instantly recognizable herringbone arches, supplemented with European tiles he brought back from a honeymoon tour. When he died in 1950, he left the place to his daughter, Louise, who died in 2004. By 2005, it was on the Preservation League of New York State’s “Seven to Save” list. A doctor bought it, but never moved in. “The wife didn’t want to live in Bay Shore is what I heard,” Mr. McDonald said. “It’s not the Hamptons or the East End.”

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