A Cool, Chill Place

On a summer afternoon at downtown’s Neutral Zone teen center, Taylor Wedekind, age seventeen, and Max Saalberg, age sixteen, are rehearsing their latest rap songs. Saalberg, in shorts, T-shirt, and baseball cap, moves to the beat as he reads the lyrics off his phone:

I’m trying not to feed

It could be the end of me …

By the end of the week, Saalberg and ­Wedekind—along with a dozen other teens who created rock and pop tunes during a music and songwriting program—will lay tracks in the center’s Orpheum studio. The Neutral Zone is the home of Youth-Owned Records, the country’s first youth-run record label. And music is just one of the programs offered at the nonprofit, founded in 1998 to serve high-school-age youth. Literary arts, visual arts, community leadership, and education are also featured at the “entirely teen-driven” center, says Mary Moffett, NZ’s community relations director.

“We want to be a welcoming place where teens are free to try new things and engage with each other,” Moffett says. “It’s a place they can experiment in a safe, supervised environment.” About 500 teens use the center each year. During the school year, free drop-in tutoring, snacks, and computer access are offered Monday through Thursday afternoons. Some twenty workshops, discussion groups, and other activities are scheduled weekly—with an annual fee of $175 covering school-year programs (need-based scholarships are available). Foosball and pool tables as well as comfy couches and bean bags offer casual spaces to hang out.

In 2006 a capital campaign supplied the funding to move NZ from a rented space to its own larger building on Washington Street. The center’s performance venue, the “B-Side,” in the rear of the brick building, holds up to four hundred people for concerts, poetry slams, book release parties, and other events—all run by teens who choose the talent lineup and manage the details. A spacious visual arts studio in the front of the building features a digital lab and silk-screening press. The center’s literary arts program runs its own Red Beard Press, which publishes original works—and teens in the program’s VOLUME Youth Poetry Project perform at community readings. Moffett says NZ enjoys “many great partnerships” with schools and other nonprofits, including a longstanding relationship with University Musical Society and another with the Princeton Review.

Teens are part of NZ’s board, and a teen advisory council approves new program initiatives and works on grant-raising for them, ensuring teens get what they need from the center—from college readiness workshops to diversity education programs. “We serve kids from all walks of life,” says Moffett. “There are no geographic boundaries.”

Taylor Wedekind, who is new to the center, recently finished painting a mural down the street through NZ’s summer art program. Now he’s focused on fine tuning his rap lyrics. He says he plans to be back during the school year: “It’s a cool, chill place.”