Germantown youth club opens in Comcast founder’s name. The family of Ralph Roberts says it’s a first
After a $16 million renovation, a youth facility in Philadelphia renames itself after Comcast Corp.'s Ralph Roberts.
When Comcast Corp. founder Ralph Roberts passed away at age 95 in 2015, there were few buildings or institutions in the Robertses’ name. There was the Roberts Proton Therapy Center that opened in 2010 for cancer treatment, at Penn Medicine. And on South Broad Street, the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, launched in 2007 and named after Ralph Roberts’ wife.
Thousands of Comcast employees ate at Ralph’s, the headquarters cafeteria named after him.
But Roberts had agreed to help fund and put his full name on only one project — the extensive renovation of the Germantown Boys & Girls Club where he’d been a member in his youth.
He just didn’t get to see it open in his lifetime.
On Tuesday, the club held an official ceremony to rename the facility in his honor after seven years and $16 million in renovations to the existing building, funded in part with $7 million from Ralph Roberts and his son, Brian, the current Comcast CEO, and the Comcast Foundation, a charitable arm of the company. The other funds came through tax credits and additional fund-raising.
“I’m pretty certain this is the first and only building that carries his name. He really didn’t like those kind of things,” Brian Roberts said in an email.
The project had been slowed when neighbors opposed razing the old structure, leading to the extensive renovations, and because of the pandemic.
Among the renovations and improvements are new flooring, new bathrooms on each floor, giant sump pumps in the basement, a new roof, and a big mural depicting the organization’s history. The club vastly improved its athletic fields and added bathrooms in the fields. A basement gym — once litter-strewn and derelict with peeling paint — shines with new paint, wood floors, and basketball hoops. A third-floor gym was also renovated and the game room was modernized with billiard tables.
The renamed Ralph J. Roberts Boys & Girls Club has been closed for the renovations and is expected to reopen this summer, serving 300 children a day. Boys & Girls Clubs of America is a national organization of local chapters which provide voluntary after-school programs for disadvantaged children.
“This was a total gut and rebuild. It was in bad shape,” said John M. Scheffey, vice chair of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Philadelphia.
After Ralph Roberts’ father died in February 1933 in New York, the family moved in 1936 to Germantown, where he joined the club.
Roberts eventually married and ran a number of enterprises that included ones that manufactured and marketed men’s belts and suspenders, cologne and perfume, and a golf putter.
In 1963, he launched Comcast with two partners and a Tupelo, Miss., cable system. He handed his son Brian the reins of the Philadelphia company in the 1990s. It’s now a giant cable-TV, broadband, and entertainment company.
Dick Vermeil, the legendary former Eagles coach, attended Tuesday’s event. He lived next to Roberts in Chester County and the two fished for trout together. “He chose to be humble. He was the least pretentious guy I’ve ever been around,” Vermeil said.
Joseph and Lisabeth Marziello, who are married and mutually serve as president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Philadelphia, said that when they arrived in the city in 2012, the Germantown Boys & Girls Club lacked functioning computers. “If any renovation took place, it would have been 40 or 50 years ago,” Lisabeth Marziello said. “I don’t know if there ever was.”
Marziello added that she did not get to meet Roberts before he died but “I did send him notes and cookies.”