Thanks to the great commitment of parents from the neighborhood, the Oerlikon community center was able to end its modest backyard existence 20 years ago and move to the vacant switchboard. A popular district center was created in a short time under the name “Tezet”.
For a long time, the growing Oerlikon district did not have much to offer families with children. A small community center was operated in a back yard on Gubelstrasse, the range of which was rather modest due to its size. That changed in the early 1990s when committed parents founded a parents’ association and thought about a more family-friendly future for the neighborhood. Board member Ursula Schwager and her husband Reto Vollenweider saw the vacant Swisscom switchboard as an ideal location for setting up a district center. They found broad support and formed a project group together with the neighborhood association, the GZ and Jugendmusik 11. “Swisscom was positive about the idea, but didn’t want to sell the building to the city of Zurich, which in turn didn’t just want to rent it,” recalls Fritz Blocher, then head of the GZ. After intensive negotiations with the building construction and social department about the operation, renovation, furnishing and sponsorship of the district center, the city finally agreed and applied to the municipal council for a loan of 1.5 million francs for the renovation, which was approved on March 22, 2000. After some renovation work, the “Tezet Oerlikon”, as the company group called it, was officially opened on April 1, 2001.
“A kind of provisional solution”
Fritz Blocher was the first manager of the new district center. “It was all kind of a makeshift arrangement,” he says. «It was an old house. You had to make something out of what was. Thanks to the neighborhood and parents’ association, we had a good network in the neighborhood and were able to take over some groups from before. ” There was great demand from the start for the rooms to rent. “Many Oerliker associations held their general assemblies here. And the café was also becoming increasingly popular. At the beginning we offered coffee and cake, later also lunch. “
Until 2009, when Fitz Blocher retired, the Tezet had steadily developed into a classic community center. “More and more groups and families, including international ones, have used it, and at the same time the clubs are slowly withdrawing.” Accordingly, the name “Tezet” was finally given up and it became a “GZ”.
Because of the old, uninsulated windows that carried the noise outside, there were always conflicts with the neighborhood. Ultimately, Swisscom did not want to continue investing in the building and sold it to the city.
After Fritz Blocher, Markus Pfister took over the management of the GZ Oerlikon in 2009. Susanne Siebenhaar followed in 2013 and Leonie Schüssler has been the main person in charge since 2016.
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