La Jolla’s Shepherd YMCA Firehouse to reopen soon after 5½-year closure

After years of closure during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Shepherd YMCA Firehouse in La Jolla will reopen to public use in September.

A grand-reopening celebration is planned for 8 a.m. to noon Saturday, Sept. 6, with previews set for earlier that week at 7877 Herschel Ave. The grand opening will include demonstrations of new equipment, youth dance classes and group exercises.

The 1930s-era building, which was remodeled about a decade ago, will not be modified; changes will just be to programming.

“Our goal was to come back to the Shepherd Firehouse YMCA,” said Lucy Murillo, associate executive director of the YMCA of San Diego County. “We just didn’t know what it was going to look like. Now we are so excited to offer all our programs and bring the Shepherd Firehouse back to life. We have all missed it.”

With a revived focus on fitness based on community feedback, the facility will feature EGYM “smart” strength equipment, Precor cardio machines, Pilates Reformers and more than 10 group exercise classes each week. Other programs will include youth dance, monthly Parents Night Out events (in which parents can drop off their children for supervised play) and small-group personal training.

To celebrate the reopening, new members who join at the Sept. 6 event will receive a $70 program credit. The YMCA also will waive its $60 joining fee Sept. 1-22.

The EGYM equipment, Murillo said, is an artificial intelligence-based training system that uses multiple exercises to individualize workouts based on the user’s needs. She said members will get a wristband with their personal information and goals programmed into it and then scan the wristband to activate the AI programming. That in turn leads the users through various exercises to meet their fitness needs, with their past workouts in mind.

Full-body workouts with EGYM can be as brief as 20 minutes, Murillo said.

“We really wanted the center to be fitness-oriented,” she said. “We have some youth programs and our group exercise classes … but we are really going to focus on the well-being aspects and programs.”

The Shepherd YMCA Firehouse also will offer Teen Night once a month, when it will transform into “the ultimate hangout spot” for youths ages 12-17, according to the YMCA. Teen Night offerings will include game and movie nights and holiday celebrations.

The Shepherd Firehouse, built in 1937, has housed police and fire services and a jail, according to the YMCA.

“The La Jolla YMCA repurposed the space in the mid-1980s. However, the space was in need of major upgrades, so they began a renovation/restoration [in 2015],” the organization said in a statement. “Thanks to a generous gift from the Shepherd family, the completed renovation [provided] members with a new, modern facility prepared to serve the community for generations to come while preserving the structure’s historic past.”

The renovated facility opened in August 2016.

But it was closed to public use in March 2020 because of the pandemic and served as the production studio for the Y’s virtual programming and classes.

But the intent was always to reopen the facility, Murillo said.

“We started slowly with Group X classes, an occasional Parents Night Out here and a few Teen Night programs,” she said. “But as we started bringing it back, we wanted to make sure when we reopened, we did so with purpose.”

So the YMCA created a survey that went to past Shepherd Firehouse members and current members of La Jolla’s Dan McKinney Family YMCA asking what they wanted in the reopened facility.

“Through that, we brought in the data and had a community talk in November 2024 in which we showed what we got from the data and wanted to make sure that was what the community wanted,” Murillo said. The focus on fitness “really came from community feedback.”

Beginning in September, hours will be 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4-7 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Learn more at ymcasd.org/shepherd.