Barney's 'corner room at the Y'

Corner room at the Y?
Much is being made in Raleigh these days of the opening of the first part of the newly constructed YMCA on Hillsborough Street between the Capitol and the N.C. State University. It’s a marvelous facility from all I’ve heard and read about it, replacing the old Central Y with the new John M. Alexander Family YMCA.
Local businessman Johnny Mac Alexander engineered the replacement project. His father, John McKnitt Alexander, organized the fund-raising campaign to build the old Central Y in the late 1950s.
Among other things, millions of television fans of the Andy Griffith Show know a little about the Central Y. That’s where Mayberry Deputy Barney Fife would stay when he made his trips to Raleigh. He liked “the corner room at the Y,” and for decades folks have been pointing out the corner room at the Y to visitors. Johnny Mac Alexander has a plaque and doorknob from the corner room at the Y (Room 201), reports Matthew Eisley of the News & Observer. Here’s a link.
According to one story I heard long ago, the original corner room at the Y hadn’t been at the Central Y in years and years. Its materials, at least, were in my neighborhood on the north side of Raleigh. Bruce Robertson, who lived around the corner from me for years, was an accomplished woodworker who made his modest two-story colonial home into something of a showplace. He scrounged lumber wherever he could find it and made lovely things from it.
His backyard featured a gazebo, a storybook playhouse for his daughter, a balcony on his house and a new sunroom that was the envy of the neighborhood. I bought an old Sears joiner from him in the late 1970s. He told me how he’d used it to plane down the lumber he recovered from the demolition of an earlier version of the Central Y. He pointed to the gazebo and told me, “That’s ‘the corner room at the Y’ right there.”
I suspect those materials might have been from a corner room that pre-dated the Andy Griffith Show (1960-68) and Barney’s references to his corner-room visits to Raleigh. Bruce moved away from our neighborhood years ago and several owners have come and gone. I don’t know if Bruce’s story was true, or if the timing was way off, or if the current owners realize the little piece of history they might just have behind their house. We walk by it on our evening stroll most every night, and wonder.