Cultural Wellness Center breaks ground on Dreamland on 38th, a Black-led hub in South Minneapolis

Oct. 10, a sunny fall afternoon, community elders, county and city leaders and longtime supporters gathered at 38th Street and Third Avenue South to break ground on Dreamland on 38th, the future home of the Cultural Wellness Center’s Cultural Wellness University.

The event, held at 3800 Third Ave. S., opened with a historical walk along the 38th Street African American business corridor led by Anthony Taylor, the center’s community storyteller, followed by a program, a golden shovel ceremony and a meal prepared by the center.

Elder Atum Azzahir, the center’s founder and executive director, welcomed guests by calling the day a family event, both by blood and through years of shared work. She said the vision on display was one she and the project’s partners put on paper nearly a decade ago.

What the building will hold

According to the center, the two-story building will include a community event space of about 892 square feet for cultural celebrations, ceremonies, rites of passage and neighborhood gatherings, along with healing and treatment rooms that carry forward the center’s culturally grounded approach to wellness.

It will also house a Cultural Self-Study Archive with digital connections to the Minnesota Historical Society, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a national network of African American museums. The archive will include a digital collection of African American newspapers dating to the late 1800s, anchored by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. A satellite of Marshall’s Books and Music, brought to Minneapolis by the Primm family, will also have a home there.

Hennepin County Commissioner Angela Conley described the project as a 6,300-square-foot community hub that will include culturally specific incubator spaces for alternative medicine practitioners and community-rooted small businesses. She said the total investment is $8 million, with the county contributing $700,000 through its transit-oriented communities program.

“What makes this project so unique is it’s a commitment to being Black-owned, Black-developed and Black-led,” Conley said. She said the project keeps economic opportunity inside the Black community that shaped the district’s cultural identity.

Conley, who was first elected in 2019 as the first Black Hennepin County commissioner, said she was brought into the project’s earliest conversations right after taking office. She said the site holds personal memories for her.

“This building is a core memory,” she said, recalling that her parents took her there for ice cream about 41 years ago.

“We don’t want to uproot any of that,” Conley said of the neighborhood’s history. “We want to water those roots.”

The newspaper’s role

Tracey Williams-Dillard, publisher and CEO of the Spokesman-Recorder, said the project sits at the center of the neighborhood’s history and her own. She said many of the elders in the crowd were people her grandmother, Spokesman-Recorder founder Cecil Newman’s wife, introduced her to as a child, and that she now has the chance to work alongside them.

Williams-Dillard said the paper, which just marked its 92nd anniversary, exists so the community can tell its own story.

“We’re the keeper of the history of Minnesota’s Black community,” she said. She noted that the paper’s headquarters at 3744 Fourth Ave. S., around the corner, is now going through the National Register of Historic Places nomination process, which she called a big deal.

She said she and Taylor walked the 38th Street corridor together during an earlier neighborhood small business project, when she recommended him as a local historian.

Years of work, a timeline to finish

James Parrott, who has worked with the center on the project for nearly a decade, said the effort survived the George Floyd uprising, a global pandemic and personal health crises among those involved.

“Building the building is the easy part for me,” Parrott said. The harder work, he said, was everything that had to happen before the soil could be turned.

Azzahir said the construction company, Watson-Forsberg, has assured the center that work will be done in 2027, and that the team is trying to avoid slipping into 2028. She also credited the project’s architects and its owner’s representatives, whom she compared to organizers who sometimes need lawyers or doctors.

Azzahir invited elders and members of the Agape movement, who work on rites of passage and repairing harm, to help serve guests. She also thanked Judge LaJune Lange, whom she said led historic and cultural preservation research on the building, though it was not clear whether Lange attended.

T. Mychael Rambo, the center’s ambassador, opened his remarks with a refrain that became a chant for the crowd.

“It’s been a long, long time coming,” he said.

Rambo recognized donors to the capital campaign, including retired WCCO news anchor Don Shelby, as well as officials and supporters, among them Conley and former Minneapolis City Council President Andrea Jenkins. Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne was acknowledged from the crowd.

For more information, visit www.culturalwellnesscenter.org/copy-of-dreamland-on-38th.

Jasmine McBride welcomes reader responses at jmcbride@spokesman-recorder.com.