A local racial equity and arts and culture organization wants to put a 21st-century meeting house honoring abolitionist Frederick Douglass in downtown Boston.
Embrace Boston announced earlier this month they’d acquired two buildings in Downtown Crossing to turn into a 35,000-square-foot civic center.
The new hub will be close to Boston Common, which means it’ll be steps from what Embrace Boston is best known for: a sculpture on Boston Common honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King titled The Embrace.
“180 steps! I walked it many times,” Imari Paris Jeffries, Embrace Boston’s executive director, said on GBH’s The Culture Show Monday.
Jeffries said the organization hopes to have the center fully redeveloped and open by 2030, the 400th anniversary of the city of Boston.
“We wanted to have something that had tenants but could be convertible to cultural space,” he said. “There’s going to be a black box theater. There’s going to be a gallery there.”
The organization wrote in its press release that the center will feature rotating art exhibits, performances, podcasting and “flexible spaces” for gathering and a café.
But for now, it’s still a usable space.
“It doesn’t look cute, but it’s usable,” Jeffries said. “The cultural space is available now, and I think some of the companies will start using. If there are other organizations, other nonprofits, other cultural spaces that want to use it and want to do small-scale installations inside of it, we want it to be used while we’re developing it and raising money.”
Land records show Embrace Boston recently acquired the two-building parcel on West Street for nearly $10 million.
As of June 2024, the nonprofit had about $6 million in total assets, according to its most recent regulatory filing.
The full redevelopment is being designed by Model of Architecture Serving Society, formerly MASS Design Group.
On West Street, the space will also serve as the host of Embrace Boston’s next major public art project to honor abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
“We’ll pull together an art commission, a national call for artists to redesign the facades of these buildings in the images of Frederick Douglass — whatever that means to people — and we’ll have the community vote,” Jeffries said.
Jeffries teased that he will have one or two local theater companies to announce in the coming weeks that plan to make the new center their home.
“Art and culture is how we communicate — how we sense-make,” he said. “There are limited spaces for smaller mezzanine, middle-sized cultural companies to have spaces to call their own.
With the advent of other cultural destinations, like the Holocaust Museum opening in 2027, Jeffries said people are coming back to downtown Boston.
“Downtown Crossing is starting to emerge as a new cultural hub,” he said.
