A new center for the North End

ST. PAUL

Saturday grand opening welcomed the community into glassy, three-level facility infused with art

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The new $30 million multi-level North End Community Center on Rice Street includes meeting rooms, a kitchen, a game room, workout rooms, a gymnasium, playgrounds and a multi-use sports field. PHOTOS BY JOHN AUTEY — PIONEER PRESS

People eat lunch on the outdoor patio at Saturday’s grand opening celebration.

The NFL helped pay for a new artificial turf sports field.

Torria Randell, right, who hosts cooking classes under the name “Chopp’n Up with Ms. T” supervises Camrin Cole, left, and Jamarien Miller making deep fried cheese sticks at the grand opening event.

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Dancers with Team Rosettes AT Dance perform at the grand opening.

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By Frederick Melo

fmelo@pioneerpress.com

Just off St. Paul’s Rice Street, the glass door entrance to the new North End Community Center is no accident of design. Treated glass rings the exterior of the $30.8 million, multi-level facility, allowing a clear line of sight from within the building out to Rice Street and surrounding amenities like the Rice Street Library, which sits just across the street.

The tired old baseball diamond at Rice Street and Lawson Avenue no longer exists, and neither does the weathered teen room that once lived half-hidden inside the Wellstone Elementary School down the path behind it. Instead, the gleaming new facility at 154 Lawson Ave. W. — a glassy, art-infused tribute to neighborhood residents of all ages — now holds the street corner, directly in front of a new playground and artificial turf, multi-purpose sports field.Some 25,000 square feet of athletic and community space carries a number of state-of-the-art touches, from bird-safe glass imbued with a ceramic frit that reduces solar heat gain, to an indoor gymnasium lined for at least six different sports, including futsal, pickleball,and the Thai sport of katow, or indoor volleyball.

A grand opening celebration for what’s being hailed as one of the city’s largest and most modern rec centers was held on Saturday.

“We try to think of this as a community campus — the elementary school, the rec center and the library,” said Chris Stark, an architect and project manager for St. Paul Parks and Recreation, which worked with Snow Kreilich Architects on the facility’s design.

Mural running all three levels

Passersby may assume they’re looking at two buildings, but the facility is technically a single continuous structure bisected by an outdoor patio, which is protected by a gate decorated with faces from the community. Elsewhere throughout the structure, a mural running all three levels features painted faces of additional community members, a project led by Twin Cities artist Peyton Scott Russell.

One building houses the more social aspects of the community center, including meeting rooms, the Parks and Rec system’s largest commercial-grade kitchen and an upstairs teen room, which is decorated with wall art designed by St. Paul teens. In glass-enclosed meeting rooms, glue-laminated timber beams and cross-laminated wood paneling is intended to evoke natural elements. Community surveys identified the kitchen, which can be leased, as a priority for a neighborhood with a growing refugee and immigrant population and some entrepreneurial zeal.

The second building houses a gym ringed by more than 30 large, electric drapes that can be adjusted to allow in more light, allowing clear views of the outdoors from four sides.

Raising the three-level building took roughly six years of planning and a year of construction, with a wide variety of funding partners, ranging from the state and federal government to the National Football League, which put $250,000 toward the artificial turf field. Some of the priciest elements aren’t visible to the public, including a geothermal heating system and an array of underground tubing with the capacity to collect up to 1 million gallons of storm water, “almost like a bathtub,” Stark said.

Those tubes, each four or five feet in diameter, are situated below the playing field and designed to collect up to 14 inches of rain within 48 hours, or two back-to-back century storms, from the surrounding 70-acre area, making them a benefit for the entire neighborhood.

A bright spot

In addition to the library, the new building sits directly across from two new businesses — the year-old Golden Palace grocery and deli and a new coin-operated laundry, Wow Wash, which is approaching its own grand opening. For the North End, that mixture of public and private sector investment doesn’t happen everyday — a bright spot in the eyes of residents pining for a win.

“I’m so excited to see the grand opening,” said Nyan Lin, a Realtor who opened the Golden Palace with family.

A few finishing touches are yet to come.

The playground is days away from completion, and some greenery has yet to be installed directly behind the building. A solar array will be installed on top of the gym building when the weather warms.

Within Wellstone Elementary, the two-room rec center that was once attached to the gym has been given back to the school district.