New restaurant among changes coming to Freedom Center

A new restaurant and charter school locating at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center may not seem to align with the nonprofit organization's mission at first glance.

But Freedom Center officials said the initiatives are designed to give the institution staying power – in the form of money and key community partnerships. And now that The Banks "neighborhood" around it is evolving and portends to add more people nearby, early attendance and fundraising goals that once seemed lofty may be easier to reach.

Among the plans:

• Louisville-based DC Management Corp. has signed a deal to open a Southern-style restaurant at the Freedom Center next year.
• Cincinnati Public Schools is in talks with the Freedom Center to sponsor a second Carpe Diem charter high school in unused space at the 50 E. Freedom Way venue.
• The Freedom Center will soon get lease payments from AT&T after it installs equipment to boost network coverage at The Banks.
• Officials are mulling expanding the use of the 300-seat Harriet Tubman Theater for more events outside of traditional museum hours. 

The nonprofit is also getting closer to one of its early goals – having an endowment of about $10 million, officials told The Enquirer.

"This is a very exciting year," Freedom Center President Clarence Newsome said. "There are a lot of moving parts that are going to round out the business model. It's a good place to be."

A safe space for difficult community discussions. A storyteller connecting visitors with the nation's history with slavery. A place for entertaining visitors from Greater Cincinnati and beyond. The Freedom Center wants to be all of these things.

The $110 million venue opened in August 2004 drawing about 280,000 visitors in its first year at The Banks. That was several years before apartments and restaurants filled in 18 acres between Great American Ball Park and Paul Brown Stadium.

Cincinnati's Freedom Center sheds its chains of doubt

That type of money doesn't get spent without an expectation the venue will be there for a while. But four years ago, the organization was on the verge of collapse. Fundraising and revenue lagged expenses. In 2012, the Freedom Center merged operations with Cincinnati Museum Center. A year later, Newsome became the Freedom Center's president.

Annual attendance is now at about 140,000. The drop isn't completely unique to the Freedom Center; it's something many museums experience once people see it for the first time, said Susan Redman-Rengstorf, the Freedom Center's vice president of institutional advancement.

But she said Freedom Center officials are keenly focused on raising that number. That means operating on two fronts – reaching people inspired by the story of the Underground Railroad while remaining culturally relevant by addressing global issues such as modern-day slavery. That has resulted in hosting exhibits like Diversity in Baseball, Kin Killing Kin and Monday's "Youth Lives Matter" summit to expand the Freedom Center's usage and audience.

"This is a way for us to get to an audience who may never come through the Freedom Center," Redman-Rengstorf said.

Fundraising and attendance targets in the second half of 2015 are beating projections and higher than a year earlier, Newsome said. He also attributes the successes to bolstering personnel and efficiency within the organization's fundraising and marketing departments.

High-profile attention doesn't hurt, such as being named in Midwest Living magazine as one of the Top 50 Midwest museums.

"We're getting better at relating our message to the local community," he said.

New charter school coming to The Banks?

The planned restaurant, Doc's on The Banks, will feature cuisine similar to a restaurant in Louisville called Doc Crow's Southern Smokehouse and Raw Bar. It will be a family-style restaurant and feature menu items such as baby back ribs, seafood and po'boys, said Michael Battle, executive vice president and provost at the Freedom Center.

The 12,000-square-foot restaurant will be built out from the existing North Star Cafe and feature two-level dining with a glass enclosure so diners can have river views, he said. The restaurant, which Battle said will feature an assortment of bourbon drinks, is slated to open in September.

"We think it's going to enhance the overall experience of The Banks too," Newsome said.

With the school, Battle said there's an opportunity to generate rent from the school's operation and drive traffic to the venue. Early feasibility studies were favorable for creating a new downtown Cincinnati school, he said.

For Newsome, there's also an opportunity to influence and teach the next generation of socially conscious youth who will be future leaders.

Cincinnati's first Carpe Diem school, for grades seven through 12, rents a wing at Aiken High School in College Hill for about $200,000 a year.

The school on The Banks would only be for grades 9-12. The CPS school board as yet to approve the move, but Carpe Diem Learning Systems CEO Bob Sommers said he hopes they make a decision by the end of the year.

“That’s the ask,” Sommers told the CPS board during a question-and-answer session Wednesday. If the idea is approved, Sommers estimated it will take about $1 million to get the school up and running.

“The Freedom Center was probably as big an advocate for this as we are,” he said. “It meets the mission of the Freedom Center. It affords us a very low-cost approach for a high-quality education. And, it meets our mission of having what we call purpose-driven schools, not just a generic high school.”

Enquirer Reporter Hannah Sparling contributed.