DREAM MAY FINALLY BECOME REALITY

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

For South Floridians, the dream of building and using an African-American library and cultural center has been put off again and again, bringing disappointment after disappointment. Maybe, just maybe, that dream is about to become reality.

It's a beautiful, inspirational dream:

The 52,000-square-foot building will be one of three public libraries in the country focused on black history and culture. It will rise on a four-acre site in Delevoe Park just west of Fort Lauderdale, at Sistrunk Boulevard and Northwest 27th Avenue.

It will contain 75,000 books by and about African-Americans and much, much more.

It will be a community cultural center, hosting authors, artists, dancers, musicians and various cultural events in a 300-seat auditorium and exhibit areas.

It will be a historical archive, housing videotaped, audiotaped and written memories, oral histories and personal artifacts about black history in South Florida.

It was to be an invaluable addition to the region's growing list of cultural facilities. Officials expect it would draw scholars, students and others from all over the tri-county region, the state and Latin America.

For black people, it will offer a place to celebrate their heritage.

For others, the library will open a window on a different culture and way of life and raise their consciousness about segregation, the struggle for civil rights and local black achievements.

When plans were first announced in July 1995, officials promised completion by early 1999. But then the groundbreaking was delayed to October 1999.

After that, architectural flaws, cost overruns and fund-raising problems brought several postponements and financial difficulties that delayed start of construction again and again.

It was particularly disturbing to learn that the architect's original design included what county construction managers called "life-threatening" flaws that risked a building collapse. Correcting that, and coping with escalating construction costs and building code requirements, have now boosted the original $10 million cost to $11.4 million, and climbing. The opening date has now been pushed back until the fall of 2002.

Executives of the James B. Pirtle Construction Co. now say construction will begin in 30 days.

If so, it will be a welcome, but belated, bit of good news about a valuable project that desperately needs it.

It's time to turn the dream into reality.

Copyright © 2021, Sun Sentinel
79°
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2001-04-13-0104121057-story.html
www.sun-sentinel.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-31
91641
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PRFTQ3A5BYXUUWCAUQNN6XJGMJN65VUX
<urn:uuid:d5974cd7-cb03-496f-a780-16cc811c14b1>
2021-07-28T07:19:46Z
23.217.116.210
text/html
sha1:IYXEC4GVAKJ3AEK7UHAD2N7HY2SLDYK6
<urn:uuid:e7aad277-80b5-4629-9fd2-b832f9e2dfdb>
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2001-04-13-0104121057-story.html
response
<urn:uuid:019b247e-3733-494d-968d-e5868c2defd1>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-31
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July/August 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-191.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/