Underground Railroad Café is making a comeback

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Across from Monte Park and a few blocks south of downtown New Bedford, a red brick building stands two and a half stories tall. Its windows are scattered with signs detailing events from a Fourth of July bike ride to a golf tournament.

It’s served as a restaurant, a food market, a banking center and a soda fountain since it was built in 1887 on the corner of Acushnet Avenue and Russell Street. It’s been the home of traditions and musical performances and art. Historically, it has been a staple for Cabo Verdeans in New Bedford since the 1940s. 

Neighbors have described it as an “all-inclusive headquarters” and a place for “information and celebration.” At times, it has been a spot to register voters and a general meeting space — always a place for people to gather. 

The building is now the Underground Railroad Café, and it’s making a comeback. It shuttered its doors as a restaurant about eight years ago and has been used sporadically for meetings and small private gatherings for the past five years. Now, current owner Carleen Cordwell has decided to turn it into a teaching and commercial kitchen and a community space. 

Cordwell, whose family has owned the property since 1982, said the café will be a needed “breath of fresh air” into an area she said has become a “food desert.”

“There’s no way to get healthy food,” Cordwell said. “When we were growing up, every social club had a kitchen, and there was always food available, cultural food available. And then that became nonexistent.”

Cordwell said the café has been a place for food and celebration since its inception. This new endeavor will build upon that foundation. 

“It’ll be a place where people can do what they do, right in the community, and do it affordably,” Cordwell said.

Vision for the café

The café’s space will host events from book signings to art exhibitions, but its main use will be as a teaching and commercial community kitchen, Cordwell said.

The need for a community kitchen came after the federal government selected New Bedford as one of the 13 communities to participate in the Local Foods, Local Places federal program in 2021. The program supports efforts to reinvest in neighborhoods through “development of the local food economy,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website. 

“After we did a whole series of research and meetings with Local Foods, Local Places, [the commercial kitchen] was one of the things that came up that would enhance the community,” Cordwell said.

The commercial kitchen will provide culinary entrepreneurs and caterers a legal space to work in. This will create an “economic incubator,” Cordwell said.  

Economic incubators are defined as “programs that help businesses launch and grow by providing free or low-cost workspace, mentorship, access to investors, and in some cases, working capital,” according to the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. 

Cordwell said food businesses without access to a licensed kitchen can’t market their goods and services, and thus, cannot grow. Many people who start their own businesses don’t have the money or capital to kickstart them or go through the loan process, said Karen Blake-Robinson, a lifelong New Bedford resident and family member of Cordwell. 

But a community kitchen can help entrepreneurs “maybe open their own restaurant once they are able to establish themselves and their products in the community and people like it,” Blake-Robinson said. “Then they can afford to rent a space and actually start a full-fledged business.”

Aya Sutton, owner of catering company STL SOUL, intends to use the commercial kitchen. She said she hopes to eventually establish her own food truck. She currently works catering jobs from client’s houses and leads cooking demos at farmers markets. She stopped working out of her own kitchen to avoid dealing with the health code regulations process.  

She occasionally works from a commercial kitchen in Dartmouth because options are “very limited” in New Bedford. 

“This is why this project is so big,” Sutton said. “There has to be other caterers who are looking for community kitchens to work out of, but there are really none in the city.”

The second cooking aspect of the café — the teaching kitchen — will be used to educate people, particularly young people, how to eat “healthy and affordably, even from a food pantry,” Cordwell said. 

It will also include demonstrations for healthy recipes, cooking methods and how to make fruits and vegetables more flavorful, said Sutton, who plans to lead some of the demos.

“There’s a lot of youth that don’t know about cooking healthy or don’t know about healthy options outside of fast food,” Sutton said.

Additional details for the teaching kitchen are currently being ironed out, Cordwell said.

She said the café’s name is a tribute to New Bedford’s prominence before the Civil War as an abolitionist community and a stop on the Underground Railroad. The city’s whaling industry provided job opportunities for people who escaped slavery, about 300 to 700 of whom made New Bedford their home by the 1840s, according to the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park website. 

The café, once it officially reopens, will most likely be available on weekends for coffee and small dishes — like a traditional cafe — but Cordwell stressed that its main role is a place for the community to “accelerate and grow.”

“We don’t want to run a restaurant,” Cordwell said. “We want kitchens available to everyone.”

The café’s estimated completion date for upgrades, repairs and rehabilitation is currently May 2026. In the meantime, it will still host art exhibitions, book signings, musical events and cooking classes. 

Funding 

The café’s current funding consists of two grants from the city’s Community Preservation Committee, of $25,000 and $150,000, and an award of $20,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy’s American-Made Program. 

Paula Robinson Deare, a former CPC member who helped Cordwell apply for the CPA funds, said the CPC’s funding will be used to resurface the historic building to maintain its history, age and aesthetic. The grant will also be used to redo the windows, gutters and signage outside of the building. 

“Some of the work at the Underground Railroad Café was about celebrating the history and then about dressing the building on the inside to make it more energy efficient and frankly comfortable,” said Kathryn Duff, an architect whose firm studio2sustain conducted a feasibility study for the project. 

Robinson Deare said a new layout for the café will also increase the current seating area from 20 seats to 40 seats and add a second bathroom. 

Cordwell plans to reevaluate what other funds are needed once the current money is used, and said she will most likely be applying for funding in the future. 

“If she does everything that is committed to the CPC grant, she can reapply to the CPC to finish whatever has not been done to fit under the historic preservation,” said Robinson Deare. 

Support from the community

Community members said they hope the café will bring more life to an area that suffers from “disinvestment.” 

EPA’s Local Foods, Local Places described the Old Bedford Village neighborhood as one of many communities in the country suffering from unequal investment compared to bordering neighborhoods in its Community Action Plan for Old Bedford Village. 

Cordwell’s application for CPA funding was backed by at least 21 letters from New Bedford residents, city council members, city officials and local business owners who all supported the need for an initiative like the café. 

Blake-Robinson, who wrote a letter to the CPC in support of the café in November 2024, said the city started using money to improve New Bedford in the early 2000s and around 2010, but all of this work was concentrated in the downtown area and the waterfront. It’s taken a long time for money to trickle into communities outside of downtown New Bedford, she said.

“It makes it hard for people to see when you’re walking past,” Blake-Robinson said. “You walk past closed up buildings and everything is run down. It doesn’t do much for your self-esteem, for your community.” 

Margaret Mott, a city resident who wrote the café’s envelope assessment application and also wrote a letter in support of the café, said she wants New Bedford to “be what it was when I grew up here.” 

“It was full of love, support, community, families, looking out for each other and making sure our kids had things to do,” she said. “I think that vision is what the café would be about.”

The building historically has been significant to the city’s Cabo Verdean community, but Cordwell emphasized that the café will be for everyone. 

“We want to present different cultural foods there,” Cordwell said. “[We want to] have chefs that are coming from Puerto Rico. They’re from Colombia. They are from Jamaica. They are from the Azores. [We want to] let them present [and] teach what they cook and celebrate in their culture.”

The application for the Community Preservation Fund grant states, “The Underground Railroad Café & Gallery will be a beacon of hope and learning on Cape Verdean culture, the history of the Underground Railroad and much, much more by celebrating multicultural life through food, art, speakers and music.” 

Blake-Robinson said the city should continue to focus more on immigrant communities through initiatives like the café. New Bedford was “built on the backs” of Cabo Verdean and Portuguese immigrants, and there needs to be more recognition and investment in those areas, she said.

“We don’t want to go anywhere. We have nowhere to go,” she said. “New Bedford is our homeland. We were very fierce and loyal constituents of the city and of the area, and we just want to be recognized.” 

Crystal Yormick, a journalism student at Boston University, is a summer intern at The New Bedford Light. She can be reached at cyormick@newbedfordlight.org.