ROCHESTER - After years of delays, a Frederick Douglass cultural center is finally being built just a minute's walk from the Victorian house once owned by fellow civil rights crusader Susan B. Anthony.

Douglass spent 25 of his most influential years in Rochester, publishing The North Star journal on Main Street. It was the place, he later wrote, where “I shall always feel more at home ... than anywhere else in the country.”

Renovations started Wednesday at a former metalwork shop where the Frederick Douglass Resource Center will open next spring at a cost of nearly $1 million. It sits on King Street next to a neighborhood green dominated by a bronze sculpture of Douglass and Anthony conversing face-to-face over a pot of tea.

The project, supported by a $650,000 state grant and a more recent infusion of $550,000 from the city, ends decades of failed efforts here to create an epicenter honoring the 19th-century anti-slavery leader, said its executive director, Gerry Hunt.

Douglass “was able to do some of his greatest things using Rochester as his base,” Hunt said. “Tourists who come into the city and wonder 'how come there's nothing for Douglass?' will be able to visit the center at the same time they might be visiting the Susan B. Anthony house.

“This has been a dream not only of the African-American community but truly the entire community.”

The center will feature a theater, a workshop, two classrooms, a computer resource center and a large exhibit space for displays as well as artifacts borrowed on a rotating basis from black American cultural institutions around the country, including New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Hunt said.

The project is spearheaded by his father, the Rev. Errol Hunt, a former Urban League director in Providence, R.I., who grew up in New Bedford, Mass. - the town where Douglass experienced his newfound freedom after his boyhood in slavery in Maryland.

The elder Hunt has been trying to find a setting for a Douglass heritage hub since his arrival in Rochester in the early 1990s, but various community projects intended to memorialize Douglass have been beset by infighting and funding setbacks.

A museum featuring displays linking Douglass to other civil rights advocates opened on Main Street in 1999 but was evicted in December 2000 for not paying rent. Xerox Corp. pledged $500,000 but withdrew most of its donation after organizers ignored repeated requests for financial documents.

Douglass and Anthony, who are buried at the city's Mount Hope Cemetery, both were active in the abolitionist and women's rights movements - and became close friends in the years after their first meeting here in 1848.

Across the square on Madison Street, Anthony's red-brick home has been lovingly restored as a museum extolling women's achievements in molding the nation. Douglass' family farmhouse in Rochester was destroyed in a suspected arson in 1872, the same year that Anthony was arrested for daring to vote.