On the market in St. Paul’s Midway — the 40-seat Dreamland Arts theater, in addition to the present owners’ adjoining single-family home connected by underground tunnel.
Kristin Pickering, a broker with Pickering Realty, listed the 2 properties on the market together on Monday, with a combined asking price of $600,000.
“We’re just marketing it at this point to the local arts community, hoping that it could actually stay as an arts venue of some sort,” said Pickering, who can be based in Hamline-Midway.
The 2-bedroom, two-bath house has been occupied by theater owners Leslye Orr and Zaraawar “Z” Mistry since 2005, but “it could even be excellent rental property,” she said. “If housing was needed for visiting performers, it could be great for that, or office space.”
The properties, listed at 677 Hamline Ave. N. and 1342 Van Buren Ave., are connected through stairways into their tunnel-like lower level. The business structure, which spans 4,200 square feet, dates to 1974. The 2-story home was in-built 1922, around the identical time as much of the encompassing neighborhood.
“It’s a really unusual, interesting, fun and quirky space, and it’s really been delivered to its almost fullest potential,” Pickering said.
Dreamland Arts, which Orr and Mistry opened together in September 2006, was named after a dilapidated movie show in Secunderabad, a city in south-central India. The couple met while working on the Children’s Theater Company within the early Nineties, where Mistry was an actor and Orr — who has been legally blind since birth — was completing a two-year internship.
“Over time, I couldn’t help noticing that I used to be the one actor with a disability, and that audience members with disabilities were few and much between,” Orr told the Como Monitor in 2015. Motivated by “the probabilities of disabilities,” she and Mistry purchased the Midway property together and hosted original works, including their very own.
In a notice promoting the property sale on the Dreamland Arts website, they said: “After 17 years of running Dreamland Arts, we have now decided to make a change, downsize and move into an apartment nearby. … We hope to seek out a buyer that may keep the theater constructing as a neighborhood arts asset for the community, and even perhaps keep it running as a theater venue.”
The couple weren’t available for a direct interview on Tuesday, but Mistry said by the use of text message: “We’re moving into an apartment nearby, technically not in Hamline-Midway but staying in the identical zip code!!”
Dreamland will host five plays and events through June. A full calendar is accessible at dreamlandarts.com.