MILWAUKEE — For more than a year, the former Pick ’n Save at 35th Street and North Avenue has stood empty.
For Tarah Lee-Turner, what is missing inside the building is personal.
“Frustration, anger, desperation,” Lee-Turner said, describing what she hears from people who live nearby.
Lee-Turner grew up nearby and still has deep family ties to the area.
“I grew up on 39th and Burleigh,” she said. “Been over there since I was 4 years old ... my brother still lives there ... so I'm still within this community.”
Now, Lee-Turner and business partners Rania Dempsey and Tonia Liddell are working to turn that personal connection into something much larger: Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery, a proposed community-owned grocery store and wellness hub they hope could eventually fill the former Pick ’n Save.
Their idea is not simply to bring supermarket shelves back to the neighborhood.
They envision fresh groceries alongside a pharmacy, café, teaching kitchen, lifestyle medicine services, spaces to grow food and areas where neighbors can sit, learn and gather.
“We're not just a grocery store,” Lee-Turner said.
What losing the neighborhood grocery store meant
Pick ’n Save closed the location at 2355 N. 35th St. on July 18, 2025, after serving the area for roughly 18 years. It was one of five Milwaukee-area Pick ’n Save stores Kroger announced it would close as part of a larger nationwide round of closures.
Its departure came amid a broader wave of retail losses on Milwaukee’s north side. Recent reporting found the north side has lost at least 10 grocery and department stores since 2023, along with multiple pharmacy locations.
For people with cars, losing a neighborhood grocery store can mean driving a little farther.
For people who walk, use the bus or have mobility challenges, it can change how they get one of life’s most basic necessities.
Milwaukee College Prep sits just across the street from the vacant Pick ’n Save. Principal Sasha Haynes grew up around the corner on Grant Boulevard and has spent 14 years working with Milwaukee College Prep.
“So this is my neighborhood,” Haynes said. “I'm very honored to work in the community that raised me.”
Haynes called the grocery store closure “devastating” for the neighborhood.
“We have a lot of older individuals, we have a lot of individuals that rely on public transportation,” Haynes said. “We had a lot of individuals who walked to Pick n Save. So now it's become an additional burden just to get your basic needs met of how do I get food, or how do I get quality food.”
She said the closest options for some residents do not necessarily provide the same access to fresh food.
“The closest thing you can walk to is a corner store,” Haynes said. “Is that the best quality food? No. Is that a great place to get fresh food? No.”
One example sticks with her.
“I could think about one of our parents who lives across the street who has to walk to 46 and North Avenue just to get some food for her grandchild because there's nowhere else for her to walk to,” Haynes said.
Haynes said the woman is in her 80s.
“That’s a physical strain on her,” she said.
For Haynes, the problem reaches into the classroom as well.
“As an educator, I know what that does to a student who's trying to learn,” she said. “We know what it means to be hungry. Can you imagine the only place you get a healthy option is when you go to school?”
A doctor confronting the limits of telling people to ‘eat healthy’
Dempsey came to the project from a different direction.
She has lived in Milwaukee for roughly 27 years and works as a physician with a focus on lifestyle medicine.
She said she became increasingly frustrated by the disconnect between the healthy choices doctors ask patients to make and the resources some patients actually have available to them.
“How can I prescribe healthy lifestyles to my patients if they don't even have a grocery store to shop at or they don't have, you know, the resources and the access to healthy lifestyles?” Dempsey said. “It's kind of pointless to prescribe that.”
That realization eventually connected her with Lee-Turner and Liddell.
Dempsey said the grocery closure has also fueled a larger conversation in Metcalfe Park about who should control the businesses and resources a neighborhood depends on.
“Obviously corporate America isn't serving us, and it's time to take back control,” Dempsey said.
That community-led push has grown since the Pick ’n Save closure. Residents packed an emergency town hall in July 2025, and local organizing eventually helped form the Food Justice Collective, bringing together residents, organizations and entrepreneurs around food access and community ownership. In March 2026, another Food Justice Collective meeting drew enough people that organizers had to bring out additional chairs.
An idea that started before Pick ’n Save closed
Lee-Turner said her vision actually began years before the current grocery store vacancy.
She traces the idea for Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery to 2020, when she was working as an investigator for the public defender’s office.
Lee-Turner said she became discouraged by seeing people repeatedly move through the criminal justice system while larger issues in their lives and neighborhoods went unaddressed.
She describes what happened next as a spiritual calling.
“When I asked God what's next, he told me grocery store and I said, Lord, I have no idea, nothing about a grocery store,” Lee-Turner said.
She began researching food access and grocery models.
Her thinking was also shaped by the 15 years she spent living in Atlanta. Lee-Turner said seeing Black professionals and businesses thriving there changed what she believed could be built back home.
“I saw it be done, so I know that it can be done in our neighborhoods, right?” Lee-Turner said. “I know it can be done in Milwaukee, we just have to change how we view things, change our narrative, change how we speak about ourselves, see ourselves in a different light.”
She also brought home something more basic from her years in the South: the role food can play in building relationships.
“That's how you talk to people, that's how you connect people is you, you feed them,” Lee-Turner said.
‘We're not just a grocery store’
That philosophy helps explain why the team's current plans stretch well beyond aisles of food.
Preliminary plans developed with Quorum Architects include grocery retail, a pharmacy and café, a teaching kitchen, lifestyle medicine space and an urban farm. The team says the project would likely be built in phases, with the grocery component taking priority.
Lee-Turner also wants a large communal table inside.
“People are like, why a table?” Lee-Turner said. “Because I want us to all come together and eat, right? ... We're not just a grocery store, that's our tagline, we're not just a grocery store.”
She said the goal is to create a place where staff and residents are treated as people rather than transactions.
“I want to be able to communicate with people and find out where they are so that we can figure out how to address where you are,” Lee-Turner said.
The vision also includes gardening and food education.
“We're gonna have a grow garden, teaching you how to be self-sufficient,” Lee-Turner said.
She said the teaching kitchen could help families learn how to prepare healthier meals, while the lifestyle medicine component could connect those lessons with health care.
What does community ownership mean?
Perhaps the most unusual part of the model is who the team wants to own it.
Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery is being planned as a solidarity cooperative, meaning both employees and community members could have ownership shares.
Dempsey said residents could buy memberships similar to other cooperative grocery stores, while employees would also receive shares through their work.
“And what that means is one member, one vote,” Dempsey said. “So everyone who has a membership has a vote.”
Members would elect a board that could help make decisions about how the cooperative operates, including what products it carries and what programming it offers.
“So it's really the, the voice is the community,” Dempsey said.
Lee-Turner stressed that having more money invested would not mean having more power.
“If you have a share, you have a voice,” she said.
Dempsey added that someone holding 100 shares would not receive 100 times the voting power.
“Everyone's voice in the community matters and everyone's voice is equal,” she said.
For Lee-Turner, that ownership component could eventually create something the neighborhood has often struggled to retain when major corporations leave: wealth.
“This whole thing is about generational,” Lee-Turner said. “That was the whole point of the co-op, that we're building generational wealth, right?”
“This thing is not just for me, not for her, not for any of my other business partners. This is for the community,” she continued. “We're building a generational legacy. This is not just a grocery store, we're building a legacy.”
How did we get here?
The push for a new model grew out of several years of work:
2020: Lee-Turner says the original idea for Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery came to her while she was working in criminal investigations. She began researching food access and cooperative grocery models.
June 2025: Kroger announced plans to close five Milwaukee-area Pick ’n Save stores, including the Metcalfe Park location.
July 2025: Residents packed an emergency community meeting after learning the store would close. Pick ’n Save shut its doors at 35th and North on July 18. Residents and organizers rallied outside the store and began organizing around longer-term solutions.
2025-26: The Food Justice Collective emerged from that organizing, bringing together residents, food advocates, nonprofits and entrepreneurs around community-led solutions, including cooperative ownership.
February 2026: Community groups opened new community-powered refrigerators on Milwaukee's north side, including one at Metcalfe Park Community Bridges, as residents continued filling immediate food-access gaps.
March 2026: Lee-Turner, Dempsey and Liddell attended a packed Food Justice Collective meeting. There, Lee-Turner connected with a real-estate adviser representing the owner of the former Pick ’n Save property.
2026: Milwaukee created the Retail Investment Fund-Grocery and Pharmacy Access, or RIF-GAP, pilot grant program to support healthy-food and pharmacy projects in underserved neighborhoods. Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery says it is pursuing that funding.
Summer 2026: Residents continued organizing around the former Pick ’n Save, including a July gathering marking a year since the closure and calling for community-led food solutions.
August 2026: The Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery team is working with Quorum Architects on preliminary plans while continuing to seek funding, community support and a location.
A vision — not yet a done deal
There are still major hurdles between the drawings and an open grocery store.
Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery does not own or lease the former Pick ’n Save.
Recent Journal Sentinel reporting said Pick ’n Save remains locked into its lease at the property until April 2027. A later report said the property is being marketed for lease or purchase. The Kingdom Kitchen team says it has spoken with the owner's real-estate representative and is working to formalize its interest.
The project also does not yet have secured funding.
Lee-Turner estimated during our interview that realizing the entire vision could eventually require roughly $12 million to $15 million, though Dempsey cautioned that it is still too early to put a firm price tag on the project.
That is one reason the team says the development would happen in phases.
They are pursuing grant opportunities, including the city's RIF-GAP program, building a larger team and collecting donations through a GoFundMe connected to Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery's website.
The city says RIF-GAP is designed to support healthy-food and pharmacy projects in communities with limited retail options.
Lee-Turner would like to see residents themselves become part of the fundraising effort.
“I really want this to be community led and community funded,” she said. “I really want it to be the community so we can understand and look at the power that we have when we come together.”
The team also says it needs people with experience in grocery operations, cooperatives, law, marketing and other fields to help turn the concept into an operating business.
“It is bigger than us,” Dempsey said.
‘I wanna be the help’
There is no guarantee Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery will ultimately open at 35th and North.
But Lee-Turner says that uncertainty has not changed why she started.
“For me I'm not waiting for somebody else to come in and help me, help my community,” Lee-Turner said. “I wanna help, I wanna be the help. That's it.”
And when she imagines returning to the same block years from now, she does not only picture grocery carts moving through a reopened building.
She pictures the neighborhood looking different.
“I wanna see the narrative change when they speak about this community,” Lee-Turner said. “I wanna be able to see people coming from all over, you know, looking to see how did y'all do that, right? How can we duplicate this in our community so that we can create a different narrative.”
Dempsey imagines the boarded windows replaced with glass, plants and gardens — children coming over after school, parents taking cooking classes and neighbors gathering.
“It's vibrant and it's really brought an energy to the community,” she said.
For a neighborhood that has spent more than a year waiting to see what replaces its grocery store, the Kingdom Kitchen team believes the answer could be something built differently from the beginning — by people with a stake in what happens after the doors open.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT KINGDOM GROCERY VISIT THEIR WEBSITE HERE: https://kingdom-kitchen-well.base44.app
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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