When I was a kid, the church I attended in Milwaukee with my family sat in one of the city’s predominantly Black, impoverished neighborhoods. The “projects” stood a block away, next to a corner store, where we’d sneak out and buy grape sodas and Mike and Ikes.
There was a park down the street and we would hang out there during summer camps. We’d wave to our friend, “Cheese” — no idea why they called him that — and his family on our way. They lived across the street from the church.
But every time I return to that spot, another piece of my childhood seems to vanish. The corner stores and affordable housing complexes have been replaced by $300,000 condos occupied by middle-class families and residents who don’t look like the folks from the old neighborhood.
I wonder if the same erasure will continue here, as plans for a new Rondo neighborhood persist. I worry that the name “Rondo” is nothing more than a pawn for future economic development that will inadvertently benefit, above all, affluent, white Minnesotans and business owners but not the Black community members and direct descendants of St. Paul’s greatest tragedy — against the wishes of its visionaries.
Our Streets Minneapolis cited Milwaukee as an example in its “Reimagining I-94″ report that details a proposal to replace a stretch of the interstate between St. Paul and Minneapolis. It’s one of a handful of concepts, including ReConnect Rondo — a plan to build a land bridge over the highway, an idea that received a $2 million federal grant — that could help restore the economic nucleus the highway erased through racist federal policies that destroyed St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The highway also stole seeds of generational wealth in the local Black community.
Keith Baker, the executive director of ReConnect Rondo, has called the project “an African-American cultural enterprise district.”
“It really is a pretty significant chunk of land,” Baker told the St. Paul Neighborhood Network in 2022. “It allows for upwards of 13 acres of new, open park space, just as one illustration. The potential of 576 housing units. A business incubation center. Possibly, an outdoor botanical garden. Who knows? So there are a lot of possibilities that can go on top of 21 acres.”
Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., said the initiative could right the historic wrong that unfolded in the Rondo neighborhood while allowing “reconciliation and healing for a community that was cruelly ripped apart,” according to a news release issued by the city of St. Paul.
