Rondo

The corridor before the freeway

Rondo Avenue ran from Western Avenue east to Rice Street through the heart of St. Paul. In the early 1950s, anyone who walked the stretch from Lexington Parkway to Dale Street passed through the commercial and civic core of the city’s African-American community. The avenue carried groceries, barbershops, churches, insurance offices, and the kind of dense neighborhood street life that accumulates only over generations.¹

The neighborhood took its name from Joseph Rondeau, a fur trader of French-Canadian and Ojibwe heritage who settled on land just north of the avenue in the 1840s and 1850s. The spelling shifted from Rondeau to Rondo as the area filled with residents, and the name traveled from the family to the street to the community.² African-American families began arriving in the corridor after the Civil War, drawn by work in the railroad yards and hotel trades and by a degree of tolerance, always partial and contested, that they could not find in many other Twin Cities neighborhoods where racial covenants excluded Black buyers and renters outright.³

By 1950, roughly 85 percent of St. Paul’s Black residents lived in the Rondo corridor, a concentrated geography shaped not by preference but by the web of restrictive covenants and steering practices that closed most of the city’s other neighborhoods to them.⁴ The corridor ran east-west for about a mile and a half, roughly bounded by Lexington Parkway on the west and Rice Street on the east, with Rondo Avenue as the spine and St. Anthony Avenue one block to the south. The density was residential and social at once. Extended families occupied blocks over decades. Church congregations formed the institutional backbone. Pilgrim Baptist Church, at Central Avenue and Mackubin Street, was the neighborhood’s largest, founded in 1863 and rebuilt in the early twentieth century into a congregation whose civic reach extended well beyond Sunday services.⁵

The neighborhood sustained a complete commercial and professional economy. Black-owned businesses on and near Rondo Avenue included insurance agencies, funeral homes, law offices, beauty parlors, and restaurants. The Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, named for the educator and civil-rights advocate, served as the neighborhood’s primary social-service and cultural institution, offering programs for children and adults and functioning as an organizing hub across the full length of the corridor.⁶

Image pendingRondo Avenue looking east from near Lexington Parkway, Saint Paul, Minnesota, circa 1940s, showing the commercial storefronts and street life of the neighborhood's main artery.Sought from Minnesota Historical Society, 1945

What the map does not fully capture is the quality of life the corridor held. Evelyn Fairbanks, who grew up in Rondo and whose 1990 memoir remains the most widely read account of the neighborhood before the freeway, wrote that the community was “everything we needed.” She described summer evenings on front porches, the sound of jazz from the Keystone Bar, and a social density that came from knowing one’s neighbors not as acquaintances but as participants in a shared civic life over decades.¹ Kate Cavett’s oral-history collection, published in 2005 and drawn from dozens of interviews with Rondo residents and their descendants, carries the same texture: a community that called itself Rondo not merely as an address but as an identity.

The highway decision and the communities it excluded

The decision to route Interstate 94 through Rondo did not arise from technical necessity. The Minnesota Highway Department considered at least one significant alternate alignment, running roughly along St. Anthony Avenue, one block south of Rondo Avenue. That route would have followed a corridor with fewer residential structures and would have caused substantially less displacement. The department rejected it.⁷

The documented reasons for the rejection remain incomplete in the public record, but the pattern is consistent with what historians of postwar highway planning have found across dozens of similar cases: engineers and officials weighed the cost of acquiring commercial property along alternative corridors and found it less convenient than taking residential property in communities whose political power was limited. Rondo’s residents had no seat at the table where that calculus was made.⁸

The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 accelerated a planning process that had been building since the late 1940s. Minnesota received its first formal interstate planning allocations in the mid-1950s, and the route for I-94 through St. Paul was largely fixed before any public hearings took place. The Rondo-St. Anthony Improvement Association, a neighborhood organization, raised objections to the alignment during the hearing process. Reverend Floyd Massey of Pilgrim Baptist Church testified against the route. Timothy Howard and other residents organized petitions and appeared before city and state bodies. None of the objections changed the route.²

The contrast with other St. Paul neighborhoods is instructive and was not lost on Rondo’s residents at the time. The Summit Hill and Macalester-Groveland neighborhoods to the south, predominantly white and more prosperous, faced their own freeway threats in the same period and ultimately deflected or delayed them. Rondo faced the same state apparatus and did not. The difference was not the quality of the argument; it was the power of the constituency.³

The alignment that proceeded cut the neighborhood along a path roughly 200 feet wide. The right-of-way ran between University Avenue to the north and St. Anthony Avenue to the south, taking out most of the blocks that made up the residential core of the community. The freeway did not merely pass through Rondo: it replaced Rondo Avenue itself along much of its length, severing the corridor that had organized the neighborhood’s life for nearly a century.

The demolition years: 1956 to 1968

The state began acquiring property in the Rondo corridor in 1956. Demolition followed quickly after condemnation offers, which arrived as take-it-or-leave-it propositions with no negotiation and no independent legal counsel provided to homeowners. Renters, who made up a significant share of the households in the corridor, received no displacement assistance at all under the laws then in force.⁸

Approximately 700 homes and 300 businesses came down between 1956 and 1968. The state displaced approximately 600 Black families.⁹ The numbers, which appear in nearly every account of the neighborhood’s destruction, carry the risk of abstraction: each family represents a household, a set of extended relationships, a place in the social fabric of the corridor. The Fairbanks memoir and the Cavett oral histories together give those numbers faces and names. Families who had owned their homes for twenty or thirty years received condemnation payments calculated at assessed values that did not reflect the actual cost of replacement housing elsewhere in a city where most neighborhoods remained effectively closed to Black buyers.⁴

The few families who could find purchase financing to buy in previously white neighborhoods often found that the neighborhoods resisted them. The Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer had invalidated restrictive covenants, but the informal apparatus of racial steering by real estate agents, discriminatory lending by banks and savings institutions, and social pressure from white neighbors continued to operate with considerable effectiveness through the 1960s.⁴ The dispersal of Rondo’s residents did not distribute them freely across the city; it pushed them into adjacent corridors that were themselves already under pressure, and it scattered the extended-family and congregational networks that had held the neighborhood together.

Pilgrim Baptist Church relocated. The Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, which had stood as the neighborhood’s primary civic institution, lost its building to the right-of-way and eventually rebuilt on a different site. Businesses that had served the corridor for a generation could not reopen: the customer base was gone, the physical plant was gone, and the capital for reconstruction was not available to Black entrepreneurs on the same terms it was available to white ones.²

Image pendingInterstate 94 under construction through the Rondo neighborhood, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1962, showing cleared lots and the freeway excavation through the residential blocks.Sought from Minnesota Historical Society, 1962

Construction on the relevant segment proceeded through the early 1960s. The full St. Paul segment of I-94 opened in 1968. When it did, Rondo Avenue as a continuous residential and commercial corridor had ceased to exist. In its place ran 200 feet of concrete trench, six lanes wide, carrying traffic between the Twin Cities at speed through the air above what had been the most densely populated Black neighborhood in Minnesota.

The economic aftershocks continued for decades. A 2015 study prepared in connection with the ReConnect Rondo project estimated that the corridor had lost roughly $150 million in wealth in 1960 dollars through the combination of below-market condemnation payments, forced displacement, and the destruction of businesses with no compensation for goodwill or customer relationships.¹⁰ The figure is almost certainly conservative, because it does not fully account for the compounding effect of intergenerational wealth that would have been built on the equity those homeowners never received and never passed down.

What stayed, and how it stayed

The destruction of the physical corridor did not end Rondo as a community. The residents who remained in St. Paul reorganized around institutions that had survived and rebuilt institutions that had not. Pilgrim Baptist Church continued operating. Hallie Q. Brown eventually reopened at Concordia Avenue and Dale Street, six blocks from its original site but still serving many of the same families.⁶

The oral-history tradition proved particularly durable. Families who had been displaced did not stop talking about Rondo. Parents told children who told grandchildren. The stories circulated in church basements, at family reunions, and in the informal networks that communities maintain when the landscape cannot hold the memory. What Evelyn Fairbanks called “the days of Rondo” became a reference point that former residents and their descendants used to name a loss that the official record of the city barely acknowledged.¹

Marvin Roger Anderson, who grew up in the Rondo corridor and became one of the community’s most persistent advocates for its recognition, identified the gap between official silence and community memory as itself a form of injury. The city had taken the neighborhood and offered no public accounting of what it had taken, no commemoration, and no plan for repair. The community’s knowledge of its own history had nowhere to go in the public landscape of the city.¹¹

Anderson, Floyd Smaller, and Deborah Gilbreath Montgomery founded Rondo Days in 1983, an annual festival that drew former residents, their descendants, and the broader community back to the corridor’s geography. Rondo Days became the largest African-American festival in Minnesota within a few years of its founding.¹² The festival did not restore what had been taken, but it established a public claim on the memory: the neighborhood had existed, it had been destroyed by a government decision, and the people who had lived in it had not forgotten.

Image pendingRondo Days festival crowd on the streets near the former Rondo Avenue corridor, Saint Paul, Minnesota, celebrating the neighborhood's history and community.Sought from Rondo Avenue Inc., 2019

Rondo Avenue Inc., the nonprofit that Anderson helped establish to coordinate advocacy and commemoration, built an archive of photographs, oral histories, and documents related to the neighborhood’s pre-freeway life. Kate Cavett’s 2005 oral-history collection emerged partly from collaborations with this network. The Minnesota Historical Society holds a substantial Rondo-related collection, including photographs of the pre-freeway streetscape, neighborhood organizational records, and documentation of the highway planning process.¹³

ReConnect Rondo and the land bridge proposal

In 2015, a coalition of Rondo descendants, architects, planners, and community organizers incorporated ReConnect Rondo with a specific and ambitious goal: to build a 21-acre land bridge over I-94 between Grotto Street and Chatsworth Street, capping the freeway trench and restoring a continuous urban surface to the corridor.⁹

The proposal is not merely a park. The ReConnect Rondo plan integrates the land bridge with 350 to 1,400 units of new housing, commercial space, and community facilities, organized in part through a community land trust structure tied to the Fifth Ward. The land trust component is the mechanism by which the project would direct the wealth generated by new development back to the families and communities displaced by the original freeway construction, rather than allowing the land-bridge investment to simply accelerate gentrification of the surrounding blocks.¹⁰

The estimated cost of the full project as of the most recent published estimate is $458.9 million.¹⁴ That figure encompasses the structural cap over the freeway, the infrastructure required to carry buildings and green space above an active interstate, and the affordable-housing components. Securing that level of funding requires coordinating federal, state, and local sources across multiple budget cycles.

ReConnect Rondo has pursued that coordination strategically. The organization engaged early with MnDOT’s Rethinking I-94 process, which began formal public engagement in 2023 and is expected to produce a preferred alternative for the corridor’s long-term configuration by around 2030.¹⁵ Rethinking I-94 is one of the most consequential highway planning processes currently underway in the Upper Midwest: the question of whether I-94 through St. Paul should be rebuilt, reconfigured, reduced, or partially removed will shape the corridor for the next fifty years. ReConnect Rondo has positioned the land bridge as a viable option within that process rather than as a parallel advocacy campaign outside it.

The federal Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, created a dedicated funding stream for projects that reverse or mitigate the damage caused by mid-century freeway construction. ReConnect Rondo has applied for and received planning grants through this program.¹⁶ The grants have funded engineering studies, community engagement, and the detailed cost analysis that underpins the $458.9 million figure.

The land bridge has precedents, most of them in wealthier contexts. The Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, which opened in 2012 over a below-grade section of the Woodall Rodgers Freeway, demonstrated that capping a freeway trench and creating urban real estate above it is technically and financially feasible. The difference in the Rondo case is the explicit commitment to directing the resulting development toward the community that the original freeway displaced, rather than toward market-rate development driven by adjacent property values.¹⁷

Image pendingConceptual rendering of the ReConnect Rondo land bridge over Interstate 94, showing the 21-acre cap connecting the Rondo corridor with housing, green space, and commercial development above the freeway trench.Sought from ReConnect Rondo, 2022

The community land trust component reflects lessons from neighborhoods where public investment in formerly redlined areas produced rapid appreciation that displaced the very residents the investment nominally intended to serve. The Rondo corridor saw that pattern begin in the 1990s and accelerate through the 2010s, as adjacent neighborhoods gentrified and the land values near the corridor rose faster than the incomes of long-term residents.¹⁸ A land bridge without affordability protections would complete the displacement that the freeway started, this time through the market rather than through eminent domain.

The parallel to Rethinking I-94

The Rethinking I-94 process is the institutional context in which Rondo’s future will be decided. MnDOT launched the process in 2023 in response to a convergence of pressures: the physical infrastructure on the St. Paul segment of I-94 is approaching the end of its design life and will require substantial reconstruction regardless of what configuration the state chooses; federal transportation policy has shifted toward evaluation of equity and environmental justice alongside mobility metrics; and the organized advocacy of ReConnect Rondo and allied organizations has created a political constituency for alternatives that did not exist in the 1950s.¹⁵

The alternatives under study range from full replacement in kind, which would rebuild the current freeway with modest design changes, to a reduced-capacity or partial-removal option that would transform the corridor into a surface boulevard. The land bridge is a supplement to, not a substitute for, the Rethinking I-94 alternatives analysis: whichever configuration emerges from that process, the land bridge addresses the surface above the remaining right-of-way.

The Rethinking I-94 process has generated the kind of sustained community engagement that the 1956 planning process entirely excluded. MnDOT has held public meetings in Rondo and the surrounding neighborhoods, translated materials into multiple languages, and established a community advisory structure that includes Rondo descendants and representatives of the African-American organizations that have worked on the corridor since the 1980s. Whether the process produces an outcome that reflects the organized preferences of the affected communities is an open question.¹⁵

The stakes are clear to the people who remember what the corridor lost. Floyd Massey’s congregation protested the freeway in 1956 and watched the state proceed anyway. The difference now is not simply that the political environment is more favorable; it is that the community has built an organizational infrastructure over sixty years that can hold the process accountable in ways that the Rondo-St. Anthony Improvement Association, operating with limited resources against a fully mobilized state highway apparatus, could not.⁹

What the corridor holds now, and what it could

The stretch of University Avenue between Lexington Parkway and Dale Street in 2026 is a block away from a freeway trench. The Green Line light rail, which opened in 2014, runs along University Avenue and has brought new investment to the corridor. That investment has not, on its own, restored what the freeway took. The businesses along the avenue are a mix of the long-established and the new; the residential density that made Rondo a self-sustaining community in 1950 has not returned to the blocks nearest the trench.¹⁹

The Hallie Q. Brown Community Center operates from its rebuilt facility at Concordia and Dale. Rondo Days continues each summer, drawing thousands of people back to the corridor’s geography. The Minnesota Historical Society’s Rondo collection continues to grow as families donate photographs and documents. The ReConnect Rondo organization maintains a policy archive, an engaged board, and active relationships with federal, state, and local partners.⁹

What Rondo demonstrates, for communities engaged in comparable fights in 2026, is a set of practices that have kept a displaced community’s claim on its geography alive for sixty years. The oral-history tradition has produced published books and accessible archives. The annual festival has built a political constituency that includes descendants who have never lived in the corridor. The policy organization has translated community memory into engineering studies, cost analyses, and legislative relationships. The community land trust framework has encoded affordability as a structural requirement of any restoration project, not a preference that can be traded away in a later negotiation.

The Reconnecting Communities program, and the infrastructure-funding environment it represents, has created a narrow window in which projects like ReConnect Rondo can move from aspiration to construction. The window will not remain open indefinitely. The outcome of the Rethinking I-94 process, expected around 2030, will determine whether the corridor’s next fifty years resemble its last fifty or something different. The organizing record suggests that the community has done more to prepare for that determination than it could in 1956. What the state and the federal government do with that preparation remains the open question.

Footnotes

1. Evelyn Fairbanks, The Days of Rondo (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1990), 3–7, 42–68. Fairbanks grew up in the Rondo corridor and her memoir is the most widely cited firsthand account of the neighborhood’s pre-freeway life. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Kate Cavett, Voices of Rondo: Oral Histories of Saint Paul’s Historic Black Community (Minneapolis: Syren Book Company, 2005), 12–25, 88–114. Cavett draws on interviews with dozens of Rondo residents and descendants conducted for the Rondo Avenue Oral History Project. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Charles Royster, “Rondo: A History of St. Paul’s African-American Community,” in Minnesota’s African-American History, ed. David Taylor (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2012), 215–238. ↩ ↩²

4. Mapping Prejudice Project, University of Minnesota, “Racial Covenants in Ramsey County.” https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/racial-covenants/maps-data/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Pilgrim Baptist Church, “Our History.” https://www.pilgrimbaptist-stpaul.org/our-history ↩

6. Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, “History.” https://hqbcc.org/history/ ↩ ↩²

7. Minnesota Department of Transportation, “I-94: A Highway History,” internal planning document summary cited in ReConnect Rondo policy archive, 2018. https://reconnectrondo.com/resources/ ↩

8. Raymond Mohl, “The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt,” Poverty and Race Research Action Council, 2002. https://prrac.org/the-interstates-and-the-cities-highways-housing-and-the-freeway-revolt/ ↩ ↩²

9. ReConnect Rondo, “Our Story.” https://reconnectrondo.com/our-story/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

10. ReConnect Rondo, “Economic Analysis of Rondo Land Bridge,” 2015, updated 2019. https://reconnectrondo.com/resources/ ↩ ↩²

11. Rondo Avenue Inc., “History and Mission.” https://rondoavenueinc.org/about/ ↩

12. Rondo Days, “About Rondo Days.” https://rondodays.com/about/ ↩

13. Minnesota Historical Society, Rondo Neighborhood Photographic Collection, 1890–1970. https://www.mnhs.org/library/findaids/rondo ↩

14. ReConnect Rondo, Rondo Land Bridge Community Benefits Plan, 2022. https://reconnectrondo.com/land-bridge/ ↩

15. Minnesota Department of Transportation, “Rethinking I-94.” https://www.rethinkingI94.com/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

16. U.S. Department of Transportation, “Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program.” https://www.transportation.gov/grants/reconnecting-communities ↩

17. Klyde Warren Park, “About the Park.” https://www.klydewarrenpark.org/About-The-Park/ ↩

18. Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce, “Region: Planning the Future of the Twin Cities” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 88–102. ↩

19. Metropolitan Council, “Green Line Equity Study,” 2016. https://metrocouncil.org/Transportation/Planning-2/Key-Transportation-Planning-Documents/Green-Line-Equity-Study.aspx ↩