Rondo Center of Diverse Expressions

The Rondo Center of Diverse Expressions formed in 2018 when Marvin Anderson, one of the principal architects of the Rondo Days festival and Rondo Avenue Inc., organized a successor institution to carry the work forward and to provide administrative stewardship for the Rondo Commemorative Plaza. The Plaza, located at the corner of Fisk Avenue and Rondo Avenue in the Summit-University neighborhood, repurposes a vacant lot with greenspace and a small museum for art and artifacts interpreting the Rondo experience. It stands on a block near the I-94 trench that replaced Rondo Avenue’s residential core.

RCODE pursues three goals: celebrating Rondo’s history and cultural creativity, inspiring diverse people to find common ground in the corridor, and building a trusting and engaged neighborhood community. Its programming connects the pre-freeway community record, preserved through Evelyn Fairbanks’s memoir, Kate Cavett’s oral histories, and the Minnesota Historical Society collections, to present-day organizing around the ReConnect Rondo land bridge proposal and MnDOT’s Rethinking I-94 process.

The Center’s location near the I-94 trench gives it a direct institutional stake in the question of what development follows freeway removal or reconfiguration, and its community engagement work supplies the relational infrastructure that ReConnect Rondo’s land bridge and community land trust proposals require to move from engineering studies to construction.