Rondo, and What Interstate Ninety-Four Erased

For roughly a century, Rondo Avenue was the spine of Saint Paul's African American community. It ran east-west through the heart of what was called the Rondo neighborhood, a corridor that had been home since the late eighteen hundreds to Black families who came north from the South, built churches, ran businesses, educated children, and created a cultural life that was self-contained precisely because the rest of Saint Paul excluded them from most of it.

By the nineteen fifties, Rondo had seven churches that anchored community life. There were barbershops, beauty parlors, a pharmacy, a funeral home, restaurants, and clubs. The neighborhood was dense, walkable, and poor by the measures that economists use, but rich in the accumulation of community relationships that take generations to build.

In nineteen fifty-six, the Federal Highway Act authorized the Interstate Highway System. Saint Paul chose to route Interstate Ninety-Four directly through the Rondo neighborhood. The decision was made by transportation planners, but it was not made without alternatives. Maps drawn at the time show that a more northerly route was available. It was rejected. The Rondo route was cheaper, partly because the land was owned by Black families whose political leverage was limited.

Between nineteen fifty-six and nineteen sixty-eight, more than six hundred homes and businesses were demolished. Over three hundred families were displaced. The four-hundred-foot-wide freeway trench cut Rondo Avenue in two and erased its commercial core. Residents received relocation payments that were systematically insufficient, according to studies conducted afterward by the Saint Paul Urban League.

The community did not disappear entirely. Churches moved and reassembled elsewhere. Families scattered to other Saint Paul neighborhoods and the suburbs. But the concentrated, intergenerational community that Rondo represented was broken in a way that has not been reconstructed.

Rondo Avenue itself still exists on either side of the freeway, bearing the name. The Rondo Community Library and annual Rondo Days celebration preserve the neighborhood's memory. A community organization has spent more than a decade proposing a land bridge over the freeway as a form of reconnection; the project has received state and federal attention, though it has not been built.