In the 1950s, Debbie Montgomery, a former St. Paul City Council member and the first woman hired by the St. Paul Police Department, watched her parents thrive in the city s Rondo neighborhood.
The flourishing Black family owned a multilevel home and a pair of lots, crucial acquisitions toward building generational wealth, before local planners used federal money to cut through one of the state s most prominent and affluent Black communities to create Interstate 94. It decimated the village, Montgomery told me during our conversation last week. We don t have a village anymore. We ve got community but we don t have a village. We lost that.
At the height of the urban renewal era, state and local governments across the country strategically routed highway projects through the heart of Black neighborhoods displacing residents, destroying businesses, and shattering communities. Now, advocates from St. Paul, Minn., are hoping to restore some of what was ripped away by building a land bridge over a troubled roadway and to provide an unconventional model for other communities.
After more than five years of organizing and a decade of dreaming, advocates from the nonprofit Reconnect Rondo are seeking $6.2 million from Minnesota to reconnect the historically Black Rondo neighborhood, which was largely razed in order to make way for Interstate 94 between 1956 and 1968, displacing 60 percent of residents. But unlike many of the highway removal proposals that have been applauded by urbanists, the project would leave the interstate intact, and install a massive, roughly 16 acre of cap that would become Minnesota’s first “Af
How I-94 ripped apart the Rondo neighborhood and one group s plan to help restore it article
The construction of I-94 split up a once-thriving Black neighborhood in St. Paul. Now decades later, a group thinks it can take a big first step in restoring Rondo.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - If you’ve ever driven on I-94 through St. Paul, you traveled through an ugly chapter in the city’s history.
When the interstate was built, the highway ripped the heart out of the Twin Cities Black community, scattering hundreds of families and shattering their hopes of achieving the American dream.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has wasted no time spreading his message that under the Biden administration, everything about urban transportation will change, especially the way people think about it. In the new world of urban transportation, equity and concern for the interests of people other than drivers will take precedence. But this view goes up against a century of thinking that has catered to cars to the exclusion of everyone else, and changing those entrenched habits will prove difficult. For evidence, we offer stories from Houston, where the Texas Department of Transportation gave itself the go-ahead to widen a Houston freeway to ten lanes, and Minnesota, where civic leaders in both of the Twin Cities are trying to push the Minnesota Department of Transportation to get serious about “reimagining” a freeway that cut a historically Black St. Paul neighborhood in two.