Could a Land Bridge Reconnect Rondo?

The National Highways Act, passed in 1956, ultimately saw I-94 cut St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood in half. Sixty-five years later, a group of Rondo faithful might be on the verge of stitching the storied Black neighborhood back together.

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“George Pullman did not want white people [on his namesake sleeping cars] to have to remember your name, so he said everybody was going to be called George,” says Rondo native Marvin Roger Anderson, a retired attorney who cofounded the Rondo Days Festival with Floyd Smaller Jr. in 1983 and now serves as board chair of ReConnect Rondo, a group dedicated to building a new Rondo via land bridge over I-94. “So, there were 10,000 employees in the Pullman cars all called George. The whole thing was about dehumanization.”

In St. Paul, at the end of a shift, those de-named men, who spent up to 400 grueling hours a month ensuring the white upper class were comfortable on their cross-country journey, would walk home up the hill from Union Depot. When their shoes touched the uneven asphalt of Rondo Avenue, the humanity taken from them was restored.

“When you got back to Rondo, you could take a deep breath,” says Anderson. “You knew you were surrounded by people that felt the same way you did, and when they tore that away—”

Anderson stops just before the part where the story of Rondo both ends and really begins: the construction of I-94 smack-dab in the middle of Rondo’s east-west thoroughfares, Rondo Avenue and St. Anthony Avenue. Instead, he gets back to the Pullman Porters.

“When you come back to Rondo, you’re Mr. Anderson, and you rule your roost,” he says. “No one called anybody by their first name. We gave them the dignity. Because I don’t have a name out there, I'm going to damn sure have a name in Rondo.”

The singularly vibrant neighborhood—bordered by University Avenue on the north, Selby Avenue to the south, and Rice Street and Lexington Parkway  on either side—had residents ranging from NAACP firebrand Roy Wilkins to baseball catcher Roy Campanella when he played for the St. Paul Saints to the Pullman porters. And it was born out of necessity—a pocket of affordable housing stock that didn’t discriminate in an urban core that otherwise did. Yet, despite its vitality, Rondo was declared a slum, and by 1968 it was all but gone.

“They called Rondo a slum—why were so many people attracted to this slum?” asks Anderson. “Booker T’s, the Gopher Lodge—why were so many white people in there having a ball? I mean, I saw them. These little communities—it wasn’t just Black people. Where did Elvis go? Jerry Lee Lewis? They went and got that music, they went and got that flavor, they went and got that joy. “Blue Suede Shoes” was being sung in the Black music halls, where the blues was born. And, yeah, that is infectious. And that’s why the powers that be target them. They want people to live Rondo-less.”

Now, thanks to the work of Anderson and a cohort of other community leaders, decades after the highway ripped it in two, Rondo is poised to become whole again—literally, via a 22-acre, nearly 3,000-linear-foot land bridge spanning I-94 from Chatsworth Street to Grotto Street. The project, which just received $6.2 million in funding in the new state budget but could require $450 million to complete, is officially in the planning phase.

“It will be an African American cultural district where you bring together legacy, history, culture, and programming,” says Anderson of the vision, which also includes a reimagining of the blocks on either side of the bridge with ample housing that, in an effort to curb gentrification, will all be part of a community land trust. “And one that not just survives but thrives by bringing money back into the community, by the property taxes of the 500 new homes that allows, by creating some 1,400 jobs. And there is an intangible quality in bringing back a person’s dignity in their community and about achieving something that people thought was impossible.”

And while Anderson and company are just into the planning phase, which he cautions could take two years and ultimately affect the actual scale of the land bridge and the infrastructure around it, he insists their grand vision isn’t Pollyannaish: It’s imperative.

“The Rondo community, the land bridge, is the last vestige of what drove America to be what it is,” he says. “We’re not a small nation or a nation of tribes; we’re an interdependent, interracial community that can achieve big things.”

Because the thing is, those 100,000 Georges didn’t all come home to Rondo; they found their humanity in some of the 1,200 similar communities ripped apart by freeways—in Elgin, Illinois; in Raleigh, North Carolina; in Greenville, Mississippi. Putting them all back together won’t happen overnight, but that’s never been the point.

“I’m not afraid to plant a tree and let somebody else enjoy the shade,” Anderson says. “I put the acorn in the ground. Let somebody else enjoy the shade.”