Rondo Commemorative Plaza

by Joel Hoekstra, Architecture MN

Published October 22, 2018

Featuring Ross Altheimer, PLA, ASLA, FAAR

A new pocket park in St. Paul memorializes a neighborhood destroyed by interstate construction—and celebrates the community and creativity that remains and thrives a half-century later.

In 2013, a two-story commercial building at the corner of Concordia Avenue and Fisk Street in St. Paul, overlooking I-94, went up in flames. Architecturally, the structure was unremarkable. But to many members of St. Paul’s African American community, the building, which had functioned over the decades as a restaurant, coffee shop, dance parlor, and VFW hall, was a cultural landmark: It was the last vestige of the old Rondo neighborhood, a community decimated by freeway construction in the 1960s…

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