The Collective at the Heart of Longfellow Rising
Minnesota business owners whose properties were damaged or destroyed in the civil unrest come together around a shared vision of an equitable and sustainable future for the neighborhood they love
By Cinnamon Janzer | January 28, 2021
Members of Longfellow Rising meet outside Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. Illustration by @drawnwell.
FEATURE
“Everything was totally destroyed. The only things left were the walls,” says Ade Alabi, owner of the now-demolished Odd Fellows building in the heart of Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood. After removing the leftover debris, Alabi is currently using sand to fill the gaps in the land that once held his business.
After George Floyd was murdered under the knee of then Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May of last year, the peaceful protests that followed were co-opted by rioters and looters who caused more than $500 million in damage across the Twin Cities. The devastation coalesced along Minneapolis’s Lake Street corridor, hitting the Longfellow neighborhood—near where the Third Precinct building burned—particularly hard. The neighborhood is determined to build back better than before.
A group of over 20 community members that includes business owners, residents, nonprofit leaders, and more have taken rebuilding their neighborhood into their own hands, calling themselves Longfellow Rising. The goal is to rebuild the damaged area of East Lake Street—a commercial corridor known for its cultural diversity, particularly its restaurants serving food from around the world—in a way that prevents gentrification and focuses on social justice from racial equity and affordable housing to economic prosperity and environmental sustainability.
“When you realize what has been lost can’t be easily recovered, your thoughts turn to what comes next,” says Dan Kennedy, a lawyer whose law firm has been in the neighborhood for 25 years.
From the costs associated with demolition—up to $400,000 per site—to those associated with rebuilding older structures up to modern standards, compounded by the frustration of dealing with insurance companies, rebuilding poses big challenges.
In June, Kennedy was running an errand in the neighborhood and ran into Ruhel Islam, owner of the popular Gandhi Mahal restaurant (Islam became famous for his response to the unrest, saying, “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.”). They spoke through Islam’s car window about what could be done, and Islam proposed getting a group of property owners together. “It was part comparing notes about demolitions and part forming a group to talk about these issues in the future, and that became Longfellow Rising,” now a 501(c)3 nonprofit, says Kennedy.
While the group is still in its early stages, it has already begun to outline a shared vision. Some members are already imagining a centerpiece project at the intersection of Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue. “Our goal is to help rebuild the intersection with something better—to aim for the highest bar in terms of design, energy efficiency, water efficiency, and land usage,” says Kennedy.
“There has been this other-worldly consensus that if we don’t model something different in the community rebuild, then we’ve learned nothing from what happened in our yards over the course of those days and weeks. There’s something powerful about that.”
After serving as an ad-hoc distribution center for food and medical supplies during the civil unrest, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, which has been in the neighborhood for 117 years, has become a partner in Longfellow Rising. “We feel like this is part of our calling as a congregation in this time and place,” says Pastor Ingrid Rasmussen. The church was able to contribute some financial resources to the project from its Justice Fund—established as a home for donations received during the unrest—and it helped Longfellow Rising create an RFP for project partners.
The group has selected Walser Consulting, Inspire to Change, and Urban Design Associates to help usher its vision into being.
As for what the centerpiece project will hold, Meena Natarajan, executive director of Pangea World Theater and Longfellow Rising member, envisions an explicitly anti-racist community with art and healing center stage. “What we’d love to do is create a plaza for peace and social justice,” says Natarajan, “and make it a place for community healing” through art. She also believes that the group’s vision for a sustainably designed building will be a model for similar projects across the country.
“For me, the most important aspect of all is to have a sense of belonging for people of color,” says Natarajan, which she hopes to help accomplish by continually involving artists of color in the project and its outcomes in a way that boosts their economic freedom. Natarajan hopes to have a physical space for Pangea in the new building Longfellow Rising is working to create.
Kennedy says that the general sentiment now is to focus on building up to maximize space. “We’re talking about one, perhaps two levels of community use, with office space on the second level and multiple floors of housing,” he says. “So this would be at least a three-story project.”
Despite still having a long way to go, members are already seeing the benefits of the group’s collective approach to rebuilding.
“There has been this other-worldly consensus that if we don’t model something different in the community rebuild, then we’ve learned nothing from what happened in our yards over the course of those days and weeks,” says Rasmussen. “There’s something powerful about that.”