Like a gash lacerating the landscape, the construction of I-94 in the 1960s lacerated the historic Rondo neighborhood, nearly obliterating it from the map. But highway construction and urban renewal failed to obliterate the memory of Rondo from the minds of those who once lived there. Thanks to their memories and efforts to preserve them, Rondo continues to be remembered as a vibrant, diverse neighborhood with a very important story to tell, one that continues to enliven the history of St. Paul.
Rondo has deep roots in the history of St. Paul dating back to the arrival of a French-Canadian voyageur in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company, Joseph Rondeau, and his wife Josephine who was part Indian. Rondeau initially settled near Fort Snelling before he and other squatters were ejected in1840 and their log cabins destroyed by the military. The unclaimed land along the Mississippi River attracted the squatters, including Rondeau, and they began to stake claims near what is now St. Paul’s city center. Rondeau eventually sold his land and in 1872 claimed a tract further out encompassing largely Rice Street and reaching out toward Lake Como. Although he only lived in the area for four years, it became known as Rondo, an Americanized version of his name, and the name of the neighborhood’s main commercial street. Eventually, streets and avenues came to define the neighborhood’s borders, from Marshall to University and Rice to Lexington, although like all neighborhoods, these borders could be malleable.
The arrival of the first streetcar line along University Avenue in 1890 made the neighborhood more accessible attracting other Jews moving out of the West Side Flats and seeking improved and affordable housing, and African Americans who, like the Jews, felt little acceptance in many of St. Paul’s developing middle-class neighborhoods. Others soon were to follow, including Irish and German immigrants, the latter establishing the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in 1889. Their church, erected in 1911 at 284 N. Dale, remains an active presence in the heart of Rondo, which was rapidly becoming a polyglot, racially diverse neighborhood. Although Jews and African Americans comprised less than half of the neighborhood’s population prior to 1924, it is the decades of coexistence of these two groups that provide Rondo with its unique identity in St. Paul. In an interview recorded for “Hand in Hand,” an oral history project, Mary Chambers Bradley Hamilton (b. 1903) recalls that the corner of Rice and Rondo was where the Jewish people lived. In her memoir, Days of Rondo, Evelyn Fairbanks writes about African American businesses located across the street from ones that had Jewish owners. They operated side by side until the Jewish people began to move to Highland Park following World War II. African Americans stayed put, purchasing their former neighbor's houses and transforming their stores into churches.
By the 1930s, the Rondo neighborhood had taken on three distinct identities that are still well-remembered by those who lived there until the arrival of the I-94. Where you lived within the neighborhood told a great deal about a family’s economic and social status within the African American community. Evelyn Fairbanks sums it up the best: “The houses at the east end of Rondo, between downtown and Western Avenue, were called Deep Rondo (later called Corn Meal Valley) and made up the least desirable neighborhood. Between Western and Dale was the middle ground without a name. West of Dale Street to Lexington Avenue was a coveted area known as Oatmeal Hill. Also, the farther north or south of Rondo Avenue a person lived, the higher his status.” [p. 95]
As important as the neighborhood you lived in was the church you attended, Rondo rapidly became home to a number of African American congregations. [See below] Jon Butler writes [“Communities and Congregations: The Black Church in St. Paul, 1860-1900”] that “few institutions have seemed as important to many people as Negro congregations. Above all, they have been...a refuge in a hostile world.” He sees them as the “Crucible of Negro community life” and “coterminous and inseparable.” The history of some of these congregations and others that were established in Rondo follows.
SAINT JAMES AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH
SAINT PETER CLAVER ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
LUTHERAN CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER