Here’s a (crap image of a) map spotted at the recent Selby Avenue Jazz Fest, showing landmarks of the old Rondo Avenue neighborhood. I was told by the people staffing the tent here that this map and research were done with help from the Minnesota Historical Society, and that a copy of this map is available for purchase there.
Here’s my photo collage [click to embiggen]:
The destruction of the African-American Rondo neighborhood for the construction of I-94 in the mid-1960s is a well-known story, but the exact layout and street grid of the old neighborhood is difficult to imagine today. This kind of map allows people who were too young to remember Saint Paul in the pre-freeway days to get a sense of what the old neighborhood might have been like.
[See also, The Theory Behind the 1935 Saint Paul Slum Map, History Theater’s “The Highwaymen” Hit on Some Crucially Unexplored Themes, Then & Now: Rice and University and Map Monday: Twin Cities Redlining (HOLC) Map, 1934.]