In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, one South Minneapolis community convulsed in pain and suffered massive destruction. On Juneteenth this year, it celebrated the fruition of a project that speaks volumes about community agency and ownership, and how support from intermediaries, including LISC, can be profoundly transformative in building back stronger, and more equitably, than ever before.
Four years ago a landmark commercial building in South Minneapolis was badly fire-damaged in the anguished days of civil unrest that followed the police murder of George Floyd. What happened next to this century-old beauty surprised a lot of people.
Rather than see it demolished or snapped up by bottom-feeding real estate interests, a partnership anchored by Black women harnessed $30 million in public and private money, restored and upgraded the 85,000-square-foot building, and will own and operate it going forward.
Today, the Historic Coliseum Building stands on East Lake Street as a symbol of renewal and a sign that things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been. With affordable rents and loaded with amenities, the building makes a home for small businesses owned by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). It is a showcase for BIPOC art and design, and plants the flag of Black ownership—with all the powerful agency and wealth-building opportunities that entails—on one of the most important commercial corridors in Minneapolis.
Kitty-corner from the 3rd precinct police station where George Floyd’s murderer was assigned, the Coliseum reopened during a community celebration of Juneteenth—the day when the last enslaved people in the United States were finally informed of their freedom, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
“At its very core, Juneteenth is an affirmation that we are here, and we will continue to be here,” says Taylor Smrikárova, director of real estate development at Redesign, Inc., the community development corporation (CDC) that spearheaded the project. “The redevelopment of the Coliseum Building is an investment in the radical ideas of equity, sustainability, and prosperity for all.”
A novel partnership
In an innovative arrangement, Redesign co-developed this asset with two Black business owners, lead architect Alicia Belton (Urban Design Perspectives) and management consultant Janice Downing (CommonSense Consulting@Work), along with a third partner, Shanelle Montana, who with her husband Chris Montana founded “proudly Black-owned” Du Nord Social Spirits, a craft distillery and popular cocktail room not far from the Coliseum whose warehouse was also set ablaze in May 2020. These three partners are deeply invested in the Coliseum project, financially and emotionally. After seven years Redesign plans to exit the ownership group, leaving Belton, Downing, and Montana as the Coliseum’s owners and stewards.
Belton and Downing, longtime office mates and friends, will headquarter their businesses in the building and together run a business center where they’ll rent space by the hour or day and nurture emerging BIPOC entrepreneurs with shared services and learning opportunities. Shanelle Montana will open Lagniappe, a New Orleans-style restaurant, as well as a nightlife-sparking bar, on the ground floor. Retail spaces at street level and office units on the basement, second, and third floors will be leased at various price points. The ground level will also house the Coliseum Event Center, available to rent for weddings, corporate retreats, and other occasions.
Belton has described the Coliseum Building’s ethos as a commitment to “lift as we climb,” echoing the motto of the National Association of Colored Women founded in 1896 during the rise of the violent, segregationist Jim Crow era.
Pain and purpose on Lake Street
The Coliseum Building sits on a stretch of Lake Street that has long been a multi-ethnic working-class commercial corridor, a lively place where entrepreneurs without a lot of capital can establish businesses and visitors can shop, get a bite, hear live music, and experience the community’s cultural diversity.
It was little over a mile away that on May 25, 2020, George Floyd died under a police officer’s knee, crying out “I can’t breathe.” Thanks to a teenager’s cellphone video, the world watched it happen. People across the nation also saw images of the 3rd precinct headquarters burning, as massive peaceful protests gave way to nights of arson and vandalism that damaged some 1,500 properties in Minneapolis. For folks living and working at the destruction’s epicenter, these events were immediate, terrifying, and heartbreaking. Small business owners, many of them BIPOC and immigrants, faced devastating losses.
On May 28, Chris and Shanelle Montana captured the feelings of many in a message on Facebook: “We are overwhelmed by the injustice that took George Floyd from us and the pain his murder continues to cause in our community. Yesterday’s protests were a second day of beautiful unity. We are crushed that those protests were later followed by destruction … We love you Minneapolis. We will be a place to heal when you are ready.”
Sharing the pain were nonprofits like Redesign, the Lake Street Council, and LISC Twin Cities that had promoted and invested in the community for many years. “There were so many people who poured everything into Lake Street and South Minneapolis for decades. And there were a lot of beautiful projects there,” says Amy McCulloch, LISC Twin Cities deputy director.
Before long, these groups went to work aiding small business owners with grants and technical assistance. In concert with community members, they also began thinking about how to rebuild, and in particular how to stave off the outcome many feared: distress sales of property to wealth-extracting speculators that would redevelop and gentrify or hold the properties indefinitely in a state of ruin.
Was there a way to advance local BIPOC ownership instead? “That was the mantra out in the community: ‘We’re not just going to rebuild what was there. That’s not a high enough aspiration. It has to be transformational,’” recalls LISC Twin Cities executive director Peter McLaughlin, who had served South Minneapolis for nearly 30 years as a Hennepin County commissioner.
Many hands for a heavy lift
LISC’s most critical part in supporting this aspiration was to invent a targeted financing tool, along with capacity-building grants for partners involved in the effort.
In April 2021, less than a year after George Floyd’s murder, LISC Twin Cities announced the Community Asset Transition (CAT) Fund. With grants and investments at concessionary rates from Hennepin County, JPMorgan Chase, the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minneapolis Foundation, and others, along with LISC lending capital, the $30 million fund was ready to deploy deeply credit-enhanced loans for property acquisition and, later, construction.
Led by LISC Twin Cities senior program officer Kate Speed, the fund has made $25.3 million in loans, focused on projects by emerging developers of color and partnerships pairing experienced nonprofits like Redesign with local property owners and entrepreneurs. The Coliseum Building is the largest such project to date.
Redesign accessed a $2.07 million CAT Fund loan to swiftly buy the burned and vacant property, and later a $7.47 million loan to bridge state and federal historic tax credits. Other public funders of the redevelopment include the City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, and the Minnesota Main Street Economic Revitalization grant program. At the tail end of the development team’s fundraising, LISC Twin Cities organized a roundtable of philanthropic organizations to fill a remaining budget gap. “Without LISC’s role in the project,” says Redesign’s Smrikárova, “there would be no Historic Coliseum Building today.”
The boarded-up 3rd precinct building is not the only scar still marking the landscape around East Lake and 27th Avenue South. But the spiral of displacement so many feared would come in the long wake of tragedy “didn’t happen,” says longtime Lake Street Council executive director Allison Sharkey. Apart from a handful whose buildings were completely destroyed, nearly all the hundreds of mom-and-pops of the East Lake Street corridor recommitted and eventually reopened. What’s more, says Sharkey, “There’s not a single case of somebody that sold their property to somebody from outside the community.”
She attributes that to a healthy ecosystem of business-support organizations (including Redesign and her own organization) that could help owners figure out how to rebuild or, if they decided to sell, connect with a pipeline of local groups ready to purchase properties and develop a community-serving vision for them.
In fact—and this was a shared aspiration, too—the work of responding to crisis has actually built up the nonprofits and strengthened the “community muscle” it takes to tackle big projects like the Coliseum, says McLaughlin.
Building for the ages
With its handsome brick exterior, terrazzo and wood floors, and lofty ceilings, the Coliseum, if it could speak, would tell many stories.
It was built in 1917 at a major streetcar hub. In ensuing decades the building brimmed with small businesses. People went to the Coliseum for a haircut or a dental appointment, to buy meat or insurance, to shoot billiards in the basement or dance in the spacious top-floor ballroom. For fifty years a family-owned department store, Freeman’s, filled a large part of the ground floor.
The demise of the streetcar system and rise of car culture in the 1950s moved people and commerce away from the urban core. Lake Street lost bustle, and in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so did the Coliseum, though it housed a furniture warehouse and a rehearsal space. In recent decades BIPOC and immigrant families—from Mexico and Central America, East Africa and South Asia—helped write the corridor’s comeback story.
With the Coliseum’s reopening, a new chapter begins. Belton and Downing are busy setting up shop. The Montanas, whose former cocktail room closed four years ago, are excited to once again interact with the community they love. And Smrikárova is in active lease negotiations with potential tenants including a tortilla purveyor, a hair salon, and a campaign headquarters.
In a small interior section of the building, the developers have preserved the pattern smoke and water made in 2020—a “weeping wall” that tells a story of pain and struggle. That the opening comes on a day to celebrate the resilience and cultural legacy of Black Americans is only fitting. “The restored Coliseum Building,” says Smrikárova, “is yet another reminder of our history, our strength, our grit, and our power.”