Olson Memorial Highway: Community Harms

This article is part of a larger report, “Bring Back 6th: A Collective Vision for Reparative Justice & the Future of the Northside.”

The construction of Olson Memorial Highway displaced thousands of homes, businesses, and community centers in a predominantly Black, Jewish, and immigrant area, dividing neighborhoods in the corridor and disrupting other Northside neighborhoods.

Historic & Ongoing Injustices

Today, this history of physical, economic, and social segregation, pollution, and other ongoing impacts continues to disproportionately affect communities of color that neighbor Olson Memorial Highway in Minneapolis. These harms take the form of intersectional environmental justice impacts that shape everything from community health and economic mobility to access to daily needs and opportunities.

While this damage can never be fully undone, Bring Back 6th is an opportunity for State, County, and City partners to take significant steps toward reparations for this historic and ongoing injustice and help to facilitate a more equitable and resilient future for the community.

Beale Street of Minneapolis

The community’s history is captured in pictures of a bustling street full of pedestrians, streetcars, jazz clubs, grocery stores, and gathering places. It is also rooted in the legacy of prejudiced policies that led to the demolition and displacement involved in large highway construction projects.

Near-North Minneapolis has been a diverse and welcoming neighborhood to immigrants and migrants since the early 1900s. This area was Dakota homeland—likely wetland and oak savanna—then fur trading grounds up to the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, after which Minneapolis’ population and development exploded and newly acquired land was platted and developed.

This rapid growth planned by wealthy industrialists and speculators included Near-North’s Oak Park Addition, a “tangletown” of leafy residential streets and Victorian houses built in 1872.

Waves of immigration and suburbanization from expanding industries rapidly changed the neighborhood. The lack of racially restrictive housing covenants allowed Jewish immigrants to move into the neighborhood, joining German, Bohemian, Finnish, and Scandinavian immigrants. Black workers and families moving up from the south after the Civil War moved into these neighborhoods as well—many historically Jewish neighborhoods in the Twin Cities were the places most welcoming to people of color, leading to a vibrant mix of Jewish and Black businesses and gathering places along 6th Avenue North.

The neighborhood developed numerous churches and synagogues, pool halls, nightclubs, restaurants, and delicatessens, as well as settlement houses offering a variety of social services, such as Phyllis Wheatley, which supported sports, summer camps, dances, adult education, and housed early University of Minnesota students, and Emmanual Cohen (now Pillsbury United Communities). It became a hub that attracted African-American entrepreneurs, who opened grocery stores, dry cleaners, and restaurants after World War I.

The district became the center of the region’s growing jazz scene in the 1920s and served as an incubator for racial justice during the first half of the 1930s.

For Black residents along 6th Avenue North, venturing out of this safe haven carried grave risks. Minneapolis had ten active chapters of the KKK who were highly visible in local politics, the police department, and
the school system. The Klan made its presence known to the residents of North Minneapolis, sending warnings that there were consequences for the “dangerous intermingling of white and colored people”.

…Since the Negro was restricted from the downtown entertainment, the Ave was their only outlet for enjoyment after six days of hard labor in those years… On most of those warm Sunday evenings…there were times when the sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded with people coming or going…

Clarence Miller, creator of “Lament for a Lost Intersection” map depicting 1929 6th Avenue

Systemic Racism and Displacement

By the 1920s, exclusionary policies, intimidation, and harassment made the area around the 6th Avenue North one of the only places where Black and Jewish people could live. During the height of Prohibition, bootlegging and other illegal activities offered employment to Jewish and black men.

In 1934, the city was consumed by street battles between labor organizers and armed deputies hired by the employers, which put Minneapolis on the map and prompted journalists from around the world to predict that this was the place where “the revolution may come.”

In the aftermath of this local civil war, community and business leaders were desperate to rebuild the City’s reputation as a model metropolis. At the same time, Jim Crow became law across the nation and lynchings became common. With this backdrop, scientific racism infused the new planning ideologies that would reshape American cities, leading to an idea to take prevalence that neighborhoods where people of different races lived were inherently unhealthy, unstable, and prone to violence.

This was the context that gave urgency to plans to demolish 6th Avenue North. In the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation drew the Minneapolis map and described the area around 6th Avenue and Lyndale Avenue as, in their words, “of the poorer class of Jew and colored people.” This observation, in their opinion, made it “a most undesirable location for residential purposes,” and earned it a “hazardous” rating, unfit for investment.

Olson Memorial Highway was built as Minnesota’s first state highway along the route of 6th Avenue North in the late 1930s, and expanded in the 1950s to the shape we know today. In the late 1960s, I-94 replaced Lyndale Avenue and completely reshaped the historic Near-North neighborhood. Seven years after the construction was completed, Olson Memorial Highway was “one of the least used express thoroughfares in the city,” according to a City of Minneapolis traffic engineer.

Starting in the summer of 1936, people were forcibly removed from their homes along the corridor and in the neighborhood, which was cleared for the Sumner Field Homes Federal Housing Project. In 1938, newspapers reported that tenants in 23 houses and stores on 6th Avenue North refused to vacate their properties, which had been condemned for the construction of Olson Memorial Highway. Resident William Trent explained that he had no choice but to ignore the notice.

Residents were once again displaced when the 1995 Hollman Decree—a class action lawsuit led by the NAACP and residents of the public housing projects—required the demolition of 770 public housing units in the name of “deconcentrating poverty.” Although residents were promised the “right to return” after construction
of the new Heritage Park mixed-use development was completed, less than 5% of residents returned.

Economic Impact

It is challenging to fully comprehend the economic impact of constructing the Olson Memorial Highway. What we do know is that dozens of commercial and residential buildings were displaced during the highway’s two phases of construction in the late 1930s and 1950s. As a result, the community that once shared 6th Avenue North as a place to live, work, play, and shop could no longer enjoy these amenities. Many likely experienced a downturn in their quality of life due to their low-income status and the economic impacts of the Great Depression during the same period.

One assumption we can make is that the potential economic benefits to those who owned homes, businesses, or property could not be realized by themselves or their descendants, given the displacement that occurred.

To understand the potential value that could have been realized for homeowners, we examined the historic median home values for Minneapolis in 1930. In 1930, the median value of homes in Minneapolis was $5,697. In today’s value, that is an estimated $110,000, excluding the value of the land. Although there is no specific data on the number of owner-occupied homes that were displaced, this is a significant increase in value that should be acknowledged.

Several examples from across the county have shown positive trends in land
value and tax revenue from repurposing highways, further underscoring an opportunity to regain the value displaced during the removal of 6th Avenue North.

Olson Memorial Highway Today

Today, Olson Memorial Highway functions as a wide surface highway that is essentially a hybrid of a street and a road, characterized by wide lanes, high speeds, and minimal infrastructure for non-motorists. According to crash data, a crash resulting in injury occurs approximately every nine days along this corridor.

Additionally, asthma hospitalization rates in zip codes with the largest concentration of BIPOC residents, such as Near North Minneapolis, are five times higher than the state average due to air pollution from vehicle emissions. Given this historical context and current challenges, repurposing the highway offers an opportunity to reverse disinvestment and unlock economic value.

Safety

This section outlines how Bring Back 6th intersects with City and State transportation safety goals and summarizes the findings from City, State, and advocacy-led safety analyses.

The key takeaways from the review of these documents include:

• The City of Minneapolis and MnDOT are both committed to reaching zero roadway deaths.
• The corridor is high-risk for all modes of travel due to high posted and driving speeds, confusing and complicated intersections, unsafe and unmarked crossings, and poorly designed and maintained infrastructure.
• This corridor sees some of the highest instances of severe and fatal traffic crashes and contains the third (West Lyndale Avenue) and fourteenth (East Lyndale Avenue) highest-risk intersections in the City of Minneapolis.
• Vulnerable roadway users (i.e., people walking and bicycling), who already have the least protection while traveling, are overrepresented in crashes, primarily occurring at signalized intersections.
• The highway is used for local trips and should serve the local community. This, paired with the knowledge that many residents do not have vehicle access, makes safe multimodal travel imperative.
• Conditions for people walking, bicycling, and accessing transit are not only unsafe, but also uncomfortable, inconvenient, and inefficient.

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Learn more about the campaign to Bring Back 6th.

Once called the “Beale Street of Minneapolis,” the old Near-Northside was an integrated Black and Jewish community that was destroyed in 1939 for the construction of Olson Memorial Highway, a low-trafficked highway “to nowhere” that has been polluting the neighborhood ever since.