Nieeta Presley envisions a day sometime soon when a new coffeeshop at University and Dale in St. Paul will offer a "Frogtown with Two Hops of Rondo."
If you have a better name for a drink, Presley invites you to put your money where your mouth is. The organization she directs,
Aurora St. Anthony Neighborhood Development Corporation (ASANDC), is planning to open the Rondo Coffee Cafe in the new
Frogtown Square mixed-use building. For a $500 donation, ASANDC will assign any name you like to a beverage on the menu.
But Presley says the real purpose of the cafe is not to create new drinks but to be a generator of social enterprise -- hiring and training people who have trouble getting work elsewhere and helping folks learn how to start their own businesses.
The cafe's name recalls the lost, lamented Rondo neighborhood, home to St. Paul's African-American community before the construction of Interstate 94 destroyed it almost half a century ago. The Rondo Coffee Cafe will serve as a mini-museum to the memory of Rondo, Presley says.
To that end, supporters may donate lesser amounts to have their family photo from Rondo displayed on the cafe's walls or on top of a table. She wants to include stories with the photos.
The kind of photo customers might see is one that's been offered already from 1954 when Hubert Humphrey was re-elected to the U.S. Senate. The donor's dad--an African-American weighing more than 300 pounds--is shown seated in a wheelbarrow that's being pushed by a "little white guy" up Cathedral Hill, as Presley recalls it. The two had bet on the outcome of Humphrey's Senate bid, and the photo documents how the bet was settled.
Eventually the display could grow to include memorabilia of community life since Rondo Avenue disappeared, Presley says, to answer the question, "What happened next?"
Source: Nieeta Presley, Aurora St. Anthony Neighborhood Development Corporation
Writer: Chris Steller