Rondo Avenue, which existed from 1865 to 1966, ran about two miles from Rice Street to Lexington Avenue in Saint Paul and gave its name to a neighborhood that over 101 years was home to Germans, Irish, Jews, and then Blacks. The avenue was named for Joseph Rondeau, a French Canadian and former voyageur whose surname was anglicized to Rondo. After Minnesota acquired territorial status in 1848, and when Saint Paul was still little more than a collection of buildings, Rondeau purchased about forty acres in a recently incorporated part of the city, likely in the winter of 1856, and this land became known as the Rondo Addition. Between 1859 and 1869, he sold the property, which was subdivided among several real estate agents, and streets including Marshall, Iglehart, Carroll, and Saint Anthony were created or extended through the addition, with Rondo Avenue as its central street. As Saint Paul grew rapidly between 1870 and 1905, the first residents of the Rondo Addition included many foreign-born people, especially Germans, Russians, Jews, and Irish. By 1900, Blacks began leaving the city's commercial core and moving toward the Rondo Avenue corridor; by the 1930s, about half of Saint Paul's Blacks lived in Rondo, and by the 1950s that share had grown to 85 percent. Rondo was a working-class neighborhood within walking distance of churches, factories, commercial districts, and other jobs in the city's center, and many residents worked as Red Caps for the railroad and walked to the Union Depot. Redlining by the Federal Housing Administration, which marked supposedly hazardous neighborhoods in red and promoted the idea that stable neighborhoods should remain occupied by the same social and racial classes, along with other racist housing practices, made it very difficult for African Americans to live outside Rondo. As a result, Rondo became a tight-knit, self-sustaining community where businesses, churches, and social organizations grew from Oatmeal Hill west of Dale to Cornmeal Valley east of Western, with many family-owned businesses operated by both Black and Jewish proprietors who lived in or near the neighborhood.
