A small group equipped with drawing pads and fliers gathers at the corner of Lake and Minnehaha in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. In the evening sun, the former 3rd Precinct police station casts a shadow over the intersection. It is Aug. 30.

The group rolls up hundreds of the fliers and tucks them into the security fence that wraps around the site. They hang the pads on it, too, with markers. Conor Cusack, who lives a few blocks away, draws on one. 

“The power of art is that it brings people in, and it can take back public space that is otherwise sort of ugly, not usable,” Cusack said. Behind Cusack and the fence is a city sign that states “Site cleanup begins spring/summer 2024.”

The pads and fliers invite passersby to reimagine the “ruins of the former 3rd Precinct” and submit design ideas to a neighborhood group called Confluence, a self-described “East Lake Studio for Community Design.” 

The site is charred and empty behind concrete barricades and razor wire. From the outside, it appears largely unchanged since the uprisings following George Floyd’s murder by officer Derek Chauvin.

The city has proposed transforming the former police station of Chauvin into a Democracy Center, a home for the city’s election and voter services division. This would include constructing a new 4,000-square-foot warehouse space for ballots and voting machines, as well as room for an undefined community space. Many in the neighborhood say that’s not the right fit for a historic site of trauma.

That includes Cusack.

“It feels very important to bring the conversation to the street and to a public-facing space,” Cusack said. “I want to see a city government listen to its residents and the neighbors of places like this and what they want, and I don’t feel like the city has been doing that in good faith.” 

Nearby is Confluence co-founder Duaba Unenra, a community organizer and cultural worker who also lives in the neighborhood. 

“This is the third or fourth time in many years that we’ve done a public art installation or engagement on the barricades at the precinct,” Unenra said, sticking fliers in the fence. Confluence has hosted film screenings and jams.

“We got a bunch of old school car hubcaps, and just like noise makers, and we set them up on the fence, gave out drumsticks and let people come literally make music on the barricade,” he said. 

In 2020, Unenra founded the studio with Sam Gould, an artist who lives in the neighborhood and teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Their goal is to empower people to be advocates and architects for their own neighborhood, to provide tools for what they call creative community placemaking. 

On Sept. 6, Unenra and Gould sit in Mirror Lab, a nearby art space, and discuss their current focus on the former police station.

“What we all plan to push for and fight for is that that site is 100 percent for — and built and designed by — community,” Unenra said.

“Community-developed and community-run,” Gould adds.

Confluence has been hosting gatherings and attending the city’s community engagement sessions about the site for years. They also run the Autonomous Mobile Media Unit out of a trailer parked next to Moon Palace books a few doors down from the precinct. They call it a “newsroom for neighbors.”

“How do you make collective decisions about something as big, both materially — it’s a big site — but big also conceptually, historically, emotionally, as that site?” Gould asks. “It contains a lot of unprocessed harm that needs time to be unpacked in a considerate and authentic way, so that’s the work we hope to be doing.”

Confluence doesn’t have the answer for what should occupy the former precinct. Right now, they say they’re focused on creative community placemaking and having tough discussions in the community about the trauma of the site, something they say the city is not doing.

“It needs to start with accountability. It needs to start with reconciliation and remediation,” Gould said.

Laura Mellem, the city’s deputy operations officer who oversees communications and engagement, counters that the city has been doing in-depth engagement for the Democracy Center proposal.

The proposal includes housing the Minneapolis Election and Voter Services Center, as well as building a 4000-square-foot addition to warehouse voting machines and ballots. The plan also calls for 8,000 square feet of currently undefined community space.

“We intend to do the [Request for Proposal] for identifying a community partner later this fall,” Mellem said. “That will be followed by a design process. That design process will happen in 2025 with construction in 2026.”

As for addressing the trauma of the site, Mellem said, “Recognition of the events that occurred after the murder of George Floyd will be included in the redevelopment of the facility. This will be coordinated in the design phase.”

Since June, the city has hosted two open houses with attendance of 76 and 80 people respectively, as well as seven engagement sessions with a total of 36 attendees. 

The city also issued a survey from June 1 to Aug. 18  and received 1,122 submissions. Mellem said they’ve engaged with people from many demographics and the feedback has been mostly positive, findings they shared in October with the Minneapolis City Council.

“This was a very thoughtful engagement process that attempted to hear all voices and over the course of several months really did find that there is widespread support, both citywide and especially in the 3rd Precinct, for the Democracy Center proposal.”

In September, Mayor Jacob Frey shared a similar sentiment with MPR News:

“Community has been at the heart of the 3000 Minnehaha redevelopment, and they’re tired of waiting. Our City has already held seven engagement sessions with residents and conducted a survey to gather input on the future of the site. 

“The survey results show clear support for transforming the site into a democracy center and a community space. We’ll continue to gather input to ensure our shared vision comes to life, but what we won’t do is sit on our hands while the 3rd Precinct sits vacant. It’s time to move forward.”

An issue of equity

Council Member Jason Chavez represents Ward 9, home to the precinct site. 

In a September interview, Chavez said he’s unsure if the city outreach actually engaged with the residents most impacted. He said he may support housing elections and voter services, but not building an additional warehouse.

“Minneapolis residents deserve more than a warehouse in that corner,” Chavez said. “It can be used for a variety of different cool things and initiatives that can actually heal the area.” 

He ticks off examples like a museum, a community development space and an indoor playground for children to play in the winter.

“Start listening to the voices of folks in the area of what they want, and I’m talking about people in the area, people that were impacted, people that saw this happening,” Chavez said. “There’s an equity issue of whose voices are more important, and when you have more wealth when you’re whiter, when you are from a richer part of Minneapolis, unfortunately, your voice is taken more seriously than folks in the area.”

Chavez said he supports the work Confluence has been doing. 

“It’s something that I welcome,” Chavez said. “There were people that experienced so much pain and trauma in this corner, and if those voices are not centered in the development of a future project here, we’re missing the mark.”

On Aug. 24, Unenra of Confluence hosted a placemaking session at Mirror Lab with a small group of people of color from the neighborhood. He asked the group to think about the 3rd Precinct in terms of spatial justice, a field of study that connects social justice to places and spaces through design and urban planning.

“How can we create places that generate community safety?” Unenra asked. “The way that we want to explore with y’all is through the practice of placemaking. Are y’all familiar with that?”

Resident Noah Exum responded, “My understanding of placemaking is that it’s essentially the idea of giving cultural and social value to a physical space.”

Unenra agreed, sharing a definition from the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, a non-government-affiliated organization of cultural organizers and artists.

“Creative placemaking has been described as a process of community development that leverages outside, public, private and nonprofit funding to shape and change the physical and social character of a neighborhood using arts and cultural activities,” he said.

Unenra points to local examples of successful placemaking, such as the Sabathani Community Center and the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Both are less than three miles from the precinct site.

Both, Unenra said, are community-led sites that were “literally born out of the fires of previous generations of uprising.”

Years of community gatherings like this led to the creation of the 3000 Minnehaha Coalition, which was announced at a press conference Sept. 24 at the 3rd Precinct site. 

The group includes residents, neighborhood business owners and other stakeholders including Confluence and Moon Palace Books. The coalition has urged the Minneapolis City Council to reject the Mayor’s proposal.

Unenra stated that the coalition would present an alternative proposal for the site in 2025 guided by three key elements: the site must provide community-run infrastructure and services, include a healing and truth-telling process about the history of the precinct, and help cultivate downtown Longfellow as a cultural district.”

“The desire amongst many neighbors is for this site to become a cultural district that is a destination for entertainment and community life for Southsiders,” Uenra said.

Focusing on the built environment

Wife and husband team Fancy Lanier-Duncan and Emmanuel Duncan are part of the coalition. They are musicians and owners of the nearby Legacy Building recording studio and creative space. They also founded the Soul of the Southside, the Juneteenth festival that happens in front of the precinct.

“I also grew up in this neighborhood,” Fancy Lanier-Duncan said. “Behind us here, it has been a sore spot for our community for such a long time. The formation of this coalition is to bring people and ideas together in a creative and an equal way.”

Urban designer and architect Paul Bauknight, who founded the Center for Transformative Urban Design, is also a part of the coalition and spoke at the press conference.

“Wherever we have civil unrest in the United States, we do the same thing: We have some commissions, we give a couple of committees, we then focus on the built environment,” Bauknight said. “The problem with that strategy is that we’re not focusing on rebuilding the unjust systems that cause the human pain and suffering that leads to the unrest. So we’re focusing on these inanimate objects that are not the driver of why the inanimate objects get destroyed. Here, in Minneapolis, at this spot, this space has got to be part of our larger reckoning for the future of our city. That’s what we’re talking about in this coalition.”

In mid-October the Minneapolis City Council passed a non-binding resolution co-authored by council members Chavez, Robin Wonsley and Aurin Chowdhury that opposes the addition of the warehouse at the site.

On Oct. 17, the city’s operations officer, Margaret Anderson Kelliher, told the council that a new construction fence will be going up closer to the building. On Oct. 28, the city’s hired contract workers started cutting down the razor wire and removing the security fence at the site.

A few weeks after the press conference, Gould said that artists and creatives have an important role to play in community-building and placemaking.

“The role of an artist is to create these spaces so that we can question differently, and what that allows us is to be able to see the world around us differently,” Gould said. “Artists can play a really important role in opening up those spaces so that we can live differently. Hopefully, we can live more kindly with one another.”

Gould said the 3000 Coalition is receiving more ideas for the site from the neighborhood. A 7-year-old submitted a design for a subsistence farm. Another resident suggested a free school, where neighbors could teach each other skills and histories, like what happened on the site.