Not long ago, Marvin Anderson stood in front of the refugee elders of the Hmong 18 Clan — a black man in a room full of Asian faces — and explained the history of where many from their community now live.

Before construction of Interstate 94 cleaved them apart in the 1960s, the St. Paul neighborhoods of Frogtown and Summit-University were once seamlessly connected. It’s become Anderson’s mission to weave them back together, block by block, ethnic group by ethnic group.

“This man turned to me and said, ‘I’ve been here 30 years and I never knew about what your community has been through. I can relate to that,’ ” he said.

Anderson, 76, grew up in the historically black Rondo neighborhood, once known as a vibrant middle-class enclave that gave rise to national leaders of the NAACP and the Urban League. In 1968, his childhood home on Rondo Avenue, like the avenue itself, was replaced by the deep trench of the interstate.

In his adult life, he served for 23 years as the state law librarian, keeping the official record of state legal decisions. Now retired, Anderson — a co-founder of the 33-year-old “Rondo Days” festival — has a history of his own he’d like to share with his friends and neighbors on both sides of the interstate, regardless of their race or ethnicity.

From faith to family, he believes Rondo still lives in eight core values he’s championed as one of the neighborhood’s original elders. And he’s eager to decorate eight traffic and pedestrian bridges spanning the interstate from Lexington Parkway to Marion Street with images and emblems of those ideals.

A sound wall, for instance, could accommodate a mural that speaks to respect for self and family. A historical photo or sculpted image could greet pedestrians along the bridge rail.

While the details have yet to be decided, he’s gone so far as to assign values to particular bridge crossings. Lexington Parkway would invoke the dignity of work. At Chatsworth Street, pedestrians would see a marker about the importance of education. At Victoria Street, religion. At Grotto, social integration. And at Dale Street, hope.

As the Minnesota Department of Transportation completes ongoing improvements this summer along pedestrian and traffic bridges over the interstate, Anderson believes there’s time to persuade the state to incorporate the cultural markers.

There’s certainly precedent. Anderson points to a photo of similar artistic treatments welcoming pedestrians along a highway bridge in Minneapolis’ Tangletown neighborhood.

With work on the I-94 bridges already under way, the proverbial clock is ticking, and a series of meetings with MnDOT commissioner Charlie Zelle and transportation planner Brian Isaacson produced a stiff requirement.

First, Anderson would need to send a signal to state leaders that the area’s many Hmong residents are on board. And the Somali immigrants. And the ethnic Karen from Burma. And the Oromo from Ethiopia.

“You can’t rebuild Rondo, because Rondo is gone,” said Anderson, who lives in the Summit-University neighborhood. “But you can’t forget Rondo. You have to include who is here now, and find ways to talk about what is their history. What are they bringing?”

So far, he’s gotten limited feedback.

On Wednesday morning, Anderson met with a dozen members of community advocacy groups and neighborhood district councils at the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center on Kent Street. It was the first of four weekly sessions where he hopes to convince folks with little knowledge of or personal connection to the history of Rondo that the former community’s spirit lives on.

Wa Houa Vue, president of the Hmong 18 Clan, and two facilitators from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota attended, but to his frustration, contacts Anderson had made in the Oromo, Karen and Somali community didn’t show.

“From looking at the room, we have no youth. We have a few elders. We have some things that are missing,” said Makeisha Hall, a Blue Cross health consultant, addressing the small group. “We have no Latin voice in the room. We have no African-born (members) in the room.”

Hall asked each member of the group to attempt to bring two people to the next meeting.

Marcell Walker, assistant to the north and west area managers at MnDOT, said in an interview that the department’s new arts policy requires artistic elements on bridges to be coordinated through the city in question and paid for with outside funds.

“If you have an entity come before you, that may not be representative of the larger community, so the city is a key connector,” he said. “Coordinate with your city. Give us a plan. And then pay for it. And then MnDOT will look at it from an engineering and safety perspective.”

Walker said work began Monday to replace two pedestrian and bicycle bridges over Grotto and Mackubin streets and will continue into November.

“Is it too late? I don’t think that it’s ever too late,” Walker said. “The physical structure is always there. The question is, what’s most feasible, and it’s always most feasible to do this while we’re completing bridgework.”

CULTURAL CONNECTION?

During a Rondo Days ceremony on July 17 last year, Zelle, the MnDOT commissioner, and St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman issued a formal apology for the way interstate construction was handled.

Anderson marked the event as an important start, but not a conclusion.

He said he’s well aware that the Summit-University and Frogtown neighborhoods that once gave rise to black leaders such as national NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins, photographer Gordon Parks and national Urban League director Whitney Young are more diverse today.

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But Anderson sees an opportunity. A bridge dedicated to religion, for instance, could feature interior photos of the worship spaces of different immigrant groups alongside the neighborhood’s black churches, emphasizing the cultural bond between them.

“What if I showed you a picture of an African-American church? And then I asked, show me a depiction of your temple, your synagogue, of your mosque,” he said. “And then blend these photographs … so we see the commonality of all of us is greater than our differences.”

The bridges of Rondo is a big project, he acknowledges. But it’s nowhere near as big as a second initiative he has up his sleeve, one that will take even more explaining and campaigning, and probably garner more pushback.

He points to the 5-acre Klyde Warren Park in downtown Dallas and similar parks or economic-development projects in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio, built over freeways. Anderson believes that if united, neighborhood leaders can persuade MnDOT and federal transportation leaders to put a lid over part of I-94, effectively turning the interstate into a tunnel for at least a short section. The result would reconnect streets that have been interrupted for nearly 50 years or more.

Anderson wants to bring back Rondo.

A HISTORY OF RONDO

State officials say the possibility of an interstate park or development space is neither far-fetched nor immediate.

Though no location has been chosen, Isaacson, the MnDOT planner, has been actively looking into the possibility of a short cover over I-94 somewhere in Minneapolis or St. Paul. Costs would be enormous. And even if it were funded, he cautions, it could be decades away.

Anderson is well aware that at 76, he might not be around to see such a project completed. But he’s waited his whole life for closure; he can wait a little longer, he says.

In March, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx highlighted the fact that a million people were displaced in the first 20 years of federal highway construction alone. Most of them were low-income people of color in the nation’s urban core. Half a century later, many of those areas bordering the freeway remain poor.

Over coffee at Golden Thyme, a Selby Avenue eatery, Anderson doesn’t crack a smile when he points to a picture of traffic zipping along Interstate 94 near Chatsworth Street and says, “There’s my home right there, in the middle of the freeway.”

In 1956, his father received a letter from the state indicating the family’s Rondo Avenue apartment complex stood in the way of the future interstate and would have to be moved or leveled. The family fought the decision for 12 years.

For 10 of those years, Anderson’s childhood home stood vacant in light of the pending construction.

And when the empty structure finally was relocated elsewhere in 1968, the money his father received from the state was minimal.

“It destroyed him,” said Anderson, recalling how the same situation played out for black homeowners in St. Paul’s old Rondo neighborhood. “They did think they were going to get a reasonable award. They were low-balled.”

Anderson grew up toward the western end of Rondo Avenue, a middle class community nicknamed “Oatmeal Hill” because of its relative affluence.

His childhood pal Floyd Smaller, Jr. grew up on the lower end of St. Anthony Avenue, nicknamed “Cornmeal Valley” for its poverty. Kids from the two areas didn’t always mix, but “we’ve been friends for 65 years,” Anderson said.

Smaller, 79, attended Wednesday’s meeting at Anderson’s request. “We want people to know who lived here, and who’ll die here,” Smaller said.

After Rondo’s upheaval, Smaller went on to spend 35 years as a teacher and near-legendary football, basketball and track coach at Central High School, earning a spot in the Minnesota State High School League Hall of Fame.

Anderson left to go to college, graduate school and the Peace Corps. When he finally returned to St. Paul, he no longer recognized Rondo. “It just wasn’t the same,” Anderson said. “People would tell me stuff about having to walk in the mud in order to get to church. I had so much anger when I got back here.”

LESS ABLE TO ABSORB NEWCOMERS

The interstate’s arrival was more than just an aesthetic change or a geographic inconvenience. The community south of University Avenue had been cohesive and better equipped to absorb newcomers, he said. Some 80 commercial buildings — most of them businesses owned by blacks — disappeared when Rondo Avenue was destroyed.

In Anderson’s youth, a new arrival from Chicago might soon self-identify as a St. Paulite. He no longer senses that to be the case. “When you took Rondo away, you took away that ability for the community to do self-regulation,” Anderson said.

Eager to restore some pride in place and teach a new generation about the neighborhood’s history, Anderson and Smaller founded Rondo Avenue Inc., which in 1982 launched an annual festival, Rondo Days, complete with a parade and senior supper.

It unfolds this year July 14 through 16.

“Rondo Days was created because there was so much pain in the air,” Anderson said. “It hung over us like a gloom.”

HISTORY PROJECTS

The last remnant of Rondo’s business community, a vacant two-story commercial building at 820-822 Rondo Ave., was torn down in September 2013. A few weeks later, Anderson led a symbolic funeral procession to mark its passing and promised that the site — about a block east of Victoria Street, south of I-94 on a frontage-road section of Concordia Avenue — would someday host a physical tribute to the history of Rondo.

He’s made good on his promise. On July 15, the city will break ground on a commemorative plaza at the same location. Anderson hopes the $375,000 project will be ready for its grand unveiling next April, but “we’re not going to rush it,” he says.

The city provided about two-thirds of the money, and another third came from the St. Paul Foundation, the Mardag Foundation, the Bigelow Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the 3M African-American employee network.

The money will cover annual operating costs for two or three years of programming, including a website and mobile app that launches July 1. Online videos will tell the story of Rondo.

In March, Macalester College students embarked on the “Rondo History Harvest,” an effort to digitize physical artifacts from the community’s heyday, from cookbooks to black-and-white photos.

The corner even bears Anderson’s name. In 2013, the St. Paul City Council co-named the section of Concordia Avenue between Lexington Parkway and Dale Street “Marvin Roger Anderson Avenue,” and a segment of St. Anthony Avenue between Victoria Street and Western Avenue “Floyd G. Smaller Jr. Avenue.”

Standing at Concordia and Mackubin Street on Wednesday, the two men eyed the faded, rickety-looking pedestrian bridge over the interstate disdainfully.

“You think that bridge could exist in Edina?” Anderson said. “Put that bridge in any other community in St. Paul and they’d have a fit. And all of our bridges are like that.”

Said Smaller, simply: “It’s ugly.”