Minneapolis city leaders, residents and business owners are at odds about the future of the intersection where George Floyd was murdered five years ago by police officers who pressed him stomach-down in the street as he begged for air.
Artwork and offerings sit at the crossroads where Floyd took his last breath on May 25, 2020 — E. 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. A large fist sculpture stands in the center of a roundabout. A former Speedway gas station, now known as the People’s Way, is boarded up and covered in protest art.
The current debate about what to do with George Floyd Square centers around whether cars should be allowed to continue travelling through the intersection, or whether it should be turned into a pedestrian-only space.
Some community members and nearby residents see the intersection as “sacred ground” that should be blocked off from cars to allow space for reflection and to prioritize pedestrian safety. Others want traffic to continue flowing to provide access to businesses.
Many on both sides are frustrated that the process for deciding what should happen next has taken years.
“To me it’s sacred not only because a Black man died there – that happens all the time, everywhere. But it’s symbolic of the brutalization and anti-Blackness that this country was built on,” said Art Serotoff, a longtime community advocate in the neighborhood.
The intersection’s future has also sparked debate at city hall, with the mayor and City Council not seeing eye to eye.
Mayor Jacob Frey supports a “flexible open” street plan that would keep vehicle traffic, widen sidewalks and update the area’s infrastructure. Frey said the results of the city’s engagement sessions to gather public input, which cost about $2.2 million, were “unambiguous.”
“We did a pretty extensive engagement survey process, and people want us to move forward,” Frey said. “They want some action … They want progress.”
But the Minneapolis City Council voted earlier this month to table that plan.
They also asked the city to further study creating a pedestrian plaza. Frey vetoed that action on Feb. 19, which some council members hope to overturn in a vote at Thursday’s council meeting.
Council Member Jason Chavez said George Floyd Square is a place of protest, where people come to mourn and honor Floyd. He said trust was broken when police officers killed Floyd.
“Many community members were hurt and they felt betrayed by the city, and I think there’s a way to address those concerns while also recognizing — not forgetting or sanitizing — what happened here,” he said. “There are many people with different opinions on this issue, but I think we can all agree that we should protect the sacredness of this place.”
Some community members say the city should act soon to update the intersection’s infrastructure and clean up the streets.
“Another five years will be a decade. My kid is going to be in college by then,” said Cedric Steele, a co-owner of a restaurant, Just Turkey, on Chicago Avenue near the square.
But Jeanelle Austin, the executive director of Rise and Remember, an organization that preserves offerings people leave at the square, said that the community was deeply traumatized in 2020, and that conversations about developing the intersection didn’t start immediately.
“Whenever someone says it’s been five years, for me, that is a most insensitive statement to the volume of the trauma that was caused, that it triggered one of the largest global uprisings that anyone has ever seen,” Austin said.
Jenny Jones, who lives four blocks away from the square, said the city’s last round of community engagement meetings felt rushed, and that the city only has “one shot to get this right.”
The city unveiled three development proposals for the square last July based on community meetings the city had conducted since 2021 — an open street plan, a pedestrian plaza and a transit mall.
The city announced in October that it wanted to move forward with a “flexible open” concept that would allow vehicle traffic to continue through the intersection. The square could be closed off for events such as the anniversary of Floyd’s murder and protests. Frey said temporary closures could occur on a regular basis.
“When city employees on city time murder a man, I don’t think the city has a right to determine how that man in that space is memorialized,” said Jones, who attended the community engagement events. “They just don’t have the moral authority for that, and there is no actual timeline for this decision.”
Frey said that a state statute bars the city from creating a pedestrian plaza if most of the property owners aren’t on board with the idea. The city surveyed property owners in the area, he said, and of those that responded, none supported the concept.
That hasn’t deterred Chavez, who believes there’s still an opportunity to work with businesses and property owners to designate a pedestrian area.
If the council approves the “flexible open” streets plan, Frey said he hopes construction would start later this year.
“I’d like to move forward,” he said. “I would like to see dirt move this year.”
A call for pedestrian mall for safety, contemplation
Floyd was killed in the street near a bus stop on Chicago Avenue after an employee at the nearby Cup Foods convenience store, now known as Unity Foods, called police on him for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. The area is blocked off with concrete barricades, and is covered with murals, artwork, flowers and other offerings.
Car traffic on the two-lane street has shifted over on the street around the barricades. The Metro D Line and Route 5 buses used to service the intersection, but have not returned.
Austin thinks a pedestrian-only model is the safest option.
“George Floyd Square is a place where people pay attention to what happens here, and we need to be mindful, especially given the current conditions of our country,” she said. “How are we going to protect people in the way in which we design our communities?”
Jay Webb, known as “the gardener,” tends a garden at the base of the fist sculpture in the roundabout. He doesn’t think cars need to access the intersection, and pointed to other pedestrian-friendly areas in the city, like Nicollet Mall downtown.
The square’s garden is for victims of police brutality and white supremacy, he said.
“If they don’t give it to us, we’ll give it to ourselves,” Webb said.
Katie Dillon has lived down the street from the square since 2011, and wants the city to find a way to have dedicated pedestrian space that could also allow for emergency vehicles and public transit to service the area.
“I just think: What an opportunity to be an example in the world of how to do something differently, right? Like, we need that,” she said.
Support for open streets and businesses
Many residents and community members say they want to keep the streets open to support local businesses, and are concerned that closing the streets may make the area less safe.
Community members blocked the intersection off from traffic for sometime following Floyd’s murder. The area was known as an “autonomous” and “no-cop” zone. Several shootings took place near the square, some of them fatal.
Crime increased in the area during that time, said Marquise Bowie, who works with two groups that operate in the square, the Minnesota Agape Movement and Rise and Remember. He said some people took advantage of the fact that police weren’t entering the area.
“If we could have kept it closed and safe and it was beneficial to this community, I’m pretty sure we would all want that,” he said. “But if it’s only because George Floyd got murdered that we should keep it closed, I don’t see the logic in that, because we can probably find somebody got killed on any one of these blocks, and we ain’t shutting them down.”
The streets were reopened to traffic in 2021.
Larry Ashby has lived two blocks from George Floyd Square for 30 years. He thinks the memorial should be moved to the People’s Way, a vacant gas station and parking lot across the street from where Floyd died, and that the streets should remain open. He said he’s seen small businesses in the area struggle.
“It’s all good,” he said of the memorial, “but it just needs to be across the street at the gas station.”
Asa “Ace” Rice runs an art gallery nearby on Chicago Avenue, and grew up in the neighborhood. He attended the city’s community engagement meetings, and said that from what he’s seen, the community “overwhelmingly” wants to keep the streets open.
“If you make it hard for the small businesses to survive, then … where do we go from here?” he said.
Rice said he hasn’t seen a “clear vision” of what a pedestrian plaza would look like, and believes people might have to compromise with the majority opinion favoring open streets.
Erick Lewis has lived near George Floyd Square for 55 years since he was a young child. He previously worked at a drugstore that is now Unity Foods, the convenience store immediately next to Floyd’s memorial.
Lewis and his daughter said they witnessed Floyd’s murder from their home — Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck while two other officers held down the rest of his body and a fourth officer stood watch keeping angry bystanders at bay. Lewis’ experience growing up in the neighborhood, he said, showed him that people of color were treated unfairly by police.
“There’s too many people that I know, including myself, that grew up in that community or in this skin, and we’ve been identified as a problem,” said Lewis, who is Black.
Lewis isn’t opposed to allowing vehicle traffic through the intersection, but he’s concerned about the memorial becoming too commercialized.
“Don’t turn us into a cash cow,” he said.
Bowie leads “pilgrimages” for visitors to the square, but calls himself a “tourist interruptor.” He said he tries to get people to think critically about why they’re visiting the square. Like Lewis, he wants whatever happens to the intersection to benefit people that live nearby, and doesn’t want the area to become a tourist attraction.
The memorial currently doesn’t tell visitors much about who Floyd was as a person, he said, adding that a plaque would help educate visitors about what happened there.
“That’s like having a lot at a gravesite with no plot,” he said of the current lack of information. “There’s just nothing there. Tell us a little bit about this guy that opened up the eyes to a lot of people.”
Some hope the debate stops dividing community members. Heather Doyle, the artistic director of the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center, a nonprofit arts organization near the square, said she doesn’t want the community to be torn apart by what she sees as a political debate between city leaders.
“It’s really put this cleave in our community,” she said. “It breaks my heart, frankly.”
Austin, from the Rise and Remember group that preserves offerings people leave at the memorial, said that no matter what side community members are on when it comes to developing the square, nobody feels heard.
“That, to me, is the most interesting part about all of this,” Austin said.
