City crews placed barricades and started tearing up asphalt Monday morning as street construction started at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, after years of planning and debate.
The initial road work started on one block of 38th Street and one block of Chicago Avenue, east and south of the corner where a Minneapolis police officer murdered Floyd six years ago.
Crews worked around the memorial that stands on the corner, and large fist statues that adorn the ends of each block and the center of the intersection.
The project will rebuild streets to be open to traffic in both directions, with space set aside for memorials and gardens.
Several community members gathered in the square to watch the work start. Many opposed the project, speaking out at city planning sessions over the past several years to ask for an alternate plan that allowed for more pedestrian space — or to halt construction altogether.
Julia Johnson lives down the street from the square. She said she has struggled to get answers from the city about logistics, like how to access her son’s school bus stop during construction, and how neighbors would get to a food shelf in the church on the corner. She was surprised to see no-parking signs posted outside her house, since she lives just outside the area under construction.
“They are not transparent, they’re not considerate and they’re not trustworthy,” Johnson said of city staff.
A team of city employees was on-site Monday morning — not just construction crews, but also staff designated to do outreach to community members.
Adam Hayow is the city’s project manager. He said the team is doing their best to keep residents up-to-date, and will be on site and reachable during weekly virtual stakeholder meetings throughout the summer.
“The big idea is just provide them information about what’s happening, what’s being proposed, construction impacts, schedule, all that good stuff,” Hayow said.
He said construction started relatively smoothly, despite on-and-off drizzle throughout the morning but there was a brief standoff with a group of neighbors, who stepped into the street early in the day to confront construction workers and insist that they not move the large fist statues. They stepped aside after crews said they are leaving the sculptures in place for now, and working around them.
That’s one of the unresolved details of the construction plan — what will happen to those fist sculptures. Hayow said city staff and the artists are still negotiating over who will move them, where they’ll go and who will be responsible for the cost of any damage during construction.
“We want to be respectful of artists in the community and the caretakers with the two sculptures,” Hayow said. “At the same time we need to have construction continue on.”
Community members are also protesting a property tax assessment, which is charging property owners in the square thousands of dollars to help pay for construction.
It’s a standard cost levied to property owners adjacent to any city construction project, but several property owners in the square said it’s unfair to ask them to pay for improvements, after a city police officer murdered Floyd on their block.
Bridgette Stewart lives and works in the area, and spoke at a Minneapolis City Council committee meeting last week.
“We are exhausted. We are emotionally exhausted, we’re mentally exhausted, we’re physically exhausted, and now you’re asking us to continue to be financially exhausted,” Stewart said of the assessments.
PJ Hill owns a business at George Floyd Square, and said neighbors already face challenges to living there, after the murder of Floyd.
“We did not create these challenges, but we have lived through the consequences every single day. But yet, and still, we’ve stayed, we’ve paid our taxes — and we believe that this community deserves more than this, to have the financial burden placed on us,” Hill told council members.
The Minneapolis City Council is scheduled to discuss the issue later this week. At last week’s committee meeting, council member Soren Stevenson — who represents the neighborhood — agreed with his constituents.
“The construction itself is going to be hard enough on residents and on businesses,” he said. “Having the murder of George Floyd, the uprising, the years that followed was hard enough already on the businesses and residents and community members — so this special assessment is just salt in the wound.”
Back at George Floyd Square on Monday morning, Julia Johnson said the surprises and uncertainties she experienced are particularly frustrating after attending many city meetings and listening sessions over several years.
“We shouldn’t have to demand it after you’ve done a million surveys and community engagement meetings,” Johnson said.
Street reconstruction is slated to continue through the end of this year, and restart next year on the two remaining blocks of the square, finishing by the end of 2027. It’s one of several projects aimed at redesigning the area — including a redesign of the People’s Way site and the installation of a permanent memorial to George Floyd.
