Star Tribune
St. Paul’s Rondo Days is a no-go this year
For the fourth year in a row, there will be no Rondo Days celebration in St. Paul.
But Gayle Smaller, chairman of the board of Rondo Avenue Inc., said the festival isn’t going away permanently. It’s coming back bigger and better, over several days and at several sites, in 2024.
While the festival has been derailed by a number of factors — from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd to the rising cost of security — Smaller said the focus now is creating an event that appeals to a younger and more diverse demographic.
“Really just broaden it out, while keeping the underlying history and significance in place,” Smaller said Wednesday. “We really had no intention of doing it this year. The goal was to bring it back in 2024, while filling the generational gap.”
Rondo Days was started in 1983 by Floyd Smaller, Gayle Smaller’s father, and Marvin Anderson to remember and celebrate what had once been St. Paul’s vibrant, predominantly Black neighborhood surrounding the former Rondo Avenue. In the late 1950s and 1960s, planning and construction of Interstate 94 cut that community geographically in half while removing hundreds of homes and businesses.
Rondo Days’ founding board members are now in their 80s and are finding it harder to stay involved, Gayle Smaller said, but the surrounding neighborhood looks very different demographically. Future Rondo Days need to have broader appeal, he said.
Rather than a large, single-day event in a park with a parade, Smaller said the idea moving forward is to host a variety of events at area parks and businesses — from a brunch honoring the neighborhood’s history to performances and parades appealing to the present.
“The community that was once here doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “But we’re building an even bigger event. It’s really going to be about, what does the celebration look like now? We’re excited.”
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, who grew up in Rondo, said in a statement Wednesday that he “cherished” Rondo Days growing up and was “disappointed to see it canceled” this year.
“We stand ready to partner with the organizers as they rethink and re-establish this beloved community gathering,” Carter said.
In a letter to the community confirming that there will be no festival this year, Smaller said the work now will be to reflect the demographics and interests of Rondo’s new residents, while still honoring its past.
“In regards to next steps, we will be adding new board members starting [Aug. 1], and have begun building a solid foundation to ensure that the Legacy of our founders and the community that raised them continues,” he wrote, “and is held in the brightest of light as we honor one of the country’s brightest historically Black communities.”
Star Tribune
Palestinian officials say an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza killed 15
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli strike on a school sheltering the displaced in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza where Israel has been waging a major air and ground operation for more than a week.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the ministry’s emergency unit in northern Gaza, confirmed the toll and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by both militant groups inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings