Lake Street rebuild: Latino developer has big plans for four razed lots near former Third Precinct

For years, the three-story building on Lake Street just east of Minnehaha Avenue bustled with energy. Town Talk Diner drew an early-morning crowd. Spanish-language Radio Rey hosted a stream of guests. At night, El Nuevo Rodeo pulsed with regional Mexican, salsa, and Latin pop.

“There was a lot of power in that building. When you walked in, you felt something, there really was a whole vibe,” said Maya Santamaria, who owned the nightclub and Radio Rey, among other businesses in the Odd Fellows building.

The murder of George Floyd, by officers from the nearby Third Precinct police station, unleashed a wave of unrest that destroyed the entire block. For the last five years, the stretch of 27th Avenue just off Lake Street has been a grassy lot.

But plans to redevelop the block are moving forward. Colombian-born entrepreneur Wilmar Delgado recently purchased a fourth lot on 27th Avenue, where he plans a seven-story project, with 100 housing units and ground-floor retail space.

The final piece of the project clicked into place when nearby Holy Trinity Lutheran Church announced the sale on Facebook of the lot located at 3017 27th Ave. S.

Delgado, 50, is buying the property from the church. He’s lived in Minnesota for more than 25 years and is stepping into the role of developer for the first time in his career.

Delgado said the plan is a mixed-use development featuring both affordable housing and retail space.

“My goal is to see a building built again,” Delgado said. “The goal is for it to last at least 100 years.”

Church steps in

That building will be funded by Delgado, with help from the city of Minneapolis and investors but the cost is still undetermined.

“Roughly? I don’t know, it’s kind of difficult. I don’t want to throw out a number,” Delgado said.

The recently acquired lot used to feature a building owned by Migizi, an Indigenous youth-empowerment organization, but the building was damaged in a fire caused during the unrest after Floyd’s death and later demolished.

In May 2021, Holy Trinity agreed to buy the lot as part of the church’s Stepping Out in Faith initiative.

Ingrid Rasmussen, the church’s pastor, said she remembers being outside with members of the church’s congregation in the early days of the civil unrest when Brian Dragonfly, an employee from Migizi, came by to notify them the building was on fire.

“He brought this lantern and asked if the congregation would tend the fire that had burned their building down until they could rebuild Migizi in a new location,” Rasmussen said.

The congregation at Holy Trinity cared for the fire in the lantern for three years, three months, and 19 days before it was ceremonially extinguished on Oct. 5, 2023, during the opening ceremony of Migizi’s new building, located less than a mile west of their site on Lake Street.

Holy Trinity acted as a temporary land bank, protecting the property from outside developer interests. Rasmussen said the goal was to find a BIPOC developer with community ties.

“They [Migizi] wanted their former parcel here to go into the sort of hands that would care for it in the way that they wanted it to be cared for,” Rasmussen said. “And they knew that it would take time for a BIPOC-led nonprofit or developer to step forward to care for that parcel.”

Delgado purchased the lot from Holy Trinity for about $175,000, the same price it was sold for in 2021, according to Rasmussen.

Lake Street destruction hits home

The mixed-use development represents Delgado’s first steps into a new industry. He owns a home health company called Life Fountain but said he became interested in property development after seeing news coverage of the unrest following Floyd’s murder.

“When I saw the building and fire, it was kind of hard. And after driving [through the area] the next couple days later, everything looked like a bomb was hitting Lake Street, it was heartbreaking,” he said.

South Minneapolis and especially Lake Street are important to Delgado. He said he frequented salsa shows at El Nuevo Rodeo at 27th and Lake. He also remembers buying his first car 25 years ago on the corner of Portland and Lake.

Seeing the devastation on Lake Street planted a seed. Two to three years later, a friend called to tell him the properties near 27th Avenue and Lake Street were for sale and redeveloping the empty lots would be a good investment.

Other than the parcel formerly owned by Migizi, Delgado also secured a neighboring plot at 2709 E. Lake St. that used to house El Nuevo Rodeo, for $900,000, according to Hennepin County documents, and another parcel at 3009 27th Ave. S., that was formerly the Gandhi Mahal Restaurant, for an undisclosed fee.

Delgado also confirmed he owns the parcel at 3013 27th Ave. S., giving him four contiguous lots between Lake Street and the Minnehaha Post Office.

However, that wasn’t the initial plan.

Delgado said when he first looked at the area the lots had three different owners with their own plans for redevelopment.

His current project “fell together piece by piece,” he said.

Since acquiring the land, Delgado said it’s been a learning experience. He’s had to lean on various entities including local government and nonprofit partners as he navigates the hurdles of a mixed-use development.

Immigrant dance hall

The focus of Delgado’s plans have always centered on the 2700 block of E. Lake Street.

Since 2003, Santamaria, housed her businesses at the International Order of Odd Fellows building at the corner of 27th Avenue and Lake Street.

By 2012, she bought the building.

It was called 27 Event Center and home to El Nuevo Rodeo, a restaurant and nightclub, a Spanish-language television and radio station, and other businesses.

El Nuevo Rodeo, with a space of 6,000 square feet, was Minnesota’s largest Latino concert venue, according to reporting by the Star Tribune.

Even before her nightclub opened, Santamaria said, the place had been a hub for Minnesota’s immigrant communities for more than 100 years largely due to its use as a dance hall.

Santamaria frequented the building herself in the 1980s while in college, but said she never imagined owning it one day.

“I went because I was a little club kid, little partier, so I used to go, when I was in college, to that building. I remember that elevator going up and then opening up. And it was really crazy, punk rock events, Black events, whatever,” she said.

By the early 2000s things changed and Santamaria found herself in the position to provide the local Latino community a proper nightlife experience.

“We needed a venue, and we needed to stop giving the business to the ‘güeros’ [whites],” she said. “It was part of a self-determination for the Latino community to have its own spot.”

El Nuevo Rodeo flourished and in the years before the building was demolished Santamaria said the venue began diversifying by offering nights that catered to non-Latinos like the Black and African immigrant communities.

It was during those years that Santamaria came in contact with both Floyd and Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer found guilty of his death. The two worked security for her.

Santamaria’s time as the building’s owner came to an end in January 2020, when she sold the building to Adenal Investment of Woodbury for $2.8 million, five months before the civil unrest that led to its destruction.

“It’s horrible, it really is George [Floyd] and Chauvin both worked for me, it was kind of like the center of the whole thing,” she said.

Santamaria’s businesses remained in operation even after she sold the building and were also damaged during the civil unrest; she moved her radio station to Richfield but said she and the community are still mourning the loss of their building.

“All I can say is, we dropped the mic.”

A rendering of the Viva project planned along Lake Street and 27th Avenue in Minneapolis. Credit: Van Meter Williams Pollack LLP

Low-income and market-rate units

Delgado said the development will be called Viva. He is working with Redesign, a nonprofit community developer, to develop his plans and line up funders.

“They are playing a big role to help me to get all the numbers together,” he said.

Redesign is involved in several redevelopment projects in the Longfellow neighborhood, including the Coliseum building’s restoration, which is meant to create generational wealth for BIPOC small business owners.

Viva will consist of 100 housing units, according to project renderings provided to Sahan Journal by Delgado. The building will be seven stories high and contain 12,000 to 15,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor with the possibility of a Latin American market.

“It’s going to include low-income and market-rate units,” Delgado said.

Alongside Delgado and Redesign, the city of Minneapolis has also been helping in the pre-development stage of the project along with other entities like the Lake Street Council and Hennepin County.

Delgado said much of the support he’s received hasn’t been financial but rather technical assistance or networking related. Early on, the city awarded him 150 hours of pre-development help through its Developers Technical Assistance Program (DTAP). The program offers free classes, workshops and advice for emerging real estate developers.

In 2023, Delgado received a $150,000 pre-development grant from the city for his Viva project, then called “Rodeo Plaza,” in a nod to El Nuevo Rodeo.

Last fall, the project received a $450,000 grant from Hennepin County’s Transit Oriented Communities program. At that time, before Delgado had purchased all four lots, plans called for 46 housing units and 6,300 square feet of retail space.

That iteration of Viva was expected to cost $29.7 million.

Delgado said Viva is still in a pre-development stage, with groundbreaking expected in 2028 at the earliest. He hasn’t yet applied for building permits for the project.

“It’s very overwhelming. We have meetings two or three times a week, every week for at least the last two years, year and a half,” Delgado said.

For the next two to three years, the land will instead be used as a soccer field, Delgado said. Scaffolding began going up for the athletic fields shortly after he bought the final lot last week.

“It’s to not keep the lot empty, we just built a project to have it there for three years,” Delgado said.

According to Rasmussen, the pace of the neighborhood’s development has been a much debated topic in the years since Floyd’s death. If the Viva project is completed, it will take eight to 10 years to rebuild on the lots.

“If we think about it in terms of a disaster response, we never expect disaster responses to sort of happen immediately, so it’s going to take time, but I hope that here’s a moment where the community has spoken and these community partners are ready to go,” Rasmussen said.

Paying it forward

Holy Trinity’s sale of the former Migizi lot will boost another community group.

The proceeds from the sale by Holy Trinity will be donated to the Pangea World Theatre, to help it secure a permanent home in the neighborhood.

Pangea had already purchased the building a half-block away that housed the Hub Bike Co-op. Executive Director Meena Natarajan said the new funds will help it buy the plot next door.

Pangea currently leases a space in Uptown but many of its staff are from the Longfellow neighborhood and wanted to be closer to home, she said.

“People are starting to dream and so I feel like it’s really given us such a sense of healing when that happens, when people start coming into the neighborhood, especially immigrants, African Americans, to rebuild,” Natarajan said.

For Delgado, who began working towards his dream in 2022, the work is just beginning but according to him it’ll all be worth it as long as the neighborhood continues the process it’s on.

“I’m excited about the revitalization of the area, bringing people back to that corner, back to Lake Street, that shows that after really hard moments of tragedy, we can rise and build beautiful things as a community,” Delgado said.