Defending Community: The Struggle for Alternative Redevelopment in Cedar-Riverside

Preface

Preface JUST want you to put in your book that 'gee, we had fun,''' said "ICedar-Riverside activist Tim Ogren when I told him of my plans to try to publish the story of Cedar-Riverside. I hope I have expressed in these pages just how much fun they had. Sometimes the fun was hard work, and sometimes it was even quite painful. But it was ultimately the fun of winning-of building a neighborhood and a community . Few people get the opportunity to experience the sense of community I experienced in the five years I lived in Cedar-Riverside, although those five years were some of the hardest on the community fabric. But even under the circumstances of a community increasingly disrupted by internal conflict, I too had fun. Cedar-Riverside is one of the most dynamic communities anyone can imagine, and it is hard to resist being swept up in a community that is actually winning in the struggle-not winning unconditionally, but winning nonetheless. I ended up in Cedar-Riverside-along with Tammy Raduege, my partner-quite naively in mid-1983. Looking for housing close to the University of Minnesota, where I was about to begin my doctoral work in sociology, we found the closest, cheapest, and most spacious housing in Cedar-Riverside. Never mind that "central heat" in our upper duplex apartment meant a huge gas space heater in the center of the apartment that would occasionally singe the cat's tail when he got too close, or that the noise from the two freeways bordering the neighborhood was constant, or that the bar traffic would sometimes rouse us out of bed in the middle of the night. We were living in Cedar-Riverside, with an entire metropolitan area's worth of culture Copyrighted Material ix and politics all rolled into one three-hundred-acre neighborhood, and it was just a four-block walk to school. Once we got settled, it didn't take us long to realize there was something different about this neighborhood. It was full of mature hippies -some more noticeable than others. Long hair, peasant skirts, and funky language were fashionable in Cedar-Riverside long after they had been declared out of date in the rest of the country. And Birkenstock sandals had been fashionable in the neighborhood long before the rest of the country decided maybe they weren't so ugly. Hippie dogs (gentle animal-shelter refugees-no purebreds here), who wore bandannas instead of collars, roamed the neighborhood freely and, to my amazement, looked both ways before they crossed the street. Living in Cedar-Riverside meant that, instead of unloading your junk at a rummage sale, you put it out by the street with a sign proclaiming it "free stuff." Here "cooperative" had a highly elaborated meaning : the debates were not over which capitalist-owned grocery store to patronize but over the relative political correctness of a workercontrolled organic foods co-op versus a consumer-controlled mixed organic and nonorganic foods co-op. But the weirdest thing of all was an immense complex of concrete apartment towers called Cedar Square West. The incongruity of all that concrete facing what otherwise looked like a small town with small-town housing and a smalltown business district (except for the hippies, of course) demanded an explanation. So I started asking questions-questions that led me into the heart and soul of Cedar-Riverside, introduced me to my neighbors, and helped me get my degree. I had always been drawn to alternativesto experiments in better living, insulated from the violence of competition , hypermasculinity, and racism/ethnocentrism. Until then, however , I had only read about better places. What I discovered after I began asking questions was that Cedar Square West-that immense experiment in entombing a community in concrete-was not the story. The real story was the rest of the neighborhood, which appeared so unremarkable on the outside-except for the hippies, of course. The true experiment, the true alternative, had developed in the rest of the neighborhood. Now, in the 1990s, the dogs are not nearly as likely to roam the streets or wear bandannas. The surviving grocery co-op is the one that tenaciously adhered to a worker-controlled, organic-foods philosophy . The people have grown into the 1990s. They no longer look like stereotypical hippies, and one realizes, in retrospect, that they x Copyrighted Material Preface were always more...