Milwaukee Avenue: Community Renewal in Minneapolis

In the 1970s, a politically savvy and hardworking neighborhood organization, the Seward West Project Area Committee (PAC), outmaneuvered a public agency’s renewal plan to demolish approximately 70 percent of a historic neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Demolition would have included all the houses on Milwaukee Avenue, a half-hidden, very narrow two-block-long street flanked by small brick houses. Built in the 1880s, many of these houses were the very first homes in Minneapolis. Milwaukee Avenue offers a unique presentation of determined citizens saving their neighborhood in a decade that changed history.