Wedged between the University of Minnesota's West Bank campus and the Cedar Avenue bridge over the Mississippi, Cedar-Riverside is one of the most remarkable urban communities in the United States. Cedar-Riverside was a bohemian district in the 1960s and early 1970s — coffeehouses, folk venues, the Whole Earth food co-op, protesters and students — before a catastrophically misguided urban renewal project demolished most of the neighborhood's housing and replaced it with a series of modernist high-rise towers beginning in 1973. The towers were intended as a mixed-income new town in town; they became instead almost entirely low-income housing.
Beginning in the early 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, Cedar-Riverside became the primary landing point for Somali refugees arriving in the Twin Cities, which now has the largest Somali diaspora community outside of Somalia itself — over 80,000 people. The neighborhood today is emphatically East African: Somali restaurants, halal butchers, clothing stores selling East African textiles, and cafes where men play cards and drink tea line the commercial stretches of Cedar Avenue. The Riverside Plaza towers you see dominating the skyline are now sometimes called Little Mogadishu by residents, a name claimed with pride.