The protests that have roiled Minneapolis night after night didn’t inflame just a single neighborhood: Much of the violence raged up Lake Street, an artery of commerce and culture that cuts across a broad swath of the city.

For residents, for businesspeople, for artists, the Lake Street corridor has long been a symbol of the city’s complex history, a block-by-block study in immigration, economic revitalization and persistent inequality.

The Lake Street businesses owned by Suad Hassan’s family are now boarded up, bearing messages like “black owned – solidarity.” Each night, the family has stood guard, successfully begging the mobs to pass them by.

It’s Lake Street’s minority-owned small businesses that may suffer the most from the racial firestorm that hit the city this week.

Floyd is a horror,” said Eduardo Barrera, the general manager of Mercado Central, a cooperative of largely Latino-owned businesses that helped spark economic revitalization along the street when it opened 20 years ago.

The destruction is particularly painful because Lake Street had become a success story, an achievement people took pride in.

Deb Frank moved into the Longfellow neighborhood just off East Lake Street 25 years ago, buying a two-bedroom, 100-year-old home for $40,000.

Early in the last century, it was Germans like Emil Schatzlein, who opened a saddle shop on West Lake Street in 1907 that still sells cowboy boots today.

Just like many American cities, the 1960s saw a stream of white residents and businesses leave Lake Street for the suburbs.

Minneapolis also has wrestled with its growing racial segregation -- a division uncomfortably illustrated by driving east on Lake Street, which begins in the overwhelmingly white, quiet and leafy neighborhoods near Uptown before shifting into largely black or mixed neighborhoods.

Gregorio De La Cruz, a Mexican immigrant, was just starting to reopen his two East Lake Street businesses -- a party supply and candy store, and a commercial cleaning business -- when the violence erupted.

De La Cruz hung a sign on his boarded-up door -- “Justicia Por Georrge Floyd” -- one of scores of pleas emblazoned on Lake Street’s plywood-lined storefronts