MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Along the miles-long Minneapolis street where more than a century of migrants have found their American footholds — Germans, Swedes, Vietnamese, Somalis, Mexicans — a new history can be traced.

There’s the smoldering police station torched early Thursday morning by protesters enraged by the death of George Floyd while in custody. There’s the Wells Fargo bank branch a couple of blocks away that mobs stormed through the next night, leaving behind a carpet of shattered glass and strewn paperwork. “Kill Bankers” reads the graffiti now spray-painted on an outside wall.

Go further up Lake Street and there’s more fresh history: the Somali restaurant with the broken windows, the empty hulk of a burned sneaker store, the boarded-up party supply store owned by a Mexican immigrant who had been praying for the coronavirus lockdown to end so he could reopen.

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.

On one end is a trendy district of bars and shopping. On the other are quiet neighborhoods atop the Mississippi River bluff. Between the two is a timeline that spans almost five miles marking each wave of arrivals, along with a tangle of languages spoken in each group’s markets, restaurants, churches and community groups.

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.

The 35-year-old was born in Somalia, but her family fled the country to escape war when she was a child.

“When I saw the fire two nights ago, it was like a trauma that was triggered again for me,” she said. “I had put that away in my life a long, long time ago … I told my mom ‘This is a war zone.'”

It’s Lake Street’s minority-owned small businesses that may suffer the most from the racial firestorm that hit the city this week. As thousands of people protested a police force with a history of violence against people of color, the collateral damage spread wide — from immigrant-owned restaurants to a center for Native American youth to an affordable housing complex under construction.

“What happened with Mr. 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 muraled corner building was broken into twice during the unrest, with some of its goods stolen.

“Nothing changes and people feel they’ve lost everything,” Barrera said. “There’s nothing to lose for them anymore. When there’s no justice, no fairness and no equity, they lose hope.”

“But we are hurting ourselves,” he said.

Many speculate that Lake Street was hit so hard because its eastern stretch includes the station associated with the white officer now charged with murdering Floyd. The destruction is particularly painful because Lake Street had become a success story, an achievement people took pride in.