Five Watt Coffee, one of few remaining tenants at St. Paul’s embattled Keg and Case market, is leaving the W. Seventh Street food hall this weekend, but retro arcade Starcade plans to stick around for the foreseeable future, the businesses’ respective owners confirmed this week.

The last day for the cafe, which has three other locations in Minneapolis, will be Sunday, owner Lee Carter confirmed.

Five Watt Coffee’s location at the Keg and Case food hall, shown after hours May 31, 2024, is set to close June 2. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

“Many variables were involved with this, including a potential sale of the building, as well as the widespread community confusion on whether or not the market was actually open anymore,” he said in an email.

Other recent departures from the more than 22,000 square-foot food hall include restaurants Pimento Jamaican Kitchen and O’Cheeze and soap company Soapy Toads. Anchor tenant Clutch Brewing Co. closed up shop at the end of 2023, a significant blow to the market.

Keg and Case and the neighboring Schmidt Brewery Rathskeller building were acquired and revitalized in the late 2010s by developer Craig Cohen, and both projects’ finances have fairly publicly collapsed over the past year.

In October 2023, lender MidWestOne Bank took over the deed to the Keg and Case building in a partial debt settlement with Cohen. The Rathskeller building, previously sold in a foreclosure auction last year, was bought by a Minneapolis investment group in May. Cohen filed for personal bankruptcy protection in April.

Despite the uncertainty, Starcade — which just took over a sizable footprint in the building last summer — is staying put for now, co-owner Paul Saarinen said, and even continuing to grow.

The arcade is open from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday. They also serve pizza and nachos between noon and 8 p.m. Friday through Sunday.

Earlier in the foreclosure process, MidWestOne had told Starcade they’d need to vacate, but the bank reversed course a few weeks ago, Saarinen said.

“We are here for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We had kind of jumped the gun, not expecting that the situation would change so quickly, but it did.”

Meanwhile, the arcade is working to build out a greater selection of fighting games, Japanese-style rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and competitive esports to engage with niche enthusiast communities, Saarinen said.

The arcade’s pinball wing, called Bad Penny, also hosts weekly tournaments for all skill levels at 7 p.m. Fridays, and women’s tournaments at 7 p.m. the first Thursday of the month.

“We really enjoy the community and we’ll stay as long as we’re welcome,” he said. “It would be nice to be able to stay there and grow with the community, and grow what we’re doing there.”

Following Five Watt’s departure, apart from Starcade, the only remaining business operating at Keg and Case is Sana Farms, a CBD and THC product company that also sells products in Minneapolis and Taylors Falls.

Rathskeller changes

Nearby at the Rathskeller building, changes are underway as well.

The Rathskeller at the Schmidt Brewery in St. Paul on Tuesday, May 10, 2011. (Chris Polydoroff / Pioneer Press)

Rok Music Lounge and Bar, a venue that was formerly a cheffy Nordic/Japanese spot and briefly a taco bar, is still open for now, but owner Travis Wycislak said he’ll have a clearer picture of the business’ future in a few weeks.

Mancini’s, which had once signed on to use the ornate underground room for private events, has not been affiliated with the space since December 2023.

The West 7th/Fort Road Federation, a neighborhood council, lists the building online as the site of its offices but did not reply to a clarification request Friday afternoon.

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According to the Supreme Court, it’s perfectly fine for state legislatures to draw congressional districts according to political party — they just can’t gerrymander by race. This simple-sounding rule poses a serious practical problem, however, in places where there is a high correlation between being Black and voting Democratic. The conservative majority of the court, in a 6-3 decision issued last week, made it much harder for plaintiffs to prove that race, not partisanship, is the reason a given district has been gerrymandered.

The case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, is an object lesson in the conflict between two competing theories of how we should think about racism in America today.

The decisions and dissents are a bit technical. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by all the court’s conservatives. Alito argues that courts should assume that legislatures are acting in “good faith.” In other words, faced with a gerrymander in a place like South Carolina where at least 90% of Black voters vote Democratic, we should not presume race was the motivating factor for the Republican-dominated state legislature. To convince the court otherwise, the plaintiffs should compare the contested map with an “alternative map” of a district gerrymandered purely on partisan grounds but not racial ones. In the absence of such an alternative map, Alito wrote, the court should infer that partisanship, not race, was the underlying motive — making the district constitutional.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by the court’s two other liberals, excoriated the good-faith assumption and the requirement of the alternative map. Her point was that, according to Supreme Court precedent, the justices are supposed to accept the gerrymandering decisions of district courts unless those lower court decisions are clearly erroneous. The majority, she emphasized, violated this principle by imposing the presumption of good faith and the requirement of an alternative map.

So much for the law: What’s going on behind the doctrine?

The answer is a profound disagreement about racism between the court’s two factions. Alito and the conservatives think that the Constitution should protect Black people only from the most virulent bigotry — the kind that led South Carolina to embrace slavery until it lost the Civil War and segregation until the Civil Rights movement produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

More than that, they believe that such explicit racism has now effectively disappeared. The judicial presumption of good faith is implicitly based on the notion that the white South Carolina Republicans who gerrymandered the district just want Republicans to be elected to Congress and wouldn’t care if those Republicans happen to be Black. Put another way, the court’s conservatives assume that the South Carolina legislature is sticking it to Black South Carolinians because they are Democrats, not because they are Black.

Kagan and the court’s other liberals see it differently. First, they don’t agree that overt racism is dead. A presumption of good faith is therefore premature, to put it mildly. The law shouldn’t be rigged to make it harder to prove racism than to prove other kinds of legal claims.

Second, the court’s liberals implicitly believe that racism today must be understood as more than just personal bigotry. The core idea of structural or systemic racism is that, even if we could all wake up one day miraculously free of any biases, the structures of racial disadvantage created over hundreds of years of slavery and segregation would still be with us. And Black people would still, on average, be more likely to live in locations determined by that history, as is the case in South Carolina. Under this way of thinking, the fact that South Carolina Republicans can gerrymander Black people into a district to limit the influence of Democrats isn’t a neutral act or even a purely partisan one.

At a legal level, you could see the Supreme Court’s split in this case as a consequence of its refusal to find partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional. Kagan tried hard to get Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s swing vote from about 2006 to his retirement in 2018, to hold partisan gerrymandering to be a constitutional violation. She came close, leading Kennedy to at least entertain the possibility, but in the end, she lost the flight. Now the court is differently configured, and the conservatives are following the logical implications of their acceptance of partisan gerrymandering.

At a more fundamental level, the divide on the court reflects a divide in the country about race and racism. In that respect, this case is similar to last year’s major decision on affirmative action in college admissions. We can expect more of the same in the years to come.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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By TERRY SPENCER (Associated Press)

A Florida sheriff on Friday fired a deputy who fatally shot a Black airman at his home while holding a handgun pointed to the ground.

Okaloosa County Sheriff Eric Aden fired Deputy Eddie Duran, who fatally shot Senior Airman Roger Fortson on May 3 after responding to a domestic violence call and being directed to Fortson’s apartment.

Body camera video shows that when the deputy arrived outside Fortson’s door, he stood silently for 20 seconds outside and listened, but no voices inside are heard on his body camera.

He then pounded on the door, but didn’t identify himself. He then moved to the side of the door, about 5 feet away (1.5 meters). He waited 15 seconds before pounding on the door again. This time he yelled, “Sheriff’s office — open the door!” He again moved to the side.

Less then 10 seconds later, he moved back in front of the door and pounded again, announcing himself once more.

Fortson, 23, opened the door, his legally purchased gun in his right hand. It was at his side, pointing to the ground. The deputy said “Step back” then immediately began firing. Fortson fell backward onto the floor.

Only then did the deputy yell, “Drop the gun!”

Aden said Duran was wrong to fire his weapon.

“This tragic incident should have never occurred,” Aden said in his statement. “The objective facts do not support the use of deadly force as an appropriate response to Mr. Fortson’s actions. Mr. Fortson did not commit any crime. By all accounts, he was an exceptional airman and individual.”

No phone number could be immediately found for Duran.

A criminal investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is ongoing.