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Two years ago, the riots transformed this corner of Lake Street near Chicago Avenue into a vacant lot, but last Saturday evening it bustled with crowds streaming into a local ministry's yard sale raising scholarship money for Black and Latino students.

"It is a lot of stuff," said Columba Reyes, as she packed up for the night, heaping piles of clothes into garbage bags.

Motorcycles and drag-racers snarled and muttered down the street. The child of a volunteer for the ministry grew tired of blowing bubbles and started tossing his bubble wand high in the air to see if he could catch it. A passing motorist whooped out the open window.

The predominantly Hispanic neighborhood looks more lively this summer than it has since the start of the pandemic, but it may never return to what it was then. East Lake Street is also home to the Third Precinct. Ruins of the police station still sit empty down the street, and many of the dozens of businesses torched during the riots have not recovered.

"Lake Street isn't what it used to be," said Gregorio Rivera, another volunteer.

The people of Minneapolis are living through strange times.

It's been two years, five months and 22 days since the Department of Health reported the first official case of COVID-19 in Minnesota. Three months later, Minneapolis became the focal point of America's debate over the future of policing, synonymous in national media with images of a Black man dying under the knee of an officer, a precinct swallowed in flames and brigades of armed soldiers patrolling the streets. The sound of low-flying spy helicopters is now a regular accompaniment to daily life.

The problems are real; this summer, as Minneapolis mounts its comeback to a new version of normal, violent crime rates are soaring above average, the pandemic has transitioned into an endemic and opioid addiction is surging in the background.

Yet Minneapolis contains multitudes. The lakes, patios and street festivals are booming with a surplus of appreciation accrued during months of lockdowns. Those scenes look nothing like a New York Times' columnist's casting of contemporary Minneapolis as a "dystopian ghost city" or a Fox News anchor's as an anarchist hotbed.

Last Saturday, a dozenTK Star Tribune reporters and TK photographers set out to document a night in Minneapolis during this historic summer by embedding with people and in places that help define the city's unique character. The 10-hour period brought moments of pain, laughter, belligerence, mundanity, weakness and resilience. They found police and medical responders chasing violent crime, while more responded to what could be called drunk crime. Kids played in parks, crowds flocked to stadiums and blood spilled on the street.

In North Commons Park, a group of mostly young boys shout and laugh as they shoot free throws and scrap for rebounds. A few older teenagers watch from the bench, or look on while riding bikes in tight circles on the edge of the court, itching to correct the younger ones' bad form.

"You did not deserve that point!" one of the boys calls out when another sinks a lucky shot.

Five miles south, the sun descends toward the horizon over Bde Maka Ska, and walkers and runners embracing the warm evening along the east shore offer an earful for eavesdroppers:

"They're going to give her a bone density scan…."

"I don't care where I move..."

"Quack, quack," squawked a slow-moving biker, shooing a waddling of ducks off the path.

In downtown Minneapolis, it's an hour before kickoff. Katelyn and Tricia Kell stick out conspicuously in the light rail station outside U.S. Bank Stadium Station as among the only ones not wearing Vikings purple. "I should have worn my Packers jersey," muses Katelyn Kell, in town for the weekend with her aunt.

The pandemic crushed light rail ridership, but this summer it's rebounding. Some fear the accompanying violent crime on the trains has made them less safe than before. Asked if the reports worry them, the Kell women shrug.

"I'm from Milwaukee," says Katelyn, who works as a bartender. "I know what to do."

Tanya Jack grins widely as she gazes at her reflection in a mirror propped against the side of her spacious tent, tucked near the edge of a crowded homeless camp in south Minneapolis' Phillips neighborhood.

Jack likes what she sees. The bright, sleeveless dress she found at a thrift store days earlier drapes perfectly over her slight frame, and the navy blue matches the color of the tattoos of her six children's names on her left shoulder. "I feel beautiful," says the 45-year-old as she steps into the warm evening air. "Who says that just because I live in a homeless camp that I can't feel beautiful – at least for a while?"

It's been a difficult past 20 hours for Jack.

Around 1 a.m. that morning, she and her partner, Moe Williams, were startled awake to the sound of gunshots fired right outside her tent, and a strange man yelling at everyone to shut off their lights. The shots were so close that Jack thought she could hear the sound of a bullet hitting a nearby fence. Terrified that an armed predator might be roving the camp, Jack crawled to the corner of her tent and tried to keep silent. She slipped on a pair of high-top sneakers – just in case she had to flee in a moment's notice.

"You just never know what people are going through when they come in here off the streets," Jack says. "Are they angry at us for being in a homeless camp? Are they racist? It could be just a crazed person coming in here on a whim to shoot up the place."

Jack barely slept the rest of the night and rose well past dawn on Saturday – feeling tired, sweaty and fed up with living in a camp. Flies were buzzing and recent storms had created a standing pool of fetid water in the alley adjacent to the camp.

But leaving raises a series of thorny logistical questions. How would they carry all their stuff – including a couch, futon mattress, and five bags of clothes — to a safer location? They had no phones and no way to call friends to help transport their belongings. Someone suggested going to the Quarry homeless camp in northeast Minneapolis, but Jack refused to go there because she heard it was infested with rats.

Ultimately Jack and her partner decide to stay – at least for another night - on the patch of soil that has become their home.

Jack prides herself on being a survivor. Since joining the ranks of the unsheltered six years ago, Jack estimates that she has been evicted from at least 15 homeless camps, as the city continues its practice of periodic sweeps. "My people have been wandering like this for hundreds of years," says Jack, who is Ojibwe. "It's become a way of being."

But there was another reason that Jack is reluctant to leave the camp. Staying put means she will be assured a supply of fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid that she and her partner smoke or inject several times a day. Out here, Jack does not have to venture far to find the drug. The users and dealers live side-by-side in tents in the camp. Some occupants of the camp sometimes refer to the site as "Camp `Feti," slang for fentanyl.

As she walks down the alley, Jack speaks of the "super healing powers" of fentanyl, and how the opiate kept her from falling deeper into despair after the sudden death of her uncle two years ago. Nearby, a woman sitting under a plastic umbrella takes her time carefully sprinkling the substance on a piece of tinfoil before smoking it. Dozens of used syringes lay strewn about the block, despite efforts by camp occupants and volunteers to clean the area.

"Everything is beautiful on fentanyl," Jack says. "There's no strife. There's no quarreling. There's no worrying about not having enough money to live. There's no physical pain, no mental pain. It's my medicine."

Chiffon Williams, 62, whizzes by in her scooter with plastic bags and some cash. Known among the camp as "Mama Scooter," Williams visits the site several times a day to talk to the dwellers and give them money to pick up trash. Some days, she collects more than 50 dirty needles from around the camp.

...Loud domestic, possibly physical...

The radio squawks, cutting through an upbeat country song bellowing out of Minneapolis police Sgt. Cody Johnson's dashboard.

It's three hours into the middle-watch shift in the 4th Precinct, a wide swath of land in north Minneapolis stretching from the Mississippi River to Theodore Wirth Parkway to Interstate 394. Today, Johnson is among only nine officers on patrol – part of the new normal since hundreds of his colleagues quit the after the riots.

Still, it's the only precinct the eight-year veteran officer has ever wanted to work. "It's where the action is," Johnson says proudly.

He rolls up to the corner of Plymouth and Vincent avenues north, where two of his colleagues are attempting to calm a distressed woman. She'd come to confront the man who she says stole her Apple watch. The guy tells the officers she'd given the watch to him as a birthday present, and he intends to keep it.

A woman monitors the situation as she braids her daughter's hair on the front stoop, and three youngsters playfully chase their dog in the yard. A man on a scooter across the street stops to survey the chaotic encounter.

In the end, there's not much the officers can do. Property disputes like this are for civil court, says Johnson.

"People think we can do everything," he says, "but by law, we can't."

Meanwhile, downtown, a group of 12 revelers, resplendent in their purple garb, board a westbound Blue Line train and begin snapping selfies. A woman in the group attempts to do chin-ups using the train's luggage rack, as her friends egg her on.

"What stop do we get off of?"

"I'll know it when I see Sneaky Pete's," replies one of her companions. They file off at the Warehouse District station and noisily disappear in the direction of the downtown bar and club scene.

…Engine 19, difficulty breathing report on Malcolm Avenue…

…Overdose on Park Avenue downtown…

…A male in a restroom having an asthma attack…

Capt. Jeremy Norton is sitting in a beige-block office catching up on paperwork as the 911 dispatcher drones in the background. In other rooms of Station 17, firefighters are watching TV or resting up in one of the bedrooms as they head into the last leg of a 48-hour shift.

It's been a slow night here for Norton's crew, but peace is fragile in this business. They went all summer without responding to a gunshot victim, then a couple weeks ago they caught a double shooting at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in broad daylight outside a Sunday church service.

Norton came to that same intersection two and a half years ago on a report of a man with a bloody mouth. He arrived two minutes after paramedics had taken an unresponsive George Floyd to HCMC, and Norton has testified in two trials of the officers. One call can change everything.

Engine 5 for an overdose on Second Avenue South, announces the disembodied voice of the dispatcher.

Some firefighters won't go to the area now called George Floyd Square without a police escort in fear of their own safety. Norton isn't one of them. He says the space isn't homogenous; it can be dangerous, but only if dangerous people are using it. He respects what the community has tried to do with to make it a healing place. "I personally feel the city missed a lot of opportunities to turn it into something positive for the community," he says, like creating a civil rights memorial.

…Eight-month-old child is struggling to breathe…

This time, the lights in the station blink overhead and an alarm rings, signaling Norton's crew is up.

Steven Mudek, a former school teacher who joined the department eight years ago, jolts awake from his room and moves mechanically toward the station garage as he throws on his gear.

In seconds, Engine 17 is coming alive on the black streets.

Near Powderhorn Park, music blares as 14-year-old Jesse Vilchiztrejo and his 8-year-old sister Jhoanna break open a pinata and ride a mechanical bull. Guests for their joint birthday party wear cowboy hats, sip Modelo and eat plates full of home-cooked carnitas. In the alley, a young couple presses together, dancing a Latin step. Jesse, feeling emboldened from having earned his black belt in taekwondo that morning, rides one-handed and tosses his hat into the crowd.

In Dinkytown, a dozen people gather outside the CrunCheese restaurant, a new Korean hotdog joint, and wait for their food as nightfall cools the air. A car races by and the noisy rev of the engine cuts off all conversations.

At the Green Line station down the street, Marco Gonzalez, a 20-year resident of Minneapolis, who is originally from Mexico, has just clocked out from his job at a banh mi restaurant and is now heading downtown to meet friends. Gonzalez says he feels safe in the city and aboard light rail, but he knows crime is up. "It's sad. Minneapolis is a great city."

Line from HCMC....

Back at Chicago Avenue near Lake Street, the yard sale crowd has packed up and left, and a different crowd has staked claim to the corner.

"I got a place to stay, but I'm still addicted to the streets," says a 67-year-old man who only identifies himself as Memphis. A woman approaches and hands him a bottle of peach brandy. "When it gets dark, that's the only time I come out, but ain't nobody out here except police and crooks."

A drunk man walks by holding an open bottle of vodka and offers it to Memphis, who declines. He sees a black car that he figures is driven by an undercover cop. Two metro transit police came riding through and turned right on Chicago. "Someone," he says, "needs to be trying to help these people."

…12-year-old caller says a red car keeps following her…

"Copy," Sgt. Johnson responds. Seconds later, the computer chimes with an update: She thinks they are trying to jump her.

Johnson flicks on his blinker and rumbles toward 47th and Colfax avenues north, where two frightened preteen girls rush to either side of the squad, demanding to climb inside. "What's going on?" Johnson asks.

From the safety of his backseat, the girls tearfully recount how they caught a bus from south Minneapolis to attend a birthday party at a North Side park. A car started tailing them as they left, and three older boys jumped out and yelled in their direction, scaring the girls enough to send them fleeing toward a nearby homes to get help and call 911.

"It's alright," Johnson assured them, as they continued to whimper. "I'll bring ya home."

A man intercepts them out front, confused at the sight of an MPD officer escorting his child. The girl hugs him tightly, with little explanation. "Thank you for taking her home," the father said warmly. An elderly bystander resting on a nearby bench echoes the sentiment.

Soon his laptop chirps and the screen illuminates his face in blue glow as he takes in the new call.

"Caller has an injury to his face," he says. The report says a man was assaulted with a coffee pot. It's the second domestic assault call of this shift. Johnson arrives to the house, near the border of Brooklyn Center, where four other officers have parked.

They no injured man; only blood and shattered glass on the floor of the kitchen

"What happened? Why is there blood on the floor?" the officer inquires "Where is [the victim]?

"Ya'll are just some Trump supporters," she responds.

"Who is [he] to you, anyway?" the officer presses on, ignoring the comment.

"I remember what happened to George Floyd!" she exclaims.

They find the man sitting outside in the ambulance, with a blood pressure monitor coiled around his arm and pressing a wad of gauze to his cut lip.

Two months earlier, Johnson recalls, police responded to the same location following a drunken argument. That time, though, they arrested the man for stabbing the woman with a pair of scissors.

"Eventually it's going to end up worse," Johnson sighs.

As darkness falls, most people in Camp Feti retreat to their tents. Flashlights flicker like fireflies in the warm August night. A symphony of crickets mixes with the low beat of a dance song emanating from someone's stereo.

Under the light of a headlamp, Jack weaves colorful yarns around crossed sticks to form a colorful, geometric pattern. The design, known as "God's eye," is considered good fortune among the Indigenous people of the Southwest. She plans to sell it and show other Native women who lived in the camp how to make them, she explains.

Later that night, Jack takes one more dose of fentanyl in her tent as her partner watched to make sure she didn't overdose. Then she drifts off to sleep with her shoes on.

Downtown Minneapolis changes after midnight.

As people have returned to the area this summer after COVID-19, violent crime has begun to creep back up after two years of historic lows, and TK shootings after midnight in these areas this summer.

A group of men leaving the Twins game pile into the back of a pedicab hollering and taking selfies, despite a loss to Texas.

A half hour before the bars close, a crowd gathers outside the AC Hotel where more than a dozen police officers have detained a young man they say is wanted on outstanding warrants. His friends are shouting expletives at the officers and bar hoppers from across the street start gathering around the squad cars.

An officer drops a red and white can of crowd control pepper spray and it hits the sidewalk. The man in handcuffs shouts out his mom's phone number to his friends while he's being placed in the back of a squad car.

The bars and clubs dump hundreds of rowdy customers onto the streets at 2 a.m. and a black Jeep crashes into a street light on Fourth Street that lands on a young man walking on the sidewalk, striking him in the head. The fallen metal pole pins him to the ground and he's motionless. Blood pools and splatters on the street.

Onlookers rush to the chaotic scene and call 911. His friends are in distress hugging each other, screaming for help. Police officers arrive in minutes and kneel beside the injured man, who is conscious enough to joke about needing another shot of alcohol.

Mounted police arrive at the scene, and an EMT talks to another young man sitting on the curb holding the back of his head who was impacted by the downed street light and covered in his friend's blood.

The culprit's Jeep is parked a few yards ahead of the streetlight with a flat right tire. A woman who was driving with another female passenger says that a white van swerved into them, causing them to veer into the pole. The van fled the scene and officers reviewed surveillance to confirm the driver of the Jeep was not at fault. She calls for a tow truck while the ambulance take the injured man away and police cordon off the area with yellow crime scene tape.

A white Subaru pulls out of the AC Hotel parking ramp with two young men on the hood of the car shouting as they cruise past the officers.

A young man is beaten outside the Gay '90s nightclub and he lies motionless on the sidewalk. Officers push back a crowd amassing and a man throws a Budweiser bottle toward that shatters and spooks the horses. Another man weaves through the crowd trying to sell single roses wrapped in plastic. Officers hold pepper spray but do not use it. The crowd is breaking up.

Down the street, drag queen Variah T. Shaux, known also as Able Sanchez, is among the bar-close rush at the all-night Nicollet Diner. The bearded beauty performed earlier that night at Lush and decided to cap off the night with a drink at the nearby 19 Bar and then a breakfast skillet with friend Moises Viveros after they got a "very reasonably priced beverage" at the nearby 19 Bar. "We felt empowered to indulge our hunger. Where else to go? Truly, where else to go?" Sanchez said, nodding to the fact that the diner is the only 24-hour restaurant downtown.

At 3:26 a.m., Engine 17 is screaming through red lights, aiming north toward a call of a vehicle on fire. They arrive to find a smoking minivan that's T-boned a parked Subaru with enough velocity to push the car's passenger side up onto the curb. The minivan's owner has a dubious story about leaving the car running for literally just a second, and when she came back out the car took off and she chased behind it for a half block until its unidentified driver crashed. Or maybe someone had a copy of her spare key. At any rate, the perpetrators are gone and she can't stop giggling or keep a grip on her purse. "To be honest, I don't have insurance," she admits.

Norton and Mudek pry open the hood and confirm the van's engine isn't about to burst into flames. This is a job for the Third Precinct dogwatch, not the fire department. Enough squads show up the mundane call that Norton deduces the mayhem downtown must have petered out. He wishes the officers a good night as they climb back into Engine 17 and head back to the station.

They perk up as the smell of fresh donuts being made fill the air, signaling morning is here. With a little luck, they can still get a few hours of sleep before their shift ends.