A Minneapolis doughnut shop has become the mailing address for a memorial that does not have one. On Thursday, Nov. 12, Glam Doll Donuts took in about 100 letters carrying “I Voted” stickers meant for the Alex Pretti and Renee Good memorial.
Owner Teresa Fox said the bakery had offered its address to people outside the area who wanted the stickers placed at the site, according to MPR News. The envelopes have come from Washington, D.C., Texas, Nevada, Michigan, Florida and other places. That one-day count is the only volume Fox has put on the record.
A Mailbox Standing in for a Street
The practical problem is simple. Memorial caretaker Jeff Wendelberge said the memorial address does not exist as a street address, so a letter written to the site itself has nowhere official to land.
He recalled a local mail carrier delivering one of the first letters with an out-of-state sticker. The envelope was addressed to the “Alex Pretti and Renee Good Memorial.” The bakery’s mailbox is doing the work a street number cannot.
Senders are not mailing the stickers as souvenirs. They are sending them so they can be placed around Pretti’s memorial in Minneapolis, a site that also commemorates Renee Good.
What the Stickers Answer
The tributes sit on a winter that Minneapolis has not finished absorbing. Alex Pretti was shot by ICE agents on Jan. 24 during a large-scale federal immigration enforcement operation in the city, The Guardian reported. President Donald Trump called that operation “Operation Metro Surge.” Renee Good was also killed by federal immigration agents last winter.
Some of the people now writing to the bakery said those deaths motivated them to vote and, for some, to become more politically engaged. A letter from Florida put the sentiment in two short clauses: “thank you for doing this; we tried.”
Julia Lopez Kaley said the sticker effort started organically, without one person launching it. She also said it feels like February again, with people coming from around the state, the country and the world.
From the Polling Place to the Pole
The mailbox is an extension of something that had already started in person. On Election Day, some Minnesotans left “I Voted” stickers at the Renee Good and Alex Pretti memorials after casting ballots, MPR News reported earlier this month.
Not everyone mailed theirs. Bobby LaPin traveled from Baltimore and, on Nov. 6, placed his Maryland “I Voted” sticker at Pretti’s memorial, The Minnesota Daily reported. He also left a National Defense Service Medal from his military service.
He put the sticker near the top of a light pole and turned it east. He said he wanted all of Maryland to be able to see that they had voted for Alex Pretti. The orientation was the message: a state sticker, faced toward the state that issued it.
A Sticker, a Name, a Note
Minneapolis is not the only city where an “I Voted” sticker has been pressed onto a memorial connected to immigration enforcement. In Houston, voters covered a memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo with stickers and handwritten notes, including “I voted for you” and “Por usted,” Axios reported.
The Houston notes and the Minneapolis letters are doing related work at different distances. One is a sticker left by someone who walked up to a memorial. The other is an envelope that has to find a doughnut shop because the place being honored is not on a mail route.
For now, the documented route runs through Glam Doll Donuts. Fox’s count is one Thursday and about 100 letters. Wendelberge’s first remembered envelope still carried a name the post office cannot deliver, and the stickers inside are being carried the rest of the way by hand.
