Wednesday, August 28, 2019

A Night Out in St Paul


  On my recent trip to Minnesota we had a night out in St. Paul, the capital city. We parked along the Mississippi River near Upper Landing Park and walked along what is now a beautiful waterfront on a clean river on a gorgeous summer evening.  

  Looking north, in the distance you can see several of the more than a dozen bridges of St. Paul, including the Wabasha Street Bridge which crosses Raspberry Island to Harriet Island.  To the right are two paddlewheelers, the boats that have been plying the Mississippi since Mark Twain made them famous.  The one on the right used to be a showboat with musical theater but hasn’t been in use for several years.

  Looking south, a walking/biking path follows the river downstream in Upper Landing Park toward the old Municipal Grain Elevator ...


... and back upstream toward the city, past a flock of beautiful bird sculptures which represent the navigation and migration routes along the Mississippi, and ...

















four fountains, including this one that Mason 
quite enjoyed playing on.  See the hammock napper in the background?


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  Such a beautiful public green space now with people enjoying the lush lawns and scenic trails, but this glimpse of its place in history is far from glamorous.
  
  The stretch of the river was once the busy center of shipping commerce and cargo docks for ore and lumber, and the undesirable areas of land alongside became settlements for the poorest of the poor.  The area called Bohemian Flats consisted of shacks built of flotsam and jetsam from the river by male immigrants from Czechoslovakia and Germany. The recently arrived single men were a wild bunch and Bohemian flats was known as a lawless and filthy place, constantly mentioned in the newspapers for drunken fights and other debauchery.  As their fortunes improved however, the men married, had families, and sought out better places to live in the city.  By the 1880s their shacks were deserted and new immigrants from a small area in Italy began to move in.


Upper Landing/Little Italy 1950s I think

  The men found hard work as laborers in the city, some for the railroads, and built their own homes.  Little Italy, as it came to be called, suffered from serious problems including the lack of a sewer system and clean drinking water, the foul-smelling river water, and constant flooding of homes when the river rose in the spring.  

  The community remained until a devastating flood in 1952, which  caused homes and school to be condemned.  Families were relocated against their will, the buildings were razed, and a scrapyard was built on top.  The riverfront remained a mess and an eyesore, contaminated with a hundred years of human and industrial waste. But in the late 1990s it was named a Superfund site and funds were available for a real cleanup.   
 
  Beginning in 2006, construction of attractive (and expensive!) high rise apartments and condos began.  Developers kept the old street names and named new ones after some of the successful inhabitants who began their lives in America there in Bohemian Flats and Little Italy.  

17 comments:

  1. AS in many cities it was the poorest of the poor that lived in slums by the rivers. Now the properties by rivers are the most expensive. How times have changed.

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  2. It looks like a beautiful modern city now and the episodes you recount tell the story of America. Someone should make Donald Trump understand this and he might have a more sympathetic attitude towards migrants today. But I doubt it. He is too dumb to grasp the significance of the struggle that so many people endured to build a better life, especially for their children. and his wife is an immigrant too.

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  3. Brings back pleasant memories of the 70s/80's and my trips to Rochester, MSP and the Wabasha region - well actually
    all over Minnesota.

    I hope Minnesotans (??? spelling) give that Turnip Top Greenland buying clown a right "royal" reception if he ever visits,
    but from memory Minnesota is democrat country. It is a miracle if one turns on the news these days and isn't horrified by another TWEET from that deranged canary in 1600 Penn Ave. Of course that is when he isn't off to one of his golf resorts!
    Cheers
    Colin

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    1. Is those two adults and one (for reasons unknown "SHY" child) - Don, Anna and Master Mason???
      Colin

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    2. Correct. Except Mason isn’t shy! (Maybe the sun was in his eyes??)

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    3. I have just had a very generous thought for additions at no cost to Trump like Greenland etc.
      We will give him for his dysfunctional cabinet room two despised tennis "brats" - Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic.
      I will personally gift wrap the duo in barbed, poisonous wire!
      Colin
      PS: Pouring rain here at Terrigal and thankfully some is falling in drought stricken regions but plenty more is
      needed...........one can but hope.

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  4. It's hard to believe that we treated Mother Earth so terribly. I don't think we'redoing any better today...climate change. Sorry to be so negative when you write a post that shows off some progress.

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  5. That looks like a delightful place to walk now that it has been cleaned up, on a beautiful blue-sky day. Wouldn't those inhabitants from years ago be amazed if they saw it now.

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  6. I was thinking it looked such a clean, lovely, place to meander in. Then I read your history; isn't it strange - and interesting - how things turn?

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  7. thanks for visiting my blog. I checked you out and am now following you. I've never been to St. Louis. Flew over it once... does that count. hehe.

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  8. Lots of riverfront and harbors have been regenerated like this. Here in Baltimore the Inner Harbor went through that transformation. In Buffalo that we visited in July the canal and Niagara River are being renewed. I'll be sharing photos of that soon. I've never been to Minneapolis. Always talked about going to Prairie Home Companion but never made it.

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  9. In my opinion is a nice city Love from Poland

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  10. So glad you went home for a visit. Just read your last post too. Mason sure is a cutie. I remember those little wax soda bottles, and the three colored coconut candy bars. That was mama's favorite candy. This post is interesting. How beautiful the Upper Landing is today. What a change. It is hard to believe how hard people had it back then.

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  11. Dear Cynthia, I so enjoyed your posting about the waterfront in St. Paul. After living in Minnesota for 38 years--36 of them in Stillwater, which is right next to St. Paul--I left there in 2009, so I haven't really seen what your photographs shared with us. I'm going back for a visit next year and I'll be sure to go down to the riverfront--thanks to you! Peace.

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  12. That is a great change for the best, it looks beautiful!

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  13. Interesting history of the site. It looks lovely now.

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