The first employment services for African Americans seeking entry into the local workforce were delivered out of barbershops and beauty parlors. Most important of these was the Hall Brothers…

In 1914 the Union Hall Association was created to meet the needs of the growing black community and to improve relationships with the white community. It built the Hallie Q. Brown Community House…

“In the legal profession, Labor found a friend, A lawyer on whom the toilers could depend. A fearless advocate of truth and right, And foe to every wrong upheld by might. This man was Erwin,…

The impressive house on the southwest corner of Lexington and Laurel Avenues (127 N Lexington) was built for Italian stonecutter Anthony Ambrosini in 1886. (Took out building permit April 30, 1886) He…

- The dispute between Charles Comiskey and orgainzed labor over the opening of Lexington Park - On April 30, 1897, St. Paul's legendary Lexington Baseball Park opened to the public for the first…

Before there was the “DFL” there was the “FL.” The Minnesota Farmer-Labor party existed as an independent party of workers and farmers from 1918 to 1944, essentially from World War I to World War II.…

Located on the north side of Selby Avenue between Virginia and Farrington Streets, this pleasant, tree-filled square-block park honors St Paul's outstanding African American union leader. In 1973 the…

Since 1840, St. Paul has taken on different identities: frontier hamlet, steamboat burg, provincial capital, and railroad boomtown. These transformations have left their marks all over town. Nowhere…

The electric streetcar service began on Selby Avenue in 1890. St. Anthony Hill, however, proved to be a vexatious impediment; the steep grade made for slow and hard going travel, especially in winter.…

The building at the southeast corner of the site, finished in 1863, is one of the city's oldest, and the oldest outside of downtown. The story goes back even further, to St. Paul's second decade. …

The first stop of the westbound Selby Avenue streetcar after emerging from the tunnel was at the corner of Selby and Western. It made that corner desirable as a business address. And there was a time…

St. Paul began as a steamboat town, but that era lasted barely 30 years. Railroads, and the boom in population and prosperity that they brought, made St. Paul into a city. As the city outgrerw the…

This is one of three F. Scott Fitzgerald landmarks in this part of St. Paul. The building itself is merely a solid representative of late Victorian apartment buildings. Its sole claim to fame is that…

This is the largest of Cass Gilbert's four churches in the area (the others are the Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church, St. Clement's Episcopal, and the former German Bethlehem Church at the foot of…

Before swift fire trucks, every neighborhood – especially those of wood frame construction, like most of St. Paul – needed a fire station. Making a fire call was slower and more complicated then. You…

The sport of curling involves sliding 42-pound stones of polished granite down a sheet of expertly prepared ice towards a target. One team member launches the rock in a slow, majestic procession,…