A short distance west of Engine House #21 and turning north on Smith Avenue, you will eventually cross the Mississippi River on the Smith High Bridge. Of the first three bridges in the area, the High Bridge was the last to be constructed, connecting Uppertown and Lower West Side.
After the West Side opened to settlement in 1851, the first organized crossing was John Irvine’s ferry in 1852. The Wabasha Bridge followed in 1859, then the Robert Street Bridge in 1886. These connected the Lower West Side very well, but left the blufftop isolated. No doubt some people liked it that way, but others wanted easier transportation, more commerce, and an increase in the value of their real estate -- and St. Paul had always been a town of real estate speculators.
The prime mover behind a third bridge was Robert A. Smith--banker, postmaster, city councilman, state representative, senator, and Saint Paul’s longest-serving mayor of fifteen years. Its main contractor was steel baron Andrew Carnegie, operating behind the name Keystone Bridge Company. The bridge presented some technical challenges -- it had to be very long and very high on one end. Construction began in 1888 and finished in 1889.
The High Bridge was a spectacular instant landmark: almost half a mile long, 182 feet above river level, made of wrought iron, with four huge limestone river piers below, and a deck made of cedar blocks to muffle the sound of the iron-rimmed wagon wheels for which the bridge was designed.
It held together just fifteen years. Saint Paul’s most violent storm, the Cyclone of 1904, took the south end down in winds estimated at 180 miles per hour. But the bridge was promptly rebuilt and lasted eight decades more, though with lengthy closings for repair in 1958 and 1977. Time, gravity, and corrosion required its demolition in 1985. The current bridge opened four years later and today is a favorite tailgating spot on the Fourth of July for viewing the annual fireworks show at Harriet Island.
Crossing the High Bridge pays off on both ends, as it takes you to neighborhoods that are interesting and little-visited by nonresidents. At the lower end you will find Uppertown, one of the city’s oldest precincts, with old worker housing, rehabbed rowhouses, and the lovely, restored Irvine Park. At the upper end to the left, is one of the best lookout points in St. Paul, and beyond it, Prospect Park. To the right, you will see Cherokee Heights and Cherokee Park.
]]>At the corner of Baker Street and Ohio is Engine House #21, a great example of early adaptive reuse. Built in 1910 for horse-drawn equipment, it is a pleasing example of fire station design with a hose tower.
After its retirement from the fire service in 1943 it was used by the VFW and then, starting in 1950, as a clubhouse for the Saint Paul Turnverein. The Turnverein (known today as The Turners) began in the old country as an anti-Napoleonic movement.
Transplanted to America with the great German immigration, it served immigrants to preserve their German culture and language, and as a place for young people to develop physical vigor, especially before public schools instituted physical education programs.
Until the anti-German sentiment fomented by World War I, St. Paul had a very prominent public German culture, with newspapers (20 German-language papers are known to have been published in the city), the Germania Bank, cultural institutions like the Schubert Club, social clubs, and a statue of Schiller in Como Park.
The St. Paul Turnverein once had a fine clubhouse downtown and many participants. The Ohio Street club building is tiny compared to that one and the chapter is no longer active. Today the building is a private residence. On the way to or from, notice the 1883 rowhouse at 542-548; it awaits restoration. There is another rowhouse nearby at Winifred and Bellows, built in 1891.
]]>Located just a couple of hundred feet west from the Haas House at 241 West George is the Samuel Dearing House.
Augustus Gauger, German-born and prolific St. Paul architect, designed this one, and was built in 1886, with both Italianate and queen Anne elements. The Dearings, originally from New Hampshire, were dairy farmers -- they had a prize herd of shorthorns -- and real estate speculators who owned many acres on the blufftop (they called their cows The Bluffdale Herd).
The depression of 1893, which lasted a few years, seems to have caused them some distress, as they repeatedly held public land auctions in parcels from six to one hundred lots, and in 1895 he sold several city blocks for $24,000 -- at least $600,000 in today’s money. The Dearings kept their fine house through it all and in 1905 moved to Santa Cruz, where they lived on Walnut Avenue, a street renowned today for its beautiful and well-preserved Victorian houses.
The George Street house, from 1886, combines Italianate and Queen Anne elements, both of which the Dearings found all around them in their new California neighborhood.
]]>Half a mile west of the Rau-Strong House is the Charles Haas House at 214 West George. Note the wonderful front porch and attic windows above. Built in 1889.
Charles Haas was born in Indiana County, in Western Pennsylvania, in 1849, and came to St. Paul at age 7. His father, Caspar Haas, born in Hesse Darmstadt, and in St. Paul became a very early West Side saloonkeeper -- the Sugar Bar. Later he ran a butcher shop in the West Seventh area. Charles learned the butcher trade, but soon moved up the distribution chain and became a livestock dealer.
As early as 1884 the Globe newspaper referred to him as a “well known cattle salesman.” After the South St. Paul stockyards opened in 1887, bringing with them a vast increase in the volume of trade, Haas spearheaded the creation of the St. Paul Livestock Exchange and served as its president sixteen years in three different stretches. He was a politician too, serving terms as register of deed and county assessor.
Despite his German heritage Haas was also a member of the Irish-American Club; perhaps because his wife, Mary, had been born in Ireland, and perhaps also because of the advantages of socializing with St. Paul Irish-American politicians with names like Butler, O’Brien, and Donnelly. The Haases belonged to St. Michael’s parish. Charles died at the West George house in 1933.
George Street, by the way, takes its name from George Bell, believed to have been the first white settler on the West Side; he staked his claim in 1851, immediately after the Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota that ceded the land to the United States.
]]>Continuing west on George Street, there are three residences worth admiring. Just south of the Riverview Library is the Rau-Strong House at 2 East George.
Adam Rau was a stonecutter and contractor, born in Germany. He quarried the limestone for this residence (native limestone was St. Paul's first choice for truly permanent structures in the early years.) The walls are two feet thick and the style, according to Larry Millett, “a melange . . . but more Italianate than anything else.” Rau designed it himself. The house went up in 1883, and Rau may have had plans for it from the beginning. When his daughter Elizabeth married Ossian Strong in 1885 the place soon became theirs.
Strong, the son of a farm laborer from New York, worked 50 years for the same wholesale grocery company, Foley Brothers & Kelly. Elizabeth Rau died at age 33 in 1894, leaving three young daughters. Strong used the house’s size to advantage; soon he had both his parents and his mother-in-law living there too. Strong died at age 72 in 1922. The house stayed in the family until 1986.
]]>A short distance south of St. Matthew's School, at the corner of Humboldt and George, you will find Riverview Library.
The industrialist (founder of US Steel) and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gave money for the building of 1579 public libraries in the United States. The standard view is that he did this for the benefit of immigrants (as he was, from Scotland) and their children, to enable them better to rise in the meritocratic society of the United States. A few cynics might speculate that he desired also to expiate guilt over his brutal treatment of his workers (think of the Homestead Massacre.)
The Riverview is one of three Carnegie libraries in St. Paul, all built in 1916; the others are St. Anthony Park and Arlington Hills. There is disagreement about who designed Riverview and St. Anthony (they are very similar.) St. Paul Public Library ascribes them to the untraceable “Cameron and Company.” Architectural historian Larry Millett gives credit to St. Paul city architect Charles Hausler. The most delightful feature of this library is the abundant light invited in by the enormous windows.
]]>On your way up Humboldt, take a left on Winifred Street and stop at Jerabek’s New Bohemian Coffeehouse and Bakery. There is nothing historic about the building, but the family has been operating a bakery since Ed Jerabek, a Czech immigrant, opened one in St. Paul in 1906. One might say that Edward Jerabek had pastry, or at least flour, in his blood. His father was an immigrant miller from Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. Edward came to St. Paul as an adult, from the Czech community in Silver Lake, McLeod County.
He went straight into the retail baking business, first on Front Avenue in the North End, then 710 Smith Street (the building still stands, now occupied by Capital Deals bike shop), a few blocks south of the High Bridge, then two years on West Seventh Street, and finally, in 1926, at Winifred and Stryker where it remains today. Jerabek’s may be the oldest continuing commercial establishment on the West Side. The current owners are the first who are not descendants of the founder, but they do continue some Czech pastry traditions -- the pastry recipes are original.
]]>Built in 1902, St. Matthew’s is probably the second-oldest school building in the city, after St. Joseph’s Academy/Christ’s Household of Faith (1863). The school itself, originally housed in the first St. Matthew’s Church (long gone), began in 1892. This was one of the six German “national parishes” in St. Paul, organized on ethnic lines. Parts of the surrounding neighborhood were in that era heavily German. Census records from 1900, for example, show some blocks populated up to one-third by people claiming one or more grandparents from Germany. And of course in the city as a whole (state too) Germans were by far the most numerous ethnic group.
By conducting services and school in German, St. Matthew’s helped immigrant families preserve language and culture. German was the language of church and school until 1917, when feelings incited by World War I suppressed many German names, institutions, and practices in St. Paul and around the state. St. Matthew’s was a grade school until 1929, when the second building (complete with bowling alley) and high school were added. Enrollment hit 1000 in 1952 and 1200 in 1958. It is now, much smaller, a pre-K through 8th grade school.
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