Phalen Creek was a spring fed-stream flowing from Lake Phalen through a deep ravine that ancient waters had gouged from the land. It ended up forming a small delta on the Mississippi River floodplain. Surrounded by trees and wetlands, it served as a corridor for songbirds and other wildlife. The local Dakota, who lived nearby, surely fished there and hunted along its banks.
When Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan priest and explorer was paddling up the Mississippi in 1680, his group met a Dakota war party who detained him and beached his canoe at the creek’s confluence with the Mississippi River. He is usually considered the first European person to visit Phalen Creek.
Shortly after Minnesota became a territory, Edward Phalen took up a claim on the creek that would later be named for him. In 1844 he sold it to William Dugas, who built Saint Paul's first saw and grist mill there. The meandering waterway would have a long-lasting impact on the East Side neighborhood and its water power led to the economic investment that brought settlers into the area.
The ample water supply and sandstone cliffs in which storage spaces could be dug were attractive and the site once housed at least four different breweries. The most significant of these was the one built at the northeast corner of Greenbrier and Minnehaha. Andrew Keller, a native of Germany, established the Pittsburgh Brewery there in 1860. Five years later he sold his small plant to Theodore Hamm, and he and his family transformed it into one of the largest breweries in the country.
After the Civil War, railroads were built in the area and one of them ran along the route of Phalen Creek and attracted industries that brought people to the East Side. The banks of the creek were also homes of Swede Hollow and Connemara Patch, two immigrant settlements. While these residents got their drinking water from artesian wells, they used creek for washing, watering their small gardens and some residents put their outhouses on stilts across the stream.
There were some dangers. Occasional heavy rains turned the creak into a raging torrent. In the spring of 1897, six year old Margaret Connelly slipped on a rock walkway across the creek near East Fifth Street and was swept into a sewer and drowned. Her parents investigated suing Saint Paul for lack of safety near the sewers, but the courts found that no liability attached to the city.
Over time, the creek was deployed into large storm and creek sewers and by the middle 1930’s all of the waterway was contained in a huge storm water system. While the Swede Hollow and Connemara Patch communities no longer exist, there is still a creek. But you can no longer see it, because it now runs underground from Phalen Lake to the Mississippi River.
]]>Set on the hills overlooking downtown St. Paul and the Mississippi River, the East Side has always been separated from the rest of the city, first by the marshy ground of the Trout Brook and Phalen Creek beds on the east side of Downtown, and then by the railroads that followed those corridors. Payne Avenue became the primary business district for the East Side, serving its many neighborhoods.
By the time St. Paul was settled in the 1850s, Phalen Creek had cut a corridor from Lake Phalen to the Mississippi River just east of Downtown. Here is where much of the first industry was established and first residents lived.
If one characteristic defined the East Side throughout its history, it is that it has been a place for newcomers. In the late nineteenth century, the Irish, Germans, Swedes and Italians made the East Side their home. As early as the 1860s, newly arriving Swedish immigrants made their way to settle in the abandoned shacks of fur trappers on the banks of the Phalen Creek ravine. Called “Svenska Dalen,” or Swedish Dale, the modest neighborhood soon was known as Swede Hollow.
Many of the men in the Hollow were day laborers, climbing the long stairway out of the ravine each day to work. Women took in sewing or laundry, and often cared for boarders in the home in addition to their families.
By 1915, most Swedes moved out of the ravine and north along Payne Avenue. But Swede Hollow continued to be an initial entry point for new residents, and Italians replaced Swedes in the Hollow. Arriving by trains, many immigrants were met by Joseph Yarusso, one of the first Italians in the Hollow, who took it upon himself to help the newcomers. The Italians, like the Swedes before them, eventually moved up the hill and became largely identified with the Railroad Island neighborhood.
Mexican Americans, who came to St. Paul beginning in the 1920s, inhabited Swede Hollow until 1956, when the area was vacated and deemed unfit for habitation. In time, the area would turn into the park it is today.
But it was up on the hill where the east side thrived. Payne Avenue and its adjacent streets buzzed with restaurants, grocery and clothing stores. The large businesses of 3M, Seeger Refrigeration and Hamm’s made development and housing boom in the area. And streetcars carried the many residents through adjacent arteries, and also back and forth from downtown.
While the 1970s saw a decline as many major industries closed, the area is now in a renaissance period due greatly to the more recent immigrants of the east side. In fact it was East-Siders like congressman Bruce Vento, himself of Italian immigrant ancestry that identified with the plight of the Hmong after the Vietnam War and was instrumental in helping establish the Hmong presence on the East Side. It was groups like these Hmong, Hispanics, and other more recent arrivals, that carried on the East Side immigrant tradition and are greatly to thank for the East Side’s survival.
Today, as popular Gastropubs, organic farms, and artist communities take root, it’s important to remember the immigrant tradition that defines and has determined the culture of this East Side neighborhood.
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