Part of what was historically Lower Rice Street was lost due to urban renewal, construction of the Saint Paul Sears store, University Avenue widening and the state capitol complex expansion. Some buildings have been lost in more recent times; including one of the area’s few remaining barns that stood at 619 Rice St.
When Lower Rice Street was platted, its Frogtown section was next to marshes and tamarack swamps. But the street soon became a bustling commercial district, due in large part to its prominence as a major north-south route to outlying communities including Little Canada. It was a key route for farmers traveling to the Saint Paul farmers’ Market.
The neighborhood’s commercial growth was spurred along in the 19th century by the development of the streetcar system.
Rice Street itself was a mix of small commercial uses including grocery stores, meat markets, restaurants and lunch counters, drug stores, confectionaries, clothing and hat shops, shoe stores, hardware stores and more. The neighborhood’s ethnic mix changed over time from Scandinavians, Germans, Irish and poles to eastern Europeans, Asians and now East Africans.
Lower Rice Street between University and Pennsylvania avenues still retains more than a dozen of its historic buildings.
]]>Located in the North End neighborhood, Rice Street began as a commercial corridor that served St. Paul’s working class. Rice Street is unassuming; when it was rushed into being, more than a century ago, there was no time for ornamentation or ostentation.
Despite its utilitarian appearance, Rice Street has a character that is unique to the street and the North End. A trip along Rice Street reveals a rich neighborhood history with ethnic and working class roots. Rice Street was and is a street that works.
The street takes its name from Henry Rice (1816-1894) who came to St. Paul via the fur trade. Rice settled here in 1849 and quickly made a fortune, chiefly in real estate.
Then he went into politics, eventually becoming one of Minnesota’s first U.S. senators (1857-63). Rice served as a regent of the University of Minnesota, president of the Minnesota Historical Society, and treasurer of Ramsey County.
As you walk north on Rice Street from University, there is a mixture of religious and commercial buildings, some of which are a remnant of a small Romanian community, which made a striking contribution to the street’s landscape. Both the St. Mary’s Romanian Orthodox Church and St. Bernard’s Church have their roots in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
As a streetcar route, Rice Street was once home to twenty-four grocers, butchers, confectioners, and bakers operating between Atwater Street and Maryland Avenue. Though less than half of the original commercial buildings still stand, Rice has few vacant lots or empty storefronts. The best place to catch a glimpse of the Rice Street of old is at the southern end, starting at Atwater Street and looking north. Here, nearer downtown, more old structures survived than on the northern stretches. These blocks were also home to some of Rice’s longest-lasting enterprises.
St. Paul’s historic Oakland cemetery is another site worthy of a visit in the Rice Street area. With roots going back to 1853, this non-denominational cemetery was designed with aesthetics in mind. Notable features include St. Paul’s firefighter’s memorial, the Soldier’s rest and contains the graves of such prominent Minnesotans as former Governor Ramsey, Henry Sibley and Henry Rice himself.
Rice St. continues to thrive and buzz with much the same activity as it had since in it’s street car days and is a vibrant connection between St. Paul and the surrounding communities.
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]]>The dominant Rice Street institution for the past 120 years has been St. Bernard’s Church and School. Like St. Mary’s several blocks to the south, St. Bernard’s has its roots in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of the original parishioners (the parish was organized in the spring of 1890) came from five villages in what was called the Deutsch Ungarn, a German ethnic region of what is now western Hungary. The parish began very near its current location, in a rented house on Jessamine Street.
This was mostly unbuilt territory at the time (most of the housing was still south of Front Avenue), but not for long. As an early parish historian observed, “From the time the church was built in 1890, that part of the City grew rapidly. Business on Rice Street sprung up like mushrooms over night, residences were built on all side streets up until 1893 and after the hard times in 1896….St. Bernard’s grew bigger and bigger, not only from year to year, but almost daily. New immigrants came from across the big pond and even if they did not have much money, they generally had lots of children. And how they grew up!”
And how St. Bernard’s grew! A new church and school building opened in 1891, a convent in 1893, a parish hall in 1895, a rectory in 1900, a new church (the current one) in 1906, a new convent in 1911, a new school in 1922, and a new rectory in 1939. St. Bernard’s School, the only Catholic school in the area, was an instant hit. By the early 1900s the students were “packed like sardines in a tin can, in fourteen rooms, some of which were as small as 12 feet by 18 feet.”
According to a diocesan history, enrollment reached 1,280 in 1934, making it “the largest grade school west of Chicago.” It certainly dwarfed all the public grade schools on the North End. Time, however, often works in cruel ways and the grade school was not able to withstand the test of time. Like many urban Catholic schools, St. Bernard’s lost enrollment steadily in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The grade school closed in 2009 and the high school one year later.
St. Bernard’s Church is a thing of unique beauty. It has no basement and no steeple—twin spires instead. The sanctuary floor slopes gently from the back to the communion “so that people in the rear rows can see the Communicant as well as those in the front rows.” Architectural historian Larry Millet calls the style Art Nouveau-Prairie. The architect was Vienna-trained Slovenian immigrant John Jager.
]]>A century ago the Rice Street area, especially between Atwater and Front, was a new and densely populated neighborhood. There were lots of rooming houses and many big families. Lyton Place today is a quiet, two-block street running east from Rice to Oakland Cemetery. In good weather you can find a few kids on bicycles or pausing in the park. Census takers in 1905 found 141 people living in just 23 households on those two blocks - 68 of them were 18 years of age or younger. Their names were Mulligan, Taack, Stinsky, Miller, Hollman, Guindon, Woods, Woodburn, Hancock, Leuzinger, Comer, Best, Martin, Douglas, Peterson, Johnson, Ordmann, and Howe -- mostly individuals from the British Isles with seasonings of Scandinavia, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Some of these houses (on the first block) are still there.
But on the next block east you will find something interestingly different. There, and around the corner on Sycamore, in the early 1990s the city took down three rows of degraded houses and replaced them with these that reflect, without re-creating, the styles of the era. After more than twenty years these houses remain attractive, an admirable feat of blending new housing with old.
Just a little roaming in this precinct pays off for this with the interest and imagination to see, in the mind’s eye, the neighborhood of a century ago. Cross Rice Street and try the adjacent streets of Woodbridge and Marion between Atwater and Milford. Strip away the new(er) siding and additions, and populate the streets with five of six kids per house. Add the occasional clatter of the streetcars on Rice Street, and you have the North End of 1910, when a street laborer could own a house and raise a family on his wages.
Nearby on Marion Street it is easy to see where clear-cutting of the old houses has taken place. This was the neighborhood where civil rights leader Roy Wilkins grew up, in the 1910s. His house is gone, replaced by the public housing across the street from Lewis Park.
]]>Just three blocks east of Rice Street lies, very quietly, one of St. Paul’s loveliest, most serene, and most interesting greenspaces – the Oakland Cemetery. Founded in 1853, Oakland is St. Paul’s oldest public cemetery. It is also a relatively early exemplar of the American “garden cemetery” style, which grew up, starting in the 1830s, as a public alternative to the traditional (and very small) church cemeteries.
The design belongs to Horace Cleveland, one of the great landscape architects of the 19th century. Just in the Twin Cities area he did the University of Minnesota campus, Lakewood Cemetery, and Minnehaha Park, and the Grand Rounds of the Minneapolis park system.
Amongst Oakland’s gentle contours and beneath its towering hardwoods rest the bones of pioneers, magnates, heroes, nameless poor (acres were set aside as the “county plot”), the first immigrants to the city and the most recent. Among the permanent residents: Henry Sibley, fur trader, congressman, first state governor, and military leader of the 1862 Dakota Conflict; Alexander Ramsey, first territorial governor, second state governor, and U.S. Senator; Norman Kittson, magnate of the oxcart trade and an early mayor of St. Paul; schoolteacher and early settler Harriet Bishop (see the Lower West Side guide), and of course Henry Rice; merchant Amherst Wilder and 3M stalwart Archibald Bush -- the Wilder and Bush Foundations today still reinvest their founders’ fortunes in the community.
There is a plot for war veterans, going back to the Civil War. St. Paul firefighters who lost their lives on duty are also honored by a touching monument here. A striking feature of Oakland is the large number of new black tombstones erected by people from the Hmong community; the remains of the city’s pioneers lie as neighbors to those of its most recent immigrants. And for those interested in Rice Street there is a plot on the cemetery’s east side, near Jackson and Jenks, which is exclusively Romanian.
No place in Saint Paul more deserves an hour of the visitor’s time than Oakland Cemetery.
]]>All along Rice Street commercial buildings predominate, designed for profit, not for show. Between 1880 and 1925, both sides of the street from Sycamore to Maryland filled with storefronts and workplaces.
These were grocers, barbers and beauty shops, cleaners, cobblers, undertakers, taverns and an occasional professional office. Rice was a streetcar route (horsecars from 1880 to 1891 and electric cars from 1892 to 1953), and it developed accordingly. When people shopped on foot or by streetcar they could not travel fast or carry much, so businesses relied on small purchases from nearby patrons, hence the many corner grocers.
In 1930, there were twenty-four grocers, butchers, confectioners, and bakers operating along Rice Street between Atwater Street and Maryland Avenue (today there are three). Though less than half of the original commercial buildings still stand, Rice has few vacant lots or empty storefronts. The old buildings were mostly replaced with newer ones serving similar needs. The 1989 strip mall on the west side of Rice between Wayzata and Front Streets offers a vivid -- and, to some, horrifying -- contrast in commercial design to the original buildings nearby. The new apartments and storefronts on the east side, called The Winnipeg, between Atwater and Wayzata, on the other hand, capture some of the original flavor -- brick, built right up to the street, with cornices that salute the original cornices still visible on the older buildings.
The best place to catch a glimpse of the Rice Street of old is at the southern end, starting at Atwater Street and looking north. Here, nearer downtown, more old structures survived than on the northern stretches. These blocks were also home to some of Rice’s longest-lasting enterprises:
• 842 Rice Street (a well preserved Victorian commercial building) was the Caron-Fabre furniture store for more than forty years, and before that a sheet metal shop, a tavern, and a Goodwill second-hand furniture store.
• 843 Rice Street (built in 1922) was Kroemer’s Grocery from the 1920s into the 1960s.
• 849 Rice Street was Michael Sarafolean’s residence and barbershop from the 1920s into the 1960s. Sarafolean is a Romanian surname, and Michael himself is buried nearby in Oakland Cemetery.
• 855 Rice Street (built in 1889) was a Romanian rooming house during its early years, and later a mattress factory. In 1910 it was one of three such rooming houses near this corner, each operated by a small (Romanian) family and housing ten or eleven Romanian laborers working for railroads, city street crews, local foundries, or the nearby Crex Carpet factory. This is the best-restored building on Rice.
• 879 Rice Street was a drug store owned by Oscar Zandell for more than four decades. As of this writing (spring 2013) it is Ron’s Bar. [460]
• 900-904 Rice Street is linked to the story of Hillard Hoffman, an immigrant to St. Paul from the distant shores of Superior, Wisconsin. Hoffman started as a coppersmith and later became a hardware dealer. On this site he built a hardware store in 1889, and then tore it down to build the current building in 1914.The tenant at number 900 for forty years was the Bluebird movie theater (later called the Royal).
]]>One small ethnic community made a striking contribution to the Rice Street landscape. Around 1900, a few hundred Romanian emigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire made their way to St. Paul, and some settled in the North End. In due course they formed an Orthodox parish and in 1914 began construction of the Falling Asleep of the Ever-Virgin Mary Church, more commonly known as St. Mary’s.
All of these people came from the Banat region of what is now Western Romania, and their church is a replica of one in the town of Sannicolau Mare (the birthplace of composer Béla Bartók). It stands unchanged at the corner of Atwater Street and Woodbridge Street (two blocks west of Rice Street). Its purely ornamental painted clock is set mysteriously and forever to 4:00. Though there is now no Romanian community around Rice Street, the congregation, though tiny, flourishes still, offering services in both Romanian and English.
The North End was one of three nodes of Romanian population in Minnesota, the others were in Minneapolis and South Saint Paul. Because there has been almost no Romanian immigration to Minnesota in the last century, and there is now no Romanian community around Rice Street, it is surprising that this congregation survives (there is still one in South St. Paul also) with its own priest, and still offering some services in Romanian.
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