Frogtown, like many other Saint Paul neighborhoods, grew along with the Twin Cities streetcar system during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Commercial corridors such as University Avenue were transformed after streetcar service began in 1890. That line soon became the busiest of the interurban streetcar lines. Frogtown residents were also served by streetcar lines on Rondo, Hamline and Thomas avenues, and Rice Street. Lines changed over the years. Today’s bus and planned light rail service mirrors many of the longtime streetcar lines.
The neighborhoods west of Dale Street filled in starting in the 1890s. Many Queen Anne, Eastlake, and Colonial Revival style homes remain here, with newer bungalows and a few Prairie-style homes west of Victoria Street. Lots here are slightly larger than in the neighborhood to the east. Note there are infill homes that have gone up over the years, so it’s not unusual to have several decades’ worth of homes on a single block.
A trip through this area reveals many existing Victorian-era working-class homes, with detailed window openings, porches and trim. Dwellings were 1 ½ to 2 stories tall. The larger homes are more grand than the smaller, simple frame and stick-style homes.
The area also has many of the city’s oldest wood, brick and block apartment buildings and duplexes, as well as many more converted corner stores, taverns, confectionaries and shops turned into housing. The neighborhood doesn’t have as many converted commercial buildings as the neighborhood east of Dale. But it does have mixed-use buildings that have been in place for more than a century, such as 741 Edmund Ave. and repurposed commercial/industrial buildings including 500 N. Grotto St.
There are also a number of historic duplexes and even a few original triplexes and fourplexes. Unlike conversions from single-family to multi-family, which accelerated during the post-World War II housing shortages, these homes were built to house more than one family.
]]>East Seventh Street was the main business strip of Dayton’s Bluff starting in the 1870’s. The railroad tracks just to the north attracted industry which, in turn, promoted the building of worker’s houses that joined the fashionable homes of more prosperous neighbors. At the time people walked or used horses to get around. Then the streetcar arrived on East Seventh and, starting on June 15, 1889, ran from downtown to Duluth Street.
Because horses could not easily make it up the steep hill, a cable car was used. It was replaced in 1893 when the system was electrified. East Seventh was one the main arterials in an out of downtown and eventually it went all the way to the suburb of White Bear. Like other streetcar strips, businesses lined both sides of the street.
Mom and pop stores served the needs of area residents who could find what they needed by walking up East Seventh, although they could take the streetcar to the large department stores in the city’s center. People later became more mobile when automobiles were more commonplace. Seventh Street stores suffered somewhat because of the lack of easy parking as residents could get to outlying suburban establishments.
Like the developments in transportation, there were also changes in the demographics in the surrounding area. Today the neighborhood is quite diverse and many of the stores reflect newer arrivals. You might keep this in mind as you stroll up Seventh Street and look at some of its landmarks.
]]>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. At about the same time that work began on the Cathedral of St. Paul, the city began digging a solution to the streetcar problem: the Selby Tunnel. It opened in 1907, taking people from the base of St. Anthony Hill beneath Selby Avenue to an opening near Nina Street. Streetcars used the tunnel until their demise in the early 1950s. The tunnel closed in 1959, but its lower entrance can still be seen, just down the slope from the Cathedral.
As St. Paul boomed in the late 19th-century, housing and commerce marched west across what must have seemed to developers an endlessly spacious prairie. Three streetcar lines ranged west from St. Anthony Hill along the parallel Grand Avenue, Rondo Avenue, and Selby Avenue. People filled the neighborhoods, and businesses followed the people, clustering along the three lines. Each of these commercial corridors had its own character. Selby Avenue businesses catered to people’s daily needs: food, clothing, and services.
By 1930, roughly the peak of streetcar commerce, there were nearly a hundred businesses on Selby between Western Avenue and Lexington Parkway—groceries, confectioneries, cobblers, moviehouses, butchers, pharmacies, and dressmakers. The Selby-Dale corner was the hub: at one time there were twenty-six businesses on a single block. This intersection was also a center of Jewish commerce: Proprietors named Levy, Cohen, Braufman, Eisenberg, Herman, and Katz ran stores there.
]]>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).
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