Swede Hollow. Even though it has been gone for half a century, there are people who still remember it fondly. A number of articles have been written about its history, often in a nostalgic manner. Some say it was a slum, while others think it was a nurturing community that welcomed waves of immigrants to their first home in a new land. It was not large--around eighteen acres-- bisected by a creek and tucked into a valley with sixty to eighty foot high cliffs that hid its homes from the outside world.
An 1886 newspaper headline declared it “A Foreign Settlement in the Midst of St. Paul.” The article said that the area had a “quaint appearance” in the midst of a “still more quaint and picturesque surrounding.” One winter day a reporter had taken a look at “the little hamlet of shanties” that was “filled with a “flaxen-haired population.” According to The St. Paul Globe, the area was almost exclusively residential. “There are no stores, a single saloon being the only public place within the valley.” It was in “the front room of a little shanty and is kept by a woman.”
Swedish immigrants began settling there in the 1860s. According to the 1886 visitor, there were around 110 families in the hollow and the total population was estimated at around 600. Nels Hokanson, a Swedish man who grew up there, wrote about some of his families activities: “In the evenings friends often came to share the warmth, drink coffee, take snuff or smoke their curved Swedish pipes,” Nels wrote. “Mother spun wool or knitted and listened to the talk from her place in a corner under a picture of King Oscar II of Sweden.” While there were a variety of immigrants who settled there, those of Scandinavian predominated in the early years and the area became known as “Svenska Dalen” or Swede Hollow.
As the Swedish moved "up onto the street," others took over their spots starting in the early 1900’s. One of former residents was Gentille Yarusso, who later wrote about the community. "Our people chose this place because they were with their own countrymen, with familiar faces, family noises, gestures, facial expressions,” he remembered. “This enchanted landscape...resembled the place they had left behind. They loved the hills, the trees, the stream, the security of friends and relatives."
During the WWII era a stream of Mexicans began joining the Swede Hollow colony, adding their own customs and, as those before them, finding jobs. They eventually started a small chapel that met in a former railroad boxcar. Alberta Silva Rodriquez was among the last people to live there. She remembered times of sharing, when the Mexican women would trade onions, garlic and peppers for Italian bread cooked in outdoor ovens. Her mother and an Italian neighbor were able to communicate. “I don’t know how,” Alberta said, “but they did.”
In December 1956, the city Health Department decided that since Swede Hollow had no sewer or city water service it was a health hazard. The last fourteen families were moved out and the remaining homes burned down by the Fire Department. Thanks to the efforts of Friends of Swede Hollow and the city of St. Paul the hollow has been revitalized and is once again a center of the community.
In 1973 Swede Hollow was designated a Saint Paul Park. The restoration of Swede Hollow as a park was the Saint Paul Garden Club's Bicentennial project, for which they received a major award. A section of Phalen Creek, which had been diverted into a large storm sewer, was “daylighted” so it flowed through pools that attracted wildlife. Visitors could walk or bike through the park on new trails. There are a few reminders of the old days seen in sporadic remains of stone foundations and flowers that were planted in immigrant yards.
]]>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.
For more (including 14 images & 1 video) view the original article
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