The West Side of St. Paul originally got it's name not from the fact that it sits west of St. Paul, but because at this point of the river, the Mississippi bends from its north-south bearing, to an east-west, placing the West Side on the left or 'West' side of the river. In fact, this is the only St. Paul neighborhood on the ‘other’ side of the Mississippi River.
It took a long time for this area to become part of the city, partially because of geography and partially because this land was Dakota territory until treaties were signed in 1851. After that it was first ferry crossings, then bridges like the early woodend Wabasha street bridge that helped the early community grow. As the low lands near the river were threatened by frequent flooding, most businesses and housing sought locations higher up the bluff.
The initial Dakota, French-Canadian, German and Irish immigrants were met by subsequent eastern European and Russian Jews and later large Mexican communities. While it became it’s own city of West St. Paul at one time, it has since been reincorporated into the larger city of St. Paul.
Business such as the Yoerg and Bruggeman Breweries found favorable conditions along the caves of the sandstone bluffs. Other manufacturing industries grew as did the working communities that supported them.
Early on it was the wealthy who built their more affluent housing along the top of the bluff and much of the poorer and working class who built below. But over time there has been a more equal distribution of classes throughout the West Side.
Such churches as the Church of St. Michael at 389 S. Robert St. reflect the cultural evolution of the West Side community. Once Irish Catholic the tower has since been renamed Torre de San Miguel, in recognition of the Chicano community that now resides there.
Other notable locations include the Omaha Swing Bridge, and Harriet Island, which is one of St. Paul’s most popular festival sites and provides a grand view of the city.
"Today, much of the heart of the West Side can be seen in established Mexican segments of the neighborhood, where the culture thrives." "In fact, the West Side's Cinco de Mayo fiesta is one of the ten largest in the United States." There are also Syrian and Lebanese influences that make the West Side even more unique.
Today the West Side remains a part of St. Paul, but it’s distinctive not only in the geographic location of where it resides, but also in the culture of the communities that have helped to create it.
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]]>People of Mexican origin or descent began to come to St. Paul around the time of World War I. Oftentimes they were migrant agricultural workers who found reasons to stay year-round, working in the railroads, local shops and factories, or the South St. Paul stockyards. Most of them lived on the West Side flats, and some St. Paul families with Spanish surnames have been here for nearly a century. For decades they made up at best an urban village; around seventy people in 1920, six hundred and thirty by 1930, and up to a thousand -- a quarter of the Flats’ population -- by 1940.
The community remained small until the 1980s, when immigration picked up again, from Mexico and also Central America. Neighborhood House, founded in 1890 as a settlement house for Jewish immigrants, changed with the times, and it has been important to the Spanish-speaking community for the better part of a century. It is housed now in the Wellstone Center, immediately north of El Burrito Market. More vital still has been Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, founded in 1931 at 186 Fairfield, in the heart of the flats, and still offering Mass in Spanish at its newer location at the far eastern edge of the West Side.
Two commercial establishments, the restaurant Boca Chica (the Frias family, 1964) and the grocery, El Burrito Market (the Silva family, 1979), have been St. Paul fixtures for nearly two generations. They are now St. Paul institutions, well known all around the city. Along Wabasha/Cesar Chavez, the number of Latino-owned businesses has grown and grown, with the area now called District del Sol.
Cinco de Mayo, a holiday celebrated more in the United States than in Mexico, commemorates the 1863 Battle of Puebla, in which Mexican forces defeated the French. In this country it has become an occasion to celebrate Mexican culture and presence. St. Paul’s Cinco de Mayo celebration, centered in District del Sol, has become one of the biggest in the United States.
In an act of cultural and architectural syncretism, the chief landmark of this part of town is the tower in the housing development along Wabasha, called Torre de San Miguel. It is all that remains of the demolished Irish Catholic St. Michael's Church (founded 1868), but its origin is remembered by few. It is a symbol now of St. Paul's now prominent Latino population – as of 2010, nearly 10% of the city's 285,000 people.
]]>Find this intersection (just south and one block west of the Robert Street bridge), and what do you see? Not much? Well, only because you came several decades too late. Had you had the foresight to visit, say in 1940 or 1950, you would be standing in the middle of a busy residential, industrial, and commercial part of town.
This was what the geographers call a receptor neighborhood -- a place where new arrivals could find shelter. They were normally struggling countrymen, and sometimes domestic workers. The first settlers, in the 1850s, were French-speaking, followed by Germans and Irish, all of whom came in scattered numbers. Then, when St. Paul boomed in the 1880s, came Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish Jews by the hundreds. By the mid-1890s, the neighborhood was predominantly Jewish and remained so almost to the end.
If you had loitered at Fairfield and Livingston in 1930 almost everyone who passed by would have been Jewish. Within walking distance you could have found four synagogues, four petroleum warehouses, four junk dealers, three blacksmiths, two cobblers, a macaroni factory, a pickle works, a fire-fighting equipment plant -- and, yes, one Spanish-language church. Students at nearby Lafayette School, the local elementary, endured the biggest classes (as many as 50 per room) and worst facilities in the city. The housing, almost all built in the 19th century, was also the city’s worst, often lacking modern plumbing. As one resident commented around that time, “the Lower West Side started out as a poor man’s neighborhood and stayed that way.”
Not surprisingly, many of those who could get out, got out. By the 1940s, and especially after World War II, many Jewish West Siders moved to St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood. Those who stayed lived through continuing deterioration, made much worse by the floods of 1951 and 1952. In 1957, city leaders decided to turn the Flats into an industrial park, protected by improved levies. The city began buying houses in 1961, and by 1966 the neighborhood was gone. Which is why, if you visit Fairfield and Livingston today, you see no traces of human habitation. The old Lower West Side lives on only in memory.
]]>Nature made it an island, but it is an island now only in name, its back channel filled in 1950 to connect it to the shore. It takes its name from Harriet Bishop (1817 -- 1883), who came from Vermont in 1847 to become the city’s first public school teacher. Bishop lived the rest of her life in St. Paul, seeing it grow from a muddy hamlet to a railroad boomtown while she busied herself with church (First Baptist), charity (Home for the Friendless, among others), marriage and divorce. She was not a simple schoolmarm.
The island was named after Bishop, but its importance to the city belongs to Dr. Justus Ohage. Born in Germany in 1839, Justus Ohage came to the United States at age 15, fought in the Civil War, married an American, became a physician, and moved to Saint Paul in 1881. Dr. Ohage was an innovative surgeon (he did the area’s first gall bladder surgery), a professor at the University of Minnesota, and the city’s first public health officer, serving 1899-1918. There he led in compulsory vaccination, pure food laws, and trash disposal.
Ohage acquired the island on his own, then donated it to the city in 1900 on the condition that it be used as a park. Its fortunes since then have waxed and waned with the health of -- and interest in -- the Mississippi.
It had its days of glory, mostly in the early 20th century: swimming beaches (known as “the public baths”), playgrounds, exercise grounds, a zoo (moved in the 1930s to Como Park) and many thousands of summer visitors. But as sewage fouled the river, people turned away, and by the early 1920s the park languished into disuse. In 1935, shortly before his death, Dr. Ohage even threatened to take it back. It has been revived from time to time, most notably in the late 1990s as public attention focused on the river once again.
Today, Harriet Island Regional Park offers fine views of downtown, walking access to the river, a Bed and Breakfast in a vintage towboat, paddleboats, vast grounds for festivals, a stage, and the refurbished WPA pavilion (1941) designed by the pioneering African American architect, Clarence Wigington. There are also trail links to Lilydale Regional Park.
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