University Avenue was once one of Saint Paul’s “auto row” districts, where people could shop for cars. Owens Motor Sales (now Lifetrack Resources) at 709 University Av. (1917, second floor 1922-23) is…

Hooray for Hollywood! Frogtown’s unique contribution to the early film industry began at 823 University Avenue. A film projectionist named Charles Bell came to St. Paul from Seattle in 1908. He…

Other key commercial districts in the neighborhood include Dale Street and the Dale-Como-Front intersection, which abuts the North End, Lower Rice Street and several small pockets of commercial…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Fort Snelling (constructed 1819-25), at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, was built to protect our northern borders from the British and to control development in the…

Completed in 1915, The Cathedral of St. Paul was the creation of Archbishop John Ireland, architect Emmanuel Masqueray, and the mostly anonymous artists, craftsmen, masons, stonecutters, laborers, and…

The familiar Midwest urban decline began along Selby during the Depression, accelerated after World War II, then hit its nadir with two nights of violence after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in…

When the European settlers arrived in vicinity of Saint Paul, the Mdewakanton band of Dakota had already lived here for decades. They called the general area "Imniza-Ska" or "white cliffs” referring…

The sport of curling involves sliding 42-pound stones of polished granite down a sheet of expertly prepared ice towards a target. One team member launches the rock in a slow, majestic procession,…

Before swift fire trucks, every neighborhood – especially those of wood frame construction, like most of St. Paul – needed a fire station. Making a fire call was slower and more complicated then. You…

This is the largest of Cass Gilbert's four churches in the area (the others are the Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church, St. Clement's Episcopal, and the former German Bethlehem Church at the foot of…

This is one of three F. Scott Fitzgerald landmarks in this part of St. Paul. The building itself is merely a solid representative of late Victorian apartment buildings. Its sole claim to fame is that…

Built in 1886, the Swedenborgian Church was designed by Cass Gilbert, the St. Paul architect who later became famous for the Minnesota State Capitol, the Woolworth Building in New York, and the U.S.…

St. Paul began as a steamboat town, but that era lasted barely 30 years. Railroads, and the boom in population and prosperity that they brought, made St. Paul into a city. As the city outgrerw the…

The first stop of the westbound Selby Avenue streetcar after emerging from the tunnel was at the corner of Selby and Western. It made that corner desirable as a business address. And there was a time…

The building at the southeast corner of the site, finished in 1863, is one of the city's oldest, and the oldest outside of downtown. The story goes back even further, to St. Paul's second decade. …