twin city sidewalks: north saint paul

Showing posts with label north saint paul. Show all posts

2018-09-27

Twin City Doorways #41

[Boston, MA.]

[West 7th Street, Saint Paul.]

[North Saint Paul.]

[Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis.]

[Selby Avenue, Saint Paul.]

[Rondo, Saint Paul.]

[Grand Avenue, Saint Paul.]

[Western Avenue, Saint Paul.]

2015-07-29

TC Sidewalks Live!: Old Streetcar to Wildwood Tour this Sunday

Seeing a map of Twin Cities' historic streetcar network goes a long way toward explaining the urban geography of the city. Most of the existing commercial corrdors, those places with the historic density, mixed-use nodes, and interesting old buildings are along the old streetcar lines. Even though the streetcars were all ripped up, burned down, and defunded over 50 years ago, there's a way in which they're still alive today.

[The streetcar map on the wall of Minneapolis Central Library.]

Some of the streetcar routes are pretty straightfoward. Others (like the old route through Minneapolis's) are crooked and confusing. Most have become bus routes, but a few of them have completely disappeared.

[The route in question.]

The old route to Willernie, White Bear Lake, and Stillwater is one of the latter. Together with Mark Brauer, a long-time East Side Saint Paul bicyclist, retired Mn-DOT planner, and amateur urban geographer*, we'll be tracing the old route of the Wildwood streetcar as best we can.

It'll be an adventure. Some parts of the route are completely gone. In other places, you'll be able to find it. And waiting at the end will be Willernie, a crazy East Metro town that used to be an amusement park and still feels like its at the the end of a long drive up to the cabin.

What: Bike ride to Willernie, along the old Stillwater streetcar line
When: Sunday August 2nd at 11:00AM. Shoudld take 2-3 hours, probably more depending on stops
Where: Meet at the corner of Payne and Edgerton, across from Yarusso's
How long: 25 miles round trip
How much: Free! (Or buy Mark or me a beer.)

[Please RSVP to the Facebook invite if you get a chance.]

Willernie is fascinating all by itself. Last summer, Andy Sturdevant, Steven Lang, and myself toured through it. Here's a bit from Andy's column:

Like so many Twin Cities neighborhoods — St. Paul’s Union Park, Lake Minnetonka’s Excelsior, the stretch of Longfellow once known as Wonderland — Willernie owes its odd footprint to an amusement park. Wildwood Amusement Park, another of the cities’ many trolley parks built to lure city dwellers out to the end of the lines for recreation, sat on the site from 1889 through the 1930s.

[Read the rest...]

I've been looking forward to this ride for a while. If you're free Sunday, join in and explore the streetcar of your imagination.

PLEASE NOTE: The ride's pacing will be leisurely. I am not a speed demon and neither is Mark, who has an upright handlebar type bicycle. It'll be a relaxing ride befitting the pace of a streetcar and the idea of Wildwood bourgeois leisure.

[Wildwood spirits.]

[Willernie stop sign.]

[Willernie back roads.]

[Do you even know what this means?]

[Willernie main street.]

* As if there was any other kind.

2014-06-30

Twin City Shop Windows #8

[North Saint Paul.]

[West 7th Street, Saint Paul.]

[Saint Clair Avenue, Saint Paul.]

[Prior Avenue, Saint Paul.]

[Location forgotten.]

[Milwaukee, WI.]

[Warehouse District, Minneapolis.]

[Downtown, Saint Paul.]

2013-12-03

Sidewalk of the Week: 7th Avenue East, North Saint Paul

From the lampposts of North Saint Paul hang banners depicting a 19th century man, bearded and serious, gazing off into the horizon. The words below read, "Henry A. Castle, founder and visionary."

It's hard not to be charmed by such earnest hagiography. Searching around for Henry Castle reveals a wealthy industrialist town founder, attempting to build a utopian community a la Ebenezer Howard, a haven by his home along a less significant lake, far removed from the petty dirt of the city.

What separates this from just your average suburban bourgeois escapism? Did Castle have a vision of justice? Architectural wherewithal?

The North Saint Paul history page lists him as a "father, soldier, journalist, politician, entrepreneur, and humanitarian." That sounds to me like a list of fairly useless professions. On the contrary, he seems a typical man of his time, riding on his own coattails.

But he left behind one of the metro's oldest suburbs (along with places like Excelsior, South Saint Paul, Anoka, Hopkins). Perhaps North Saint Paul reflects some of his solitary idealism, some gleam in Henry A. Castle's eye, but walking streets you cannot but worry about a city so uniquely wedded to a single man. Do cities retail only the earnest striving, or do they also harbor one's lesser qualities? Not only a leader among men, Captain Castle was too a self-aggrandizing plagiarist. Does North Saint Paul retain his oily residue?

[7th Avenue c. 1912.]

[A nicely planted planter.]

[Bookstore and bar.]

I'm not sure, and frankly, walking the streets of North Saint Paul today, it hardly matters. This is a suburb like many others, bisected by a busy freeway and crawling with crawling curving streets. But here a downtown remains, centering the city along a main street. 7th Avenue runs diagonal north-East from the edge of Saint Paul, and its sidewalks are wide.

They remind me of Hopkins, only with fewer people. Here is another old and edgy streetcar node, since forgotten, harboring ancient bars and dusty chow mein nooks at the edge of town. A freeway rumbles off on the horizon, but here in the midst of the 20th century limited vision sit the old bricks of another era. North Saint Paul seems left alone and happy that way, an old lonely man, proud and prickly, rich in memory but a poor tipper.

The town's abbreviation of choice is "No St Paul", which seems a declarative negation. It's a common mistake to think that North Saint Paul (i.e. the smaller old suburb) with north Saint Paul (i.e. the Northern part of the larger city). I can only imagine locals' frustration with the error.

[A classic post office.]

[Antiques, shangri-la.]

[A wide sidewalk plaza: lamppost, bench, tree, receptacle.]

[Coffee shop and pharmacy with polar bear.]

[Surveilled parking lot behind 7th.]

The sidewalks are vast. They almost echo, and have clearly received a great deal of attention. They host regular benches, all empty, an occasional wide plaza, flagpoles on every lamppost, bordered by angle parking. Flowers and flags are everywhere. Better sidewalks are hard to find in this town, more bumped bumpouts a rarity.

Shop windows too are full of books and antiques, bordered with posters for motorcycle rallys. Off the main street, the sidewalks will take you to parking lots, occasional industrial parks, shrubs and a bike trail. The high school waits across the one pedestrian overpass, a busy gas station lurking alongside.

The best thing remains the fact underfoot. You can walk these streets. It seems so possible, a rare suburb with downtown sidewalks waiting in its midst. That doesn't yet mean that people will do it. Strollers still seem extraordinary, almost existential streets. But it's possible, it's potential lies here in the earth, the grid, the sidewalks, the surrounding proximity.

"Minnesota's oldest bar" holes up here as if in a witness protection program, one of the few places where it can survive cutthroat competition without fear. It's not alone. Next to the bar, the pizza place, the other bar, the other other bar, and down from the ice cream house sit a few vacant lots, "development opportunities" should the traffic of our times pick up around these parts, bringing people to this place of old storied possibility.

An immense concrete snowman rises in the distance, refusing to melt. Henry Castle's vision is not yet gone: a windmill, a long forgotten future, mostly symbolic, not unpractical, spinning occasionally off in the distant lands past Saint Paul's northeastern edge.