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.

[Development opportunity.]

[Bland new office development rising at the edge of 7th probably should be housing.]

[The wide 7th sidewalks, lined with memories.]

[Even the aquarium bunker merits a warm bench.]

[A well festooned place for a cone.]

Sidewalk of the Week: Lauderdale

[Welcome.]

It's true, there are small cities among us. The un-annexed places, remnants of the municipal land grab hiding in the trees amidst big names. These small cities are familiar and quickly forgotten: Hilltop, Landfall, Lauderdale... To laud is to sing, to celebrate in song and poetry. Yet this is a corner that seems to want to be overlooked, forgotten, left alone.

Lauderdale sits at the crook of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, where the two towns rub against each other, slightly abrasive. The seam of Highway 280 marks the border, hedging an industrial park on one side and a large wall on the other, obscuring something. And there lies Lauderdale behind its rampart, high on a hill, hemmed in here by brown walls and there by the yellowgreen grass of golf courses.

The first question you will be asked when walking round Lauderdale is, "Do you live in Lauderdale?" So much depends on the answer, and most fail the test.

Part of the challenge lies underfoot. That there are no sidewalks here. Or, in fact, there are. But only two. Small bits of concrete laid bare, that end and start abruptly. Who made these? When? Why do they stop?  Hopscotch grounds for agoraphobes. Still, it's fun to walk on them, pivot on one's heel, and march back again to the omega.

[One of the two sidewalk fragments.]

[A Lauderdale sidewalk ends.]

[The street becomes the sidewalk.]

[Lauderdale City Hall.]

[A sidewalk painting project.]

[There used to be an overpass here.]

 

[Unattached stairs.]

Instead, the people of Lauderdale walk in the street or in the alleys. It's not difficult, and not a problem as Lauderdale can only be the end of your journey, a place that goes nowhere. There used to be a bridge across the freeway, leading out of Lauderdale, but it was removed some years ago.  Now there is only a wall and a road that ends as abruptly as the fragmentary sidewalk under my feet. People walk in the street, but there are no cars and it makes little difference.

Lauderdale is a paradox, an old suburb, its homes ranging the ages from just before the war. They are small and precise, unemcumbered by grand gesture. Meanwhile, small gestures are everywhere. A rock garden, fountain, or flag stand higher next to a Lauderdale house. Everything seems like a project, something someone created.

The age means that homes are as small as homes can be. Most have rear garages and alleyways snaking behind the quiet streets. The alleys are the real sidewalks of Lauderdale, backyards with front doors, gardens, swimming pools, workshops, old car storage. Approximately one-third of the garages don't even have pavement connecting them to the alley. Odd to see a garage not meant for cars, but that's what you find here.

[An alleyway garden growing wild.]

[Lauderdale garage.]

[An alleyway.]

[Alleyway, garage, child care center.]

[No Trespassing along a Lauderdale edge.]

Almost hemmed in on all sides by walls and fences, the edges of Lauderdale contain cracks and fissures, places where the plan doesn't quite fit with reality. At one extreme, a small path appears next to the freeway wall, leading to a tiny Lauderdale park: a playground and picnic table, tree and small patch of grass, all overlooking the view of to the Western sunsets. And this Lauderdale view, over the freeway toward Minneapolis, is a rare sight. Layers of infrastructure fold up like mountains before the downtown skyline. This is the view of labor, of the engineer, not for tourists.

Along the other sides, Over here, the sight of an abandoned onramp, now just a patch of grass waiting for a monster truck. Elsewhere, long fences of golf courses, white balls scattered like pennies in the wayward shrubs. No Trespassing. One golf course bleeds into the next, and a small path runs between them, a tightrope between the greens. 

[An alleyway / driveway / pathway.]

[The path to the overlook park.]

[The end of the Lauderdale sound wall, an abandoned onramp.]

[Red British telephone boxes lurking in a yard.]

The quality of the sunlight here might be because of the elevation, or because Lauderdale seems to exist as a limit, a place with no beyond. All things appear differently here. Homes and trees display a facticity, as if there is nothing beneath appearances. Lauderdale, plainly stated, simply being: this house, this decorative fountain, this patch of grass, this tree.

But of course there is art hiding here. Each fence conceals a vintage car. A yard on a hill contains seven red British telephone boxes, partially obscured.

Unlikely, but nonetheless. You will not find yourself in Lauderdale without reason. An overlooked overlook.

[A Lauderdale water feature.]

[A less exciting Lauderdale road.]

[Falcon Heights street sign in foreground, Lauderdale in background.]

[Corner house with a garage inside it.]

[The view from Lauderdale.]

Sidewalk of the Week: 34th Avenue South

The other day I happened across the holy grail of sidewalk wandering: the perfect corner.

Some friends had called a meeting at a local dive bar, somewhere I hadn't been before. It was yet another gorgeous summer day in South Minneapolis, and I was taking my sweet time wandering along the streets on my way there. Not heading in any particular direction, and there it was. I was instantly arrested.

The intersection of 34th Avenue and 50th Street is a nearly perfect streetcorner, quiet sidewalks leading into a neighborhood center containing just the right amount of life, as if Goldilocks lived here. On this crossing, buildings come together and collect at this spot, reaching up just high enough, like picking grapes at a Rococco picnic.

The corner has three or four restaurants, and each one seems tuned to different hours of the day. 3 Tiers is perfect for breakfast, Dominguez will give you tacos for lunch, and you can sit on the patio of Al Vento for dinner before getting a drink at the new Town Hall Lanes late into the evening. 

[A better sidewalk of shops is hard to find in this town.]

[The most amazing Latin American sidewalk pieta.]

[Dentistry and density.]

[Mixed-use mailboxes betray diversity.]

Is this the Keewaydin neighborhood? The name is a breeze tickling my ear. It means "northwest wind" in Ojibwe, the wind that carries autumn far across the prairie and into the city at the equinox. Somehow "keewaydin" was also the name of my high school yearbook, and stepping into this neighborhood it feels somehow like I've been here before. It is uncanny.

A shoe store sits in the middle, large and big-box defiant. It must mean that here people are walking, strolling, running through rubber soles with consistency. A good bookstore and a good shoe store will get you far in life.

More necessities? This corner boasts two intriguing dentistries. Each sits inside its architectural style like a pearl. One dentist, lodged inside an otherwise windowless bit of stucco somehow transcends itself with a simple swoosh. The name on the side of the large blank parking lot wall brings out the only possible beauty one could ever find here. Around the corner, another impossible dentist, art deco and delightfully gaudy.

I have been here before, years ago a friend brought me to the taco place, and it rings a bell. It is a masterpiece of refurbished kitcsh, formerly some sort of a drive-in, now adorned with a sidewalk painted astroturf green and a statuette diorama featuring a donkey.

The commercial stretch, 34th Avenue, boasts the kinds of mixed up shops that reward a stroll: a Pizza Hut sharing a wall with some kind of creative class entrepreneur, an excellent example of a barber shop. Sidewalk cafes and flowers and embedded entrances and windows galore.

[Somehow JR Shand DDS leaves me in a stucco stupor.]

[The art deco dentist "caters to cowards."]

[Pizza Hut meets the creative class.]

[An auto shop house: an excellent fusion of residence and commerce.]

[Oxendale's sidewalk is the best a blank wall can be.]

Capping the block is Oxendales, the kind of large-small local grocery that barely exist nowadays. Like the first dentist, the building is plain: one-story, concrete, and utilitarian.

But here's where the magic of Nokomis appears. Planters sit along the freshly painted blank wall. The parking lot is lined with a small garden, and bike racks appear along the street. Everywhere on this corner, the neighborhood somehow transforms auto shops into sidewalks, drive-thru banks into meaningful places. Care is visible, like laugh wrinkles of an old woman with a good sense of humor. 

Sometimes South Minneapolis can feel too linear, stretching without interruption along its gridded axes. The sidewalks of 34th Avenue rise apart from that, in the shadow of the city's Southeast lake. They are an easter egg at the end of a summer's day.

[Flowers are everywhere on the sidewalks of 34th.]

[Mug & Brush, like a dusty old saloon with a hitching post for bicycles.]