2023-01-06

Obscure Local History #11: Anti-semitism on Minneapolis' Mt. Curve

[Mansion on Mt. Curve Avenue, Minneapolis, 1950.]


Here's a quote from the fascinating documentary about Minneapolis' early Jewish community, We Knew Who We Were, of man who grew up in Minneapolis then-Jewish Near North neighborhood. 

My father became restless, he was was always a the kind of guy who liked to move a little bit outside of the lines. I recall that one time I went with him to look at a house on Mt. Curve avenue. This must have been in the early 1910s, and he had the money to pay for it. But after driving around, and after he checked into it, he found out he might not be so comfortable being Jewish there. 


So he took his money and he found a house on Washburn Ave N and within about a year or two after we moved in you could tell the movement of the population was going the non-jews were moving out, the Jews were moving in, and building homes. And it became a predominantly jewish neighborhood for a long time….



(Note: At first I thought they were talking about St. Paul's Mt. Curve Avenue, but given the timeline and geography, that makes little sense. That part of Highland was still farmland in 1910, and Minneapolis. Mt. Curve is surely the one he's talking about.)

1 comment:

Pat Nunnally said...

That house on Mt. Curve (Mpls) may well have had a covenant on it restricting it from being sold to a Jewish person anyway.