Saint Paul By Bike

October 4, 2024

20.3 Miles

Macalester-Groveland, North End, East Side

Spotted in Macalester-Groveland, a fake snake and an unorthodox Halloween showcase.

Halloween Bling at 1777 Lincoln Avenue.

Frogtown

Speeding north on Pascal Street, I caught a glimpse of an unusual and formidable vehicle as I crossed Thomas Avenue.

North End

Linda and John Jungwirth have called the charming white house with a picturesque yard at the corner of Abell Street and Jessamine Avenue East home since 1977. John could be considered a relative newcomer to the North End, having grown up in Highland Park and attending Cretin High School. Linda, on the other hand, is more familiar with the North End than most.

According to Linda, her maternal great-great-grandparents, Michael and Theresa Schneider, came to the North End in 1910. Her maternal great-grandparents, Sebastian & Maria, actually arrived a year earlier, in 1909. “Both sides of my family lived in the North End back to my great-great-grandparents on my mother’s side, and great-grandparents on my father’s side.

One set of great-great-grandparents, Michael & Theresa, and their daughter, Maria, and her husband, Sebastian, “came a year apart because they did not want to be on the same boat in case it sunk.”

Her mother’s family, while considered German, came from what was at the time Austria-Hungary. Her paternal side is Polish and Prussian. “ Both my grandpa and my grandma (Anna & Joe) lived in the same area of Austria-Hungary, but she came here when she was four. He didn’t come until he was 15. And then they met in St. Paul when they were probably late teens.”

Most on both sides of Linda’s families were enticed by others like them already living in the North End. “ A lot of Austrians all settled around here. St. Bernard’s Church—you could go to German masses there. And the same on my dad’s side, they were more to the western edge of the North End, by Western Avenue, and along there into Frogtown. It was a lot of Polish because of St. Adelbert’s Church.”

That’s the same reason newer immigrants, like Southeast Asians and Karen, settled in Saint Paul.

A collection of Linda’s relatives, starting with her maternal great-great-grandparents, Michael and Theresa, settled not just in the North End, but on one particular street, Geranium Avenue. They purchased the small house at 63 West.

Michael and Theresa Schneider’s daughter and son-in-law (who were also Linda’s great grandparents) Maria and Sebastian, were outliers who lived on the West Side Flats.) After Maria’s death in 1920 from the Spanish Flu, Sebastian returned to Europe and Linda’s grandmother, Anna, moved in with Michael and Theresa at 63 Geranium West.

Anna inherited that house after Theresa’s death. It became known as “The Little House” within the family and was the beginning of 63 Geranium West becoming the starter home for newly married family members.

“When my grandma and grandpa (Anna and Joe) got married, they bought a house on Geranium (74 East) two blocks east (of 63 West.)”

Linda’s mother, Liz, called Geranium Avenue home her entire life! “ My mom never left Geranium. Never left the street. She was raised at 74 (East). Got married, went to 63 (West), and then 22 (East).”

Good, steady jobs at the nearby railroads were another lure of the North End, including Linda’s relatives. “You had the Jackson Street shops. A lot of them could walk to that. At the Dale Street shops, a lot of the guys, like (her paternal) grandpa, they were at that. Some of the neighbors right here over on Geranium were also at Dale Street Shops. My dad, my (maternal) grandpa and my mom’s one brother worked at the Como Northern Pacific Shops.”

Linda and John

Linda and John’s rather awkward initial meeting in 1969 occurred riding a train to Duluth filled with people on the way to the  Catholic School State Hockey Tournament. Linda and some friends had a motive beyond watching hockey.  “We went because we knew we would probably be among the only girls on that train,” she said, laughing.

In 1974, five years after their first meeting, they got reacquainted, uncomfortably, at a bowling alley, John explained.

“ We used to hang out the Tom-Tom Room at Minnehaha Bowling Lanes because they always had good bands. One of the guys that worked with me was a couple years younger than Linda and he went to St. Bernard’s.” He continued, “They were friends and I kind of walked in and gave her (Linda) the standard line, ‘I think I know you.’”

“ My friend’s going, ‘Don’t give her that line. She’s my friend.’ And I say, ‘No, no, I know you!’”

About the same time, a friend of Linda’s walked up to the table. She was among the group that rode the train to Duluth in 1969. John picked up the story there. “Linda points to me and says, ‘Do you know this guy?’ She (Linda’s friend) says, ‘Oh yeah, John from the train from the hockey tournament.’ I didn’t know her friend would remember me. So that’s kind of how we met again.”

Several months later Linda and John began dating. They were married in January 1977 and bought the house at 1111 Abell Street later that year.

An example of the tightknit nature of the North End came in 1975 when Linda attended her five year class reunion of St. Bernard’s school. She and a couple of her former teachers were talking and one asked her where her boyfriend,John, went to high school. “I said, ‘Cretin,’ and they just go, ‘How did you meet him?’ And I said, ‘I did leave the neighborhood once in a while!’”

“ St. Bernard’s,” explained Linda, “at that time, for dances and things like that, they were closed. You couldn’t bring a boyfriend from another school.” Consequently, “ a lot of kids who went to St. Bernard’s ended up marrying people from St. Bernard’s.

Neighborhood Involvement

Linda and John’s budding neighborhood activism began in the mid-to-late-eighties by attending regularly scheduled police-community meetings. They were an offshoot of the community policing model that became popular at that time.

A few years later, neighbors observed an increase in unkempt properties and other “nuisance crimes,” including, loud parties and some suspected drug dealing around the area. “ We all got to be friends with the beat cops,” said Linda, “and they would call us, They would look after us. And then when we organized a block club, we had credibility. We learned the process. We made contacts at City Hall and in the different departments down at the city—code enforcement, safety and inspections.” They named the block club, which covered roughly 14 square blocks in the North End, the Tri-Area Block Club.

In the ‘90s, seriously troublesome properties within the North End, and around Saint Paul, grew significantly. The City obtained money to buy and tear down 40 blighted properties across Saint Paul. Tri-Area Block Club members mistakenly thought the money would cover 40 properties in EACH of the City’s nearly 20 districts. They submitted reports citing the top nine or 10 nuisance properties in the North End. Exhaustive, meticulous documentation, block club members learned, was the foundation for successfully getting the City to take action against deleterious owners and renters.

“ When we would contact the City about a problem property, we would CC (carbon copy) everybody. And I kept those copies in a file. So when it came to this, we put those houses on the list, and I had copies and packets for each house with all the correspondence over the years to show it’s been a problem for a long time,” said Linda. As a result, the homes on the Tri-Area Block Club’s list were all demolished.

Since the early 1980s, immigrants from Southeast Asia, Central and South America and elsewhere had settled in Saint Paul, many gradually relocating to the North End. As problem properties in the area surged. The Tri-Area Block Club reasoned they’d have a better chance of getting City officials to deal with “quality of life issues” if they added support from these newer residents. “When it’s English as a second language and they’re new,” stated Linda, “they’re uncomfortable. And I said, ‘I don’t care if it’s one sentence that says ‘tear it down’ or ‘it’s a problem’ I said, ‘Write it in your language. Write it however you’re comfortable.’ And they did. We got tons.”

Once again, thorough documentation by members of the block club proved critical. “ We made sure we had proof and information to back it up so that nobody can say we’re just picking on them. Although some of the landlords thought so.”

She added, “ We’d find out from our code enforcement here that Minneapolis was having the same problem with those same ones (landlords).”

So how did Linda become the long-tenured chairwoman of the Tri-Area Block Club? Mostly because nobody else wanted to. “One person said she’d do it, but she didn’t want to do all of it. So I said, ‘Well, for one year I’ll co-chair’. She moved away in that year and no one would ever take it over.”

“The most important thing is treasure those core people because they are the ones who will be there when you need them. They stick to it. They’re always involved.”

Linda Jungswirth

Although Linda led the block club for years, she repeatedly talked about the abundant involvement of many stalwart members. “ The beauty of it was the people here, they would all show up and I would be there and I would be presenting. The first thing I’d do is (say) I’m here and so are other members and they’d all stand up and wave. But they didn’t want to talk. They would write letters, they would make phone calls.”

The 25 Year Battle for a Nature Sanctuary

The greatest, or at least the most conspicuous, triumph of the Tri-Area Block Club was establishing Trout Brook Nature Sanctuary. The land has a long, diverse history. Before European-Americans arrived, Native American tribes roamed the area. By the mid-1850s, Europeans were settling in what would be called the North End, leading to dramatic changes. The St. Paul & Pacific Railroad pushed the first of many rail lines through in 1862 and the first train rumbled along the line later that year.

Plat maps from 1886, 1892 and 1916 (below) show the rapid expansion of rail lines through the Trout Brook area. (Click to enlarge maps) Maps courtesy U of Minnesota Borchert Map Library.

Aerial photos (below) illustrate the contraction of the railroads in the area beginning in the 1940s. (Click to enlarge) Photos courtesy Ramsey County

The Tri-Area Block Club successfully confronted several different developers and governmental agencies to thwart industrial redevelopment of the polluted former railroad land. Instead, the 42-acre parcel, previously known as the Trillium Site, was set aside as a nature sanctuary. Trout Brook sits on the eastern edge of the North End, near 35E, between Maryland Avenue on the north, Cayuga Street on the south and near Agate Street to the west. Over more than 20 years, the block club foiled a multitude of proposed industrial uses for the land, which included:

• A school bus maintenance base and storage area on which 100 or more diesel buses would have parked, idled and been repaired.
• A soil remediation business that wanted to burn contaminated soil.
• A Metro Transit bus garage
• A mini-storage facility
• Storage for heavy construction equipment

The block club waged a multi-pronged battle, Linda said. “ We had to go and deal with that. Everything we were still working on in the community, we were dealing with all of that…”

John continued, “…while still trying to get people on board to look at the vision of what it (the sanctuary) could be and get the funding cobbled together while you’re still fighting other businesses that wanted to move in there.”

The basic argument for a nature sanctuary, according to Linda, was, “We got the (railroad) tracks, we’ve got the freeway (35E). It’s our buffer and it’s polluted.”

Members of the Tri-Area Block Club convinced their city councilperson, Janice Rettman, and members of the city’s Planning and Economic Development (PED) Department to support their plan. Then their state representative, Tom Osthoff, got involved by connecting the Tri-Area group with the U of M’s landscape architecture department. Linda said State Rep. Osthoff told her, “ ‘You’re going to spend a day with the people at the School of Landscape Architecture at the U (University of Minnesota) And you tell them what you want and they’re going draw it all out for you.’ So we had a visual. And that went with me everywhere.”

The relentless campaign by Tri-Area succeeded and in 2001 the City of Saint Paul purchased the land. The next step was the massive and expensive cleanup of industrial waste from more than 100 years of heavy industrial use.

Members of the block club arranged a blessing ceremony in October of 2001 by a Native American spiritual leader prior once the purchase of the land was finalized.

The groundbreaking of Trout Brook Nature Sanctuary came in June 2013 and it opened in 2015, about 25 years after area residents began organizing efforts.

Beyond the Nature Sanctuary

Both Linda and John indicated that the Tri-Area Block Club pursued issues other than Trout Brook. For example, on New Year’s Eve of 1999 (the same evening many were apprehensive about the potential for a Y2K catastrophe), the neighborhood had quite an incident. College students living on Geranium Avenue hosted an extremely large and disruptive party. Party-goers parked cars on Geranium, Jessamine and Abell. As they went to and from the party, according to Linda and John, some broke bottles and/or threw items onto homeowners’ yards and porches.

As Linda recollects, she called the police department’s non-emergency phone number. “ ’I know this is not a good night. Everything could go down at midnight.’ But I said, ‘If you have a squad patrolling in this area, could you go there?'” And she gave them the Geranium Avenue address.

A short time after making the call, the police responded like ants to a picnic. “ We’re sitting out here with my mom and my grand-nephew and there must have been dozen squads all come by.”

The police, she said, quickly broke up the party. “ The boys got in the cars and left and left the girls standing in their heels and their gowns and no coats.”

The rowdy revelers left quite a mess for neighbors the deal with. “ The next day we all went out, picked everything up, put it in the trash bags and put them on the steps at that house and called the parents.”

A Gradual Fade

By about 2015, some block club members had moved from the area, while others pulled back on their involvement, leading to changes. “ We had been meeting monthly. Then we went to quarterly and we kind of just started communicating via emails,” Linda said.
Now, it’s no longer an organized block club. However, if an important issue comes up, residents call and email each other and of course, Linda and John.

Tri-Area Block Club Legacy

When asked about the legacy of the Tri-Area Block Club, Linda paused to ponder her response. “ Yes, we accomplished things with problem properties, with the (Trout Brook) nature sanctuary and that one took the most dedication, the most years, 25 years. But in the process of all of that, people got to know each other and people cared and looked after other people.”

The annual National Night Out was a venerated event for the block club. John recalled  one National Night Out during a city election year. They put up a large sign that said, ‘No Campaigning.’ “They’d (politicians) show and people went, ‘No. This is all about community. We don’t want this here. We don’t want anything that would divide us.’”

A spur of the moment “Blue Moon Party” one Labor Day weekend is another example of how the block club broke down barriers in the neighborhood. As John told it, “ We figured nobody’s around.  We just said, ‘If you’ve got nothing going on, I bought a case of Blue Moon beer. Have a Blue Moon.’”

“ ’Come by and have a beer’ turned into four or five hours.” Everyone brought food—hot dogs, snacks and desserts—to share. One neighbor ushered out-of-town family to the party, along with the food they had made. Another brought his telescope outside and gazed at stars with neighbors  Afterward, he said to Linda, “We met so many people that you see, but we’ve never met them.’ And he goes, ‘This was great!'”

Recognition of Tri-Area Block Club’s efforts also came from beyond the North End. Awards the block club earned included:

• Selection to the 2006 Saint Paul Neighborhood Honor Roll
• Inclusion in the 2006 Blooming Saint Paul Showcase for the beautification of a corner Rice Street and Sycamore Avenue
• A Sustainable St. Paul 2015 Water Quality Award for its efforts to create Trout Brook Nature Sanctuary
• A Minnesota Brownfields ReScape Award, also in 2015 for Trout Brook

Linda and John gave up more than two hours of their day to share with me their story and that of the Tri-Area Block Club. It’s one of foresight, planning, grassroots involvement, persistence, and community building. The struggles and success of the Tri-Area Block Club offers a blueprint to anyone contemplating grassroots change.

An Unusual Route Home

A pair of heavily used Burlington Northern Santa Fe (formerly Northern Pacific) tracks run west from near 35E. The parallel tracks serve as the borders between several neighborhoods—the North End and Frogtown, Como and Hamline-Midway and Como and Saint Anthony Park. A paved road travels alongside the rails, between Como Avenue and Prior Avenue on what I presume to be railroad right of way. Something beckoned me to scrutinize the railway road, which I dubbed the “RWR.”

Hamline Avenue proved to be an opportune place to return to city streets. The bridge provides a safe way for pedestrians and bikers to cross between Hamline Avenue and Energy Park.

I’ve found that I rarely stop to take photos the last several miles of rides. Usually, I’m tired and hot and ready to get off the bike. This trip proved to follow that regimen and I rode straight home from atop the Hamline bridge.