Saint Paul By Bike

June 20, 2025

22.2 Miles

Macalester-Groveland, Summit-University, Summit Hill, Downtown, Dayton’s Bluff, Lowertown

Flags have become a popular way to show support for athletic teams, universities and even countries. A red, blue and white flag I’d never seen hung from the front of the house at 1320 St. Clair Avenue. The flag, I came to learn, is the Juneteenth flag and features a handful of symbols, including a five-pointed star surrounded by a large star and the date when enslaved African Americans in Texas were told of their emancipation.

Summit-University

The exterior of the former Summit Lodge No. 163 at 512 Laurel Avenue is nearly indistinguishable from when it was built in 1899.

Inside the building, however, one would likely not have any idea the six condominiums of varying sizes replaced a Masonic lodge. When built, the Summit Lodge became the first in Saint Paul built exclusively for use of a single local lodge.

Apparently, the laying of the cornerstone was newsworthy enough for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press to cover it. The August 20, 1899 edition reported that more than 500 members of other Masonic lodges around Minnesota, joined by the Minnesota State Band, marched to 512 Laurel as part of the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone. The article described the marching masons as “each wearing the white apron that typifies both the lambskin purity of Masonic purpose and the ancient origin of this philosophic, philanthropic order from the dusty ranks of the stonemasons.”

More than 100 years later, I wonder how the Masons would feel about their lodge serving as another type of lodging?

Dayton’s Bluff

Dayton’s Bluff has a curious mix of names for its roads. Several streets, such as Third through Eighth streets, climb the lofty grade from Downtown to the bluff and beyond. Other northeast-southwest-running roads such as Conway are well-traveled thoroughfares, which traverse the East Side. Meanwhile cross-streets Maria, Bates and Maple are isolated within Dayton’s Bluff. I managed to at least cross each of the previously mentioned roadways on this ride.

Conway Street turned out to be significant to this ride mainly because it’s where Bob and Gloria Hoffman and I met.

Bob, you see, grew up in a handful of East Side residences, but spent several of his formative years living with his large family at 735 Conway Street.

Gloria and Bob both frequently smile. Bob is quick with a quip or joke, sometimes in response to a comment, other times about growing up on Dayton’s Bluff. And as you’ll see, he has a vast repertoire of tales from his youth.

Bob was one of six siblings. After a divorce from his father Ray, Bob’s mother, Grace Hoffman, married Joseph Waska, who had 12 children!

The blended family of 18 (the two eldest children were already married and lived elsewhere) moved to the duplex at 735 Conway about 1946. “ When we first moved in there, only the upstairs was available. We had 16 kids and my mom and dad, and we only had a half bath up there, and we lived there for probably at least a year that way.”

Eighteen people squeezed into the upstairs duplex of only about 1,000 square feet of living area! And, added Bob, “ so we didn’t take a bath, I don’t think, for a year. We went out to Lake Phalen a lot.”

Eight decades later, Bob still jokes about the move to the Conway Street house from Burr Street on the East Side. “It was the last day of school, and my parents moved into this house, which was about a mile and a half from where we had lived. They gave me the address, but they moved while I was in school and I tell people they didn’t give me the address.”

Not surprisingly, the family had very little money. “ We were dirt poor. We had nothing but a bunch of old rags, not enough blankets…”

Bob shared a bed with four others. “ Five boys in a bed. We’d sleep cross-ways and there was no heat back in that room. One night I took a glass of water and I sat it next to the bed and there was ice on the top of that glass by morning.”

Both Bob’s mom and stepdad needed to work to pay the bills. “ She worked for Dayton’s. She worked for the Emporium. She worked for Robert Hall’s when that was downtown. She was a shoe salesperson.

“My stepdad was a painter and decorator. And he earned good money when he was working, but I remember he was off work so much.”

Despite that, fun was abundant. Bob admitted that there was no shortage of mostly harmless shenanigans among the blended family’s 16 children.

One mishap, however, unfolded prior to his parents’ divorce and his mother’s subsequent remarriage, when he was only three or four years old. It involved a game of hide-and-seek with some of his siblings. They were playing just down the block from their Burr Street home, outside a corner store, when Bob spotted a fantastic hiding spot. “ Back then they had the spare tires on the back of the car, and I crawled up inside that tire where the rim should be, and I was hiding there.”

The car’s owner came out from the store, got in his car and drove around the corner. “I fell off, broke the collarbone. And from there, just went to the hospital; had a cast on, from my neck down to my waist.” Bob still has what he calls “a lumpy collarbone” from that fall some 80 years ago.

The Hoffmans and the Waskas were pretty tame, according to Bob, “but we were always doing something mischievous. We never did anything really serious. We didn’t do any house break-ins or [hassling] people.”

One stunt involved the flat roof of their house, which was accessible through a “trap door” in the ceiling. In the summer, his sisters would tan on the roof. “One winter I got the crazy idea to go up on the roof and jump into the snowbank.” Bob, who was about 10 years old, “chickened out,” but two brothers didn’t. “ They didn’t get hurt. They just jumped in a nice high snowbank two and a half stories high. That’s pretty dumb.”

You might be surprised to learn that Bob got along well with his stepbrothers and stepsisters—the Waska kids. Most of his feuds were with one brother, who was a year and a half Bob’s junior. “ We used to have some pretty competitive arguments, you know, close in age and one’s always trying to outdo the other.”

The most memorable clash involved a rifle. “He chased me with a .410/.22 rifle. As you go in that main door at the bottom,” said Bob, with a smile as he pointed toward the front entrance of the house, “there’s a stairway that goes right up to the second floor, and I was running up the stairway trying to get away from him. And he put a hole in the wall right at the top of the steps just to my left.” Bob has no recollection of what led to his brother shooting at him, nor what ended that disagreement without any injuries, or worse.

The school across the street

The Hoffman-Waska family lived across Conway Street from a school and playground. Van Buren School held kindergarten through 8th grade classes from 1881 into the 1970s. Bob offered up a number of memories from his six years there. “ I was small for my age. So when I got to Van Buren, I did start in the fourth grade, but then halfway through the year or whatever, they put me back into the third grade and I was in a grade with peers of my own age. So I don’t know if I was failing in that grade, but they just thought I was too immature.”

The aging Victorian school itself made a lasting impression on Bob. “ It was a two-story building; three with the basement. Between the two ends they had a huge assembly hall. And on the second floor, when those kids would pass some on one side, some on the other side, you could feel that floor bouncing up and down, up and down, as these people walked through there. That was scary. I was only eight or 10 years old. I thought the floor was gonna give way.”

Bob wasn’t alone in expressing anxiety about Van Buren, as evidenced by a 1947 letter to the Saint Paul Pioneer Press newspaper.

Bob then reflected upon what a summer storm did to Van Buren. “ We had a hailstorm one summer and it broke a bunch of windows in the school,” which prompted Bob to look more closely. “I walked all the way around the school and counted the broken windows. There were 81 broken windows! That had to be some repair job.”

The playgrounds

It isn’t just Van Buren School that Bob recalls. Behind it, there was a hill, much of which is now parking lots for Dayton’s Bluff Recreation Center,  that neighborhood children played on year-round. “There had to be 80 to 100 steps. So it was a good size hill. Then of course at the bottom of the hill was a large, flat area, probably a hundred yards by a hundred yards ’cause it went from one block to the other block. And we’d play ball down there; slide the hill in winter time.”

Those stairs weren’t shoveled, so when the snow got packed down, they became a riskier, or a more exciting, place to sled. “ We’d slide down the stairs between the railings and if you hit a railing, you were done, you know. The handlebar stuck out on the sled. You had to be maneuver it very carefully. But we never had any serious incidents. We’d go down that hill and we’d go so fast ’cause it was all ice. We go across that field and slam into the fence on the other side,” recalled Bob, chortling.

Another nearby playground had a cherished place in Bob’s youth. “ My second home was Bluff Playground, but that was down by Old Hudson Road and third Street where the Third Street bridge is right now. And I was down there all the time. I mean, we’d get up in the morning if it was a weekend, that’s where I’d go. I wouldn’t come home till suppertime.”

Bob and friends frequented a third park, the more distant Indian Mounds Park. “ We used to ride our bikes up there and then we’d go ride up and down the (Indian) mounds.” (In the ’40s very few people gave any thought to the Indian mounds being a sacred burial ground, so the mounds were not protected.) On one memorable ride, Bob said he heard his mother yelling, “‘Bobby! Supper time,’ and Mounds Park from here (735 Conway) as the bird flies is probably a good mile, maybe a little more, but I swear I heard her calling and so I got on my bike and I rode home. I said, ‘Mom, were you calling me?’ ‘Yes, I was. Where have you been?'”

The unusual next door neighbors

Bob recounted some conflicts between his family and the peculiar neighbors living next door to the east. The root of the friction between the households may have been a survey of the property the neighbors commissioned shortly after the Hoffman-Waska family moved in. Basically, the surveyor determined that the property line angled toward 735. In the front yard, the distance  between the homes was about three feet, but as it got to the back end of the Hoffman-Waska house, it was only about a foot wide. The neighbors put up a fence along the property line which forced Bob’s family to walk sideways when they got near the back door on the east side.

Some confrontations were physical. Bob and company had “a lot of fights” with the oldest boy next door. In one instance, a tussle in their backyard between one of his siblings and the neighbor boy resulted in an intervention by the boy’s mother. A three foot high chicken wire fence with a two-by-four support across the top separated the two yards. According to Bob, “The mother jumped up on top of that fence and over the fence down on top of these kids. She was trying to help her son out in the fight.”

Bob shared one other series of happenings, which he still laughs about, that he and his brothers witnessed through their bedroom window.

“ Those neighbors, their bedroom or whatever was right in view of that window at the back of our house. And we would see the oldest boy, he’d walk in the room, throw his robe open, and he’d yell, ‘The King!’ And then one of the girls would do the same, say, ‘The Queen!’  And we used to razz them about that. You know, ‘Hey, there’s the king and the queen!’”

From Conway to Surrey

After five or six years in the Conway Street home, the family moved to another Dayton’s Bluff house. “We just moved a block and a half south and west onto 701 Surrey Street.  I think I was about 14, maybe 15 because I know I got my first car when I was 15. And I know I lived down there on Surrey at the time.”

Bob’s best friend also lived on Surrey Street. “Bobby Appleton. Really nice guy and his whole family, his parents, his whole family; they knew when they were of age that they were only gonna live to about 35, 40 years of age. They had some disease that they all died within their forties.”

Losing his best friend still affects Bob, even after so many years have passed. Bob choked up and paused when talking about Bobby.

Bob lost another friend, this time from youthful poor judgement. “ Another close friend was Bobby Parker. We used to chum around a lot with Bobby Parker. In fact, Bobby Parker and four or five of us, they wanted to go down to the railroad yard and play on the round table. I didn’t go with him, but Bobby Parker, they put a board across, you know the gap in there? He was going across it and the table started, down he went, cut him right in half. Yep. And that was the first funeral I ever went to.”

Bob and Gloria

Bob and a friend were living in an apartment near 7th and Arcade when Bob and Gloria met. “That was August 17th, 1959.  I remember the date we met,” he said. “I had just been down the street with my brother, the one that took a shot at me, and some of his friends, and we were just sitting in front of his house chatting and having a good time.”

About 9:30 p.m., Bob took leave back to his apartment. As he drove past the Dayton’s Bluff Commercial Club on East 7th, he spotted two women in front, who were attending a wedding there.

“ She and her girlfriend had come out of the club to get some fresh air,” Bob noted. They were also hungry. “And they were standing out in front, didn’t know which way to go, and I saw that cute little gal standing there.”

Bob pulled over and chatted with them. They were looking for a place to get something some food but being from White Bear Lake, were unfamiliar with the East Side. Bob offered them a ride, which they refused, but Bob was undeterred. “I said, ‘Okay, do you mind if I get out of the car and walk with you or talk to you?’ So I got out of the car and all we did is stood there and talked a while. We didn’t even go down for any drinks or anything, and I asked her for her phone number,” which Gloria obliged.

“I called her the next day and we went to a movie.” The movie was South Pacific, which they saw at the Avalon Theater in White Bear. “We’re sitting down near the front and there’s a whole bunch of her classmates, a bunch of girls sitting in the back of the theater, and you could hear ’em, they say, ’Is that Torch (Gloria’s high school nickname) down there? Who’s the guy she’s with?’”

Bob and Gloria dated, got engaged and then married about two and a-half years later, after Gloria graduated from high school. That’s when Bob moved from Saint Paul in favor of White Bear Lake, where the two of them have lived, mostly happily ever after.

Bob departed Dayton’s Bluff more than 60 years ago but clearly, has many memories from those days long ago. “ I like to reminisce. I come back here once or twice a year. Drive by the old house and, yeah, memories,” he said thoughtfully.

Elsewhere on the Bluff

Resuming the ride, I traveled all of two houses east, to Conway’s intersection with Maple Street, and the Martinus Wick House. Like a number of the homes in the area, the well-preserved 280 Maple was constructed in the 1880s.

In the midst of a complete rejuvenation, 720 Euclid Street wears a one-of-a-kind siding pattern.

On Surrey Street, a plant reached upward from an unusual planter.

On to 3rd Street

Parkway Little League has been a 3rd Street institution since 1955. The physical manifestation of the baseball league is the tidy grounds and well manicured fields within a low spot in the terrain along 3rd, between Tell and Griffith Streets.

On the north side of 3rd Street, directly across from the little league fields, is the driveway into the American Indian Magnet School (AIM.) A four-year construction project, completed in 2024, added new classrooms, office, media center, kitchen, and cafeteria. Other space within the building was renovated. According to the school website, many elements of the building now “reflect and celebrate American Indian culture, traditions and art.”

Standing in stark contrast, both literally and figuratively, to the contemporary wing of the AIM is the original section of the building. Built as Harding High School, the first students began classes in the building in 1926.

The building became a junior high in 1964 and renamed Mounds Park Junior High. High school students transferred to the new Harding facility constructed a mile to the east. At the end of the 1980-81 school year, the building was shuttered and remained so for 11 years. As part of the district-wide magnet program, the former Harding building was put back into use in 1992 for the American Indian Magnet program.

Glorious garden

Two blocks north of American Indian Magnet School, I stumbled onto a remarkable community garden and park. While community gardens are plentiful in Saint Paul, this verdant, serene oasis on 4th Street East was unexpected and unusual for a couple of reasons.

First, the location of Skidmore Park and Community Garden—in the middle of a residential block— is a rarity. Most communal gardens are wedged into a parcel unsuitable for development. Also, Skidmore Park is nearly the size of three city lots, has several tall, mature trees and plenty of open space (lawn) that complements the areas in which crops grow. The .39 acre park seems to have existed at least as far back as 1892 based on articles in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.

The name of the park and garden comes from the plat in which the garden is in-Skidmores Addition.

Homes on Hancock

Homes of an array of styles, designs and ages line the 1100 block of Hancock Street. Some of this is due to the dramatic elevation changes on several of the lots.

Gotzian Street

Adam Gotzian, a German immigrant, and his wife Josephine developed this street in 1883, according to “The Street Where You Live.” Gotzian also platted parts of the neighborhood. A shoemaker and landowner, Gotzian was called “one of our shrewdest and most successful business men” in an April 1881 Pioneer Press story.

Margaret Park

Margaret Park takes up one full block in the middle of the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood. A playground and/or recreation center have inhabited this block since at least the early 1900s.

In 1916, a recreation center opened on the northwest corner of this parcel by the name of Margaret Square Recreation Center. A formal dedication featuring more than 500 children and their parents in attendance included vocal and instrumental performances by students.

For the next several decades the rec center and its grounds were known by assorted identities, including Margaret Playground, Margaret Square Recreation Center and Margaret Recreation Center. Throughout it all, Margaret Park and the recreation center were one of the most popular public spaces in Saint Paul.

The original rec center building was replaced in 1982 by a structure that featured the latest in public building design and energy efficiency. However, planned solar panels were never installed and the building leaked, leading to the growth of mold.

Click on any of the photos below to enlarge them.

Demolition of that structure began in 2012 and was completed early the next year.

Although the loss of the rec center has been lamented by many, the redesigned Margaret Park created new opportunities for users, such as a large sledding hill, softball fields and a lighted soccer/football field that can be used for other sports. A modern bathroom building, customized to blend with the residential architecture of the neighborhood, was part of an earlier project.

A new playground opened in 2008, prior to the demise of the recreation center building, dedicated to the memory of Saint Paul Police Sergeant Jerry Vick. In the early morning of May 6, 2005, Vick and his partner were in plain clothes working undercover. Vick was shot in the 900 block of 7th Street East, about half a mile from Margaret Park.

Once a butcher shop

The story behind the conspicuous red brick structure that sits on Margaret Street just off East 7th Street is intriguing. What are actually two storefronts line the sidewalk, while a two and a-half story building rises above the back of one. Together, they’ve been home to the East Side Enterprise Center, which includes the Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) and the Dayton’s Bluff Community Council, since about 2015. Among other things, LEDC supports Latino and immigrant entrepreneurs and small business owners by providing loans, business development resources and support for agricultural endeavors.

The oldest of the buildings, 798 Margaret Street, was built in 1895 as a butcher shop and grocery at street level with living quarters above. German immigrant George Pabst, founded and owned the store. (His brother, Frederick, settled in Milwaukee and eventually owned the Pabst Brewery.)

Today, butchers only have to worry about dead animals. That was not the case in the early 1900s.

Between 1945 and 1955 the market expanded to include both 798 and 800 Margaret Street. The business remained at the same location until sometime in the ’60s. Later in the decade the store changed hands, according to a story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Over the next couple of decades, various businesses rotated through the former grocery. In 1990, the buildings were purchased again and converted into a ServiceMaster home cleaning business, which lasted about 20 years.

Finally, the Dayton’s Bluff Community Council and The Latino Economic Development Center purchased the historic but vacant buildings in 2013 and began renovations.

Taco time

The day’s last stop happened to be in Lowertown, a mere 600 feet west of the border with Dayton’s Bluff. Chewing up mileage around the hills of the Bluff left me hungry and the Taqueria La Cañada food truck parked at 525 7th Street East (across from the car wash) smelled, and looked, too good to pass. So I didn’t. I wolfed (sorry) down the made-to-order tacos filled with fresh ingredients, which gave me a needed boost for the rest of the ride home.