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Walk through the history of St. Paul's oldest neighborhood. This walk takes 45-60 minutes with stops if you stroll at a leisurely pace. If you're planning on getting curbside pick-up from one the local restaurants make sure you've placed your order to coincide with the time when you'll finish up. If you drive to the neighborhood, park for free at the Minnesota Historical Society's Alexander Ramsey House.

Irvine Park History Walking Tour 

Walk through the history of St. Paul's oldest neighborhood. This walk takes 45-60 minutes with stops if you stroll at a leisurely pace. If you're planning on getting curbside pick-up from one the local restaurants make sure you've placed your order to coincide with the time when you'll finish up. If you drive to the neighborhood, park for free at the Minnesota Historical Society's Alexander Ramsey House. 

Irvine Park History Walk

The Minnesota Historical Society affirms that every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgment are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. The Minnesota Historical Society begins this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth. 


You are in the ancestral lands of the Dakota People which they ceded via the Treaty of 1837. We pay respects to their elders past and present and ask you to take a moment to consider the many historical legacies that bring people together in this place today. 


Land Acknowledgment

Cossetta's Eatery &amp; Pizzeria211 7th Street WestSaint Paul, MN 55102(651) 222-3476 phone<a href="https://cossettas.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://cossettas.com/</a>Founded by the Cossetta family who lived in the (now lost) Upper Levee district of the West End. Their various alimentari (groceries) and versions of their restaurants have been fixtures and purveyors of Italian food in St. Paul since 1911. Burger Moe's242 West 7th StreetSaint Paul, Minnesota 55102(651) 222-3100<a href="https://www.burgermoes.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.burgermoes.com/</a>A neighborhood place owned and operated by St. Paul restaurateur Moe Sharif that specializes in burgers and beer. Check out their patio, which surrounds a tiny two-room stone house built on West 7th around 1855! Downtowner Woodfire Grill253 West 7th StreetSt. Paul, MN 55102(651) 228-9500<a href="https://www.downtownerwoodfire.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.downtownerwoodfire.com/</a>If you are looking for a slightly more upscale experience with a wine selection try the Downtowner Woodfire Grill, also owned by Moe Sharif. DeGidio's425 West 7th StreetSt. Paul, MN 55102(651) 291-7105<a href="https://www.degidios.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.degidios.com/</a>Established by former bootlegger Joe “Kid Bullets” DeGidio in 1933 and still run by his grandchildren, DeGidio's specializes in classic Italian American dishes and features patio seating. Waldmann's445 Smith AvenueSaint Paul, MN 55102(651) 222-1857<a href="http://waldmannbrewery.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://waldmannbrewery.com/</a>Housed in the 1857 German lager saloon originally owned by local brewer Anton Waldmann, the Waldmann Brewery &amp; Wurstery offers classic German beers and dishes inspired by the history of the building and the neighborhood. Bad Weather Brewing414 West 7th StreetSt Paul, MN, 55102<a href="http://www.badweatherbrewery.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.badweatherbrewery.com/</a>They serve up seasonal and all-weather brews on-site and packaged beers and growlers to-go. The often feature food trucks on their patio. Check the website for food truck schedule.

From here you can easily access any of the numerous restaurants on West 7th Street, but we're going to highlight three of those that are nearby and locally-owned.

Before you go, please call or check their websites (listed here) for hours, information about ordering online, indoor or outdoor dining, curbside pick-up, or take-out. And please wear a mask to protect the servers and staff who make our enjoyment of these places possible and keep St. Paul's oldest neighborhood a vibrant place.

Enjoying Food and Drink in the Neighborhood

As you leave Irvine Park notice how the noise level around you immediately rises. That is because Irvine Park is below the grade of Exchange Street and because of the features mentioned earlier: the density of houses that buffer sound in the park, and the parking restrictions and limited traffic access that keep it relatively car-free. Here on Exchange Street you can hear the city. 265 South Exchange Street (1872) NOTE: this entry addressed Alexander Ramsey's role in the expulsion of the Dakota people from their Minnesota homelands. This is the French Empire Style mansion of Alexander Ramsey, the first governor of the settler territory of Minnesota and the second governor of the American state of Minnesota. Ramsey made his fortune by using his political position to push for treaty negotiations with both Dakota and Ojibwe bands and then to purchase, speculate on and sell the ceded land the US netted as a result. He played a significant role in the forced removal of the Dakota people from their Minnesota homelands, calling for their "extermination" or expulsion on the floor of the state legislature in 1862. He also used his power to found the Minnesota Historical Society, which was bequeathed this house by Ramsey's granddaughters in 1964. 276 South Exchange Street (1870) Home of the recently-shuttered Forepaugh's restaurant, this mansion was built by dry goods dealer Joseph Forepaugh who made such a fortune in federal contracts to supply US troops during the American Civil War, he was able to retire at the age of 34. 296-298 South Exchange Street (1911) Why does this house face away from Exchange Street? Because it was built facing a section of Sherman Street that no longer exists. In classic St. Paul fashion, it retained its Sherman Street address into the 2000s despite the demolition of this block of Sherman. It stands on the former location of the German Athenaeum (see photo). German immigrants constructed the Athenaeum (1859) to serve as a cultural center where they hosted performances of German plays, opera, and music, along with a German literary society. Although it burned down in the 1880s, the Athenaeum was an early herald of St. Paul's eventual identity as a majority-German city and the West End as the center of German immigration, commerce, language and culture until the early 20th century. If you want to learn more about St. Paul's immigrant past, including its German history, take the Minnesota Historical Society's West End History Walk which is also hosted on <a href="theclio.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">theclio.com</a>

Walk one block north on Walnut Street and out of the Irvine Park District back to Exchange Street, which is where you began your walk.

There are only three more stops on the tour: the Alexander Ramsey House at 265 Exchange Street; the Forepaugh House at 276 Exchange Street, and a brief stop at the corner of Exchange and Sherman Streets

Back to Exchange Street

The RiverDownhill from where you are standing there was once a boat landing that transformed this place into the head of navigation on the Mississipi River at a time when steamboats were the fastest way to travel and the Mississippi was the busiest "highway" in North America. Why is it called Uppertown?St. Paul actually had two boat landings, the lower and upper. This area between the Upper Landing and the High Bridge on Smith Avenue was nicknamed Uppertown. Everywhere you walk today is located in Uppertown. Uppertown and Irvine Park are the oldest sections of the vast West 7th or West End neighborhood that stretches from Seven Corners (the Xcel Energy Center) to Montreal Avenue where West 7th becomes Hwy 5.

You’re gazing upon heavily-trafficked streets, the Science Museum parking lot, the Excel Center, condos, and the river down below. It’s not exactly a scenic vista, so why look? Because this is the oldest section of the city of St. Paul. It is where St. Paul began. And it is where you will begin your walk.


Soooooo, why start a city here?


Welcome to Uppertown

Irvine Park surrounds its namesake, one of the three oldest green spaces in the city (the other two are Rice and Mears parks). As you walk around the park you will discover that roughly a third of the homes that surround it are not original to this location.The park and the district have experienced many changes over the intervening 170 years and some of those changes live in the landscape you're about to explore. We'll begin with by looking at one of those houses, then continue into the park itself. NOTE: Make sure you watch your step on uneven sidewalks as you look around!

You're about to walk into Irvine Park, the first St. Paul subdivision.

Places like Irvine Park can feel as if they have always been what they are today, but people have altered it along with the city. 

The park and the homes around it tell stories of power, change, and choices in St. Paul. As you explore the district consider:

Why does the park look and feel the way it does? 

Why are the homes built here still standing?
 
Why might preservationists have chosen to save these particular relocated homes by moving them here?

What do their stories reveal about the decisions St. Paulites have made about the built landscape of Irvine Park?

The Irvine Park District

<ul><li>The violent explusion of thousands of Dakota and Ho Chunk people from the state and forced removal of Ojibwe people to northern reservations altered the landing's original multiracial reality.</li></ul> <ul><li>At the same time, the people who had negotiated the treaties and expelled and removed Native Minnesotans from this land created a new economy based on land speculation and colonization.</li></ul> <ul><li>Between 1851 and 1863, the United States' forced removal of indigenous Minnesotans from this place and the subsequent land speculation and colonization raised St. Paul's population by 900% in a single decade.</li></ul> <ul><li>A severe economic depression in 1857 slowed that colonization, but did not stop it entirely. The city's fortunes rose again in the 1880's when it became the third largest rail hub in the United States.</li></ul> <ul><li>The booming railroad business eventually forced the Upper Landing to close as a river port and it morphed into a hub of light industry, and legal and illegal commerce, which it remained into the 20th century. Yes, St Paul's "red light district" operated on the northern edge of the landing until the 1920s.</li></ul> <ul><li>In the 1950s it housed small factories with large parking lots for workers.</li></ul> <ul><li>Today it is once again a mix of residential, commercial, and public spaces and an entry point to West 7th and Downtown St. Paul.</li></ul>

After 1851 the landing would change many times. The first major shifts occurred during the 1850s when the 
international fur trade collapsed and Minnesota and US officials and American business interests began calculating the money to be made by buying and speculating on the resale of the Dakota homelands and the historic territories of the Ojibwe and Ho Chunk people. 


Leaving the Landing

<h1>THE SIGHTS</h1>At the river, instead of a Caribou Coffee and a park, steamboats disgorging passengers at muddy levee, except in the winter when the river froze St. Paul shut. On the slope, instead of the Science Museum, St. Paul’s first brewery, owned and operated by a German immigrant named Anton Yoerg. A barrel factory, a saddlery and stable. A sawmill running overtime to produce the lumber newcomers needed to put up more houses, shops, and factories. Instead of condos, simple log homes, many of them built by Jim Thompson, a formerly enslaved man who was a prominent citizen of early St. Paul. Instead of paved streets, narrow crosswise dirt roads that alternated between wet and deeply muddy and so dry and rutted they once jostled a casket out of a moving wagon during a funeral procession. Instead of West 7th Street, a short road that was supposed to reach the US military base at Fort Snelling, but didn't, where one might patronize a hotel notable for lice or a handful of small businesses, and catch sight of the occasional bear. <h1>THE SOUNDS AND SMELLS</h1>People speaking combinations of English, Dakota, French, Ho Chunk, German, Ojibwe, and other Native American languages. The strike of hammers on nails. The buzz of the mill saw. The chuff of steamboat engines. The shriek of wooden wheels and axles on fur trade carts. The distant roar of the falls upriver. A soldier playing Reveille at Fort Snelling. The stink of tanning leather. The yeast of brewing beer. The scent of newly-lumbered wood. Horse manure and lots of it. During a later soap shortage, the smell of unwashed humans. The occasional bear.

In 1850 St. Paul had been the capital of the US Territory of Minnesota for one year and had a population of about 900 people. 

It was on the verge of an economic and population boom fueled by two conjoined factors:

The United States' forcible removal of Dakota people from a huge swathe of their homelands between St. Paul south to the Iowa border that ramped up in 1851. And a nationwide land speculation boom brought thousands of colonists to the ceded Dakota homelands.

So, if you'd been here in this spot in 1850, the year before, what could you still have seen, smelled, and heard?

Imagining the Landing, 1850

THE MAN AND THE HOUSE What did a sea captain do for kicks in a place like St. Paul? He operated an ice house that cut ice out of local lakes and sold it to early refrigerated warehouses. Hawking ice in the North may feel a bit like selling the sky to birds, but that is what Captain Charles Symonds did and it built him this home. The house was originally located near the edge of what is today the Science Museum parking lot. It survived 170 years of demolition, new construction, paving, and replatting around the landing in part (only in part) because people continued finding a purpose for it. <ul><li>Five years after Captain Symonds died (1874), new owners transformed it into a boarding house for single working men.</li></ul> <ul><li>In the early 20th century a young Italian widow named Elizabeth Skally used the legacy left her by her late husband, a local liquor dealer, to purchase the boarding house and move it here (1913).</li></ul> <ul><li>A local preservationist bought and restored it in 1975. Compare and contrast the home as it is now to its appearance in 1974, the year before its restoration. Historic preservation and maintenance is an expensive process that never ends.</li></ul>

Numerous historic homes surround Irvine Park. Roughly a third of them are not original to their current location but were moved here in the 1970s (we'll explore why in a bit).  This is one of the relocated houses. 

Built in 1850 by a Scottish sea captain, this has been identified as the oldest home in St. Paul.   

Have questions about how a sea captain fared in St.Paul or how a 170-year-old wooden house is still standing?  See info below!

234 Ryan Avenue

59 Irvine Park: BUILT HEREDr. Justus Ohage, a German immigrant and US Civil War veteran, built this Gothic Revival-style house (1889) for his wife Augusta and five children. He was an innovative surgeon and public health official who pushed St. Paul to adopt pure food and drug laws, compulsory vaccinations, and trash removal. Dr. Ohage also mortgaged this house to pay for construction of public baths for working class St. Paulites who lived in tenements without running water. Two of his children lived in the house until 1946. A year later the new owner subdivided it into rental apartments. Dr. Ohage's great-nephew restored the house and rebuilt the wooden tower in the 1980s, a century after his uncle had it constructed. 56 Irvine Park: TRANSPLANTScottish immigrant John McDonald built the VERY elaborate Italianate-style house (1871) four blocks away on Smith Avenue where the United Hospitals complex now stands. Preservationists moved it here via hydraulic lift truck in 1978. Neighborhood legend holds that movers left the house on the truck overnight and a member of the St. Paul Police Department gave it a parking ticket. 53 Irvine Park: TRANSPLANTBuilt by a master carpenter who relocated here from New York, this 1853 brick home originally stood at the corner of Kellogg Boulevard and West 7th (Xcel Energy Center) at a time when those were the crossroads of life and commerce in St. Paul. Over the next century+ the house served as a hotel and a single family residence for other families. Preservation advocates saved the house from demolition and moved it here in the 1970's. 50 Irvine Park: BUILT HEREThis house (1869) originally faced away from the park toward the now-demolished Washington Street and a view of the river. When a transplanted lawyer, his wife and their eight children moved in (1881), they redesigned the house so that the front door faced away from the racket of industrial developement on the river toward the recently-improved park. Like many homes on the park, this one was divided into multiple units after the Great Depression made large homes unaffordable to most families (see 1972 photo). NOTE: All of the original owners of the homes in Irvine Park were white.

Next, we will walk around the square and explore the histories of some of the historic homes of Irvine Park.  They were built in a variety of styles and have lived long and sometimes interesting lives. 

These homes are lived in. Please keep that in mind as you enjoy the neighborhood. 

Let's begin with 59 Irvine Park, the turreted cream brick house at the park's northeast corner.



59-50 Irvine Park

A white Yankee colonist named John Irvine relocated to St. Paul in 1843, only two years after the city exchanged the unglamorous name Pig’s Eye Landing for one deemed more respectable by a newly-arrived Catholic missionary. Irvine purchased 300 acres of recently ceded Dakota land and granted this plot to the city as pasture. Chickens and cows ruled until the 1870s when residents petitioned the city for gas lighting, landscaping and walkways for human guests. They added a fountain in the 1880s. If you walked here in 1890: You would hear the burble of the fountain, the roar of trains below the bluff, and the distant bell of the West 7th streetcar. You might see prominent residents coming and going from their front porches, and German, Swedish or Irish immigrant domestic workers entering and exiting through side or back doors. If you walked here in 1940: You might run into dozens of families and single working people leaving the houses, now subdivided into apartments or boarding rooms, to catch the electric streetcar on West 7th. The fountain and many of the old trees were gone, so neighborhood kids could sled down the hill on flattened cardboard boxes unimpeded.

Walk to the center of the park if you are able.  From here you will be able to enjoy its peace and loveliness and take a close look at its ornate central fountain while also being able to take in the surrounding housing.  

Note: The City of St. Paul is not currently operating or servicing the fountain due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Irvine Park, Pt 1.

Irvine Park in 1970: The park was surrounded houses badly in need of repair. Those deemed unsalvageable by owners and developers were demolished, creating a empty lots around the green. Developers were demolishing other distressed older districts close to the bustle of downtown. For example, the formerly upscale Lafayette Park neighborhood was bulldozed, making space for the State of Minnesota office complex and parking lot that stand in its place today. Irvine Park was saved. What happened? Local residents of the West End formed a preservation advocacy group. They raised funds and applied for city and federal grants to purchase and restore the homes that could be saved; they relocated at-risk houses here from other places, and they organized around the idea of revitalizing the park at the center. And the park? The group deliberately decided not to update the park with modern features like playground equipment. Instead, they chose to renovate it using its original 19th-century plans, commissioned a replica of the original 1880's fountain, and succeeded in getting the park and the entire district around it listed on National Register of Historic Places in 1973, a first for St. Paul. Irvine Park looks and feels the way it does because forty years ago neighborhood advocates decided to recreate it as a modern version of what they imagined it had been in the late 19th century with the dense housing, heavily restricted parking, limited traffic access, and strolling park that maintain a sense of quiet wealth and isolation in the midst of a busy city.

Starting in the 1950s St. Paulities, especially economically-mobile white families, began leaving the city for life in the suburbs, along with large employers and big commercial hubs like department stores. This trickle of change continued through the 1960s.

When the dual blows of a recession and the fuel crisis hit in the 1970s, St. Paul was grappling, like hundreds of other American cities, with surging population loss and commercial disinvestment that meant more empty homes and buildings and less tax revenue and economic vitality to support the city and its neighborhoods.


Irvine Park, Pt. 2

In 1890, forty years after Irvine Park was platted as a pasture, the landscape within and around it had changed substantially.<ul><li>The pasture was an elegant park.</li><li>A massive amount of the bluff beneath it had been dynamited back to make room for railroad shops and tracks by the river, thereby destroying Washington Street, which had run parallel to the river along the modern fence line.</li><li>St. Paul's population had risen from 1,000 to over 500,000.</li><li>The city was a wholesaling and warehousing center and it was on its way to becoming one of the busiest railroad hubs in the United States.</li><li>The booming new economy created multiple millionaires each year and drew thousands of migrating Americans and European immigrants to St. Paul for work.</li></ul> On nearby West 7th Street St. Paulites could purchase everything from cigars to bicycles, brewery workers of could grab after-work drinks at any of its numerous saloons or take their familes to local beer gardens. Below, steam engines bellowed past huffing out coal ash that settled back to earth like Black snow. Meanwhile, investors had managed after many failed attempts to run streetcars to Summit Hill, drawing the city's elite away from Irvine Park. While the park remained a desirable address, it was no longer the height of fashion, especially as the noisy, bustling city grew up around it.

Walk to the place where Walnut Street dead-ends at an overlook to the river below. 

The park is located atop of steep bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. What you see below you today is not what the builders of the houses around you would have seen prior to the mid-20th century. 

Walnut Street Overlook

223 Walnut Street (a.k.a. The One with the Columns) This Greek Revival House has stood sentinel here through for nearly 17 decades of change. It survived the partial demolition of the bluff below it. Steam and diesel trains have rattled its windows since the 1880s when its sideyard was also home to a short-lived, exclusive whites-only lawn tennis club. For much of the 20th century it enjoyed a view of the massive Farmers' Union Grain Terminal. Because descendants of the same family inhabited it from 1863 until 2014, it has remained a relatively unchanged single-family home throughout. 47 Irvine Park (1861) Built by a cofounder of the Minnesota Republican Party during the US Civil War, this Greek Revival house is the second American home built on this location. Twentieth-century landlords subdivided it into multiple units and faced with stucco until a new owner bought it in the 1990s and spent the next two decades restoring it to its current condition. 40 Irvine Park (1887) A wealthy widow built this house for herself, her sister, and the extensive library she inherited from her late husband. Various owners have altered the exterior over the years. 38 Irvine Park (1858) was the summer house of a wagonmaker and his wife and was originally located in Woodbury Township. It is the third American building on this site. The first was demolished. The second was relocated here and then burned down. Preservationists saved this from demolition due to the expansion of I-94 and moved it here in the early 1980s 35 Irvine Park (1885) is a Queen Anne-style beauty. It is the kind of home that springs to mind for many Americans when they hear "Victorian architecture." Its first owner, a wealthy barrel manufacturer, built it for his wife and six children but died of pneumonia before it was completed. His widow took in boarders so she could afford to maintain the house and then bequeath it to her son. It remained a single family home until the 1970s when its owner subdivided into 25 sleeping rooms and covered it in inexpensive asphalt siding. Subsequent owners have restored it to a single family home, the exterior of which mirrors its original appearance. 32 Irvine Park (1853) this pre-Civil War Federal Style brick house originally stood blocks away on Sherman Street. Preservationists moved it here in 1978 to protect it from demolition due to the expansion of the United/Childrens' Hospital complex. 30 Irvine Park (1852) This wooden Greek Revival home has survived three moves and subdivision into a fourplex over the past 17 decades in the 1950s. Its historical identity as the home of a succession of influential St. Paul businessmen and one former MN governor, William Marshall, may have contributed to its longevity. The former homes of powerful people are often saved. 26 Irvine Park (1860) At some point in its history this home was covered in stucco to make it easier to maintain. The people who purchased it in the 1970s removed the stucco to reveal the distinctive board-and-batten siding and Gothic Revival style.

As you walk the southern side of Irvine Park, knowing what you do about this district, consider again what the homes that were built here and those that were relocated here reveal for you the choices St. Paulites have made about Irvine Park. 

A Note About 1970s Renovations: By the 1970s city inspectors had declared most of the homes around the park substandard housing. The preservation-minded people who purchased them qualified for municipal and federal grant programs that offered the houses for as little as $1.00 in exchange for their promise to renovate and restore the properties. 

Irvine Park History Walk

Irvine Park History Walking Tour

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