The End of the High Road

Even casual strollers of downtown St. Paul will most likely notice the majestic High Bridge, just west of the business district. Towering above the other bridges of the city’s scenic Mississippi River valley and summiting at 160 feet above the Big Muddy, the High Bridge carries Smith Avenue from the bustling West Seventh Street commercial strip to … where, exactly?
Even for many St. Paul natives, this can be a tough question. To the naked eye, Smith Avenue crosses the river to the high bluffs on the city’s West Side, and seems to disappear up a steep hill into a leafy residential area known as Cherokee Park. But if you follow the Avenue to the top of that incline, you reach Annapolis Street eleven blocks later, the dividing line between St. Paul and the suburb of West St. Paul. While some West Side merchants hope Smith will become the next Grand Avenue, plenty of locals hope that it doesn’t. Unlike its bigger-scale cousin, which has been colonized by chain stores, Smith Avenue still boasts that rare hip-yet-unpretentious vibe. This is still essentially a working-class neighborhood full of pre-war, single-family homes with modest yards, so pick-up trucks outnumber SUVs on the streets, and neckties are few and far between. Here, the West Side’s large Latino population mingles easily with the hipsters and elderly white folk who live nearby.
The Annapolis intersection is anchored by several retail businesses. Thanks to two of them—the Old Man River Cafe and Caspers’ Cherokee Sirloin Room—it’s possible to walk down Smith and smell roasting coffee and sizzling steaks all at once. The coffee shop, owned by a pair of former journalists, occupies an old brick building that for seventy years was a pharmacy. Today, it serves not only as an outlet for its own line of java, but as a hub for the neighborhood’s social and political life, attracting a cross-section of local residents, Smith Avenue commuters, and West Side political junkies and activists.
Across the street at the Sirloin Room—an excellent example of a family-owned institution that stuck around long enough to circle back into relevance—a dark, woody bar captures that feel of the comfy neighborhood joint, but with a hint of edge, especially on weekends. The place has been there since 1970, longer if you count the twenty-some years it was the Cherokee Tavern, before the Casper family bought it.
West St. Paul Antiques is the corner’s cultural attraction. While it has a fine collection of antiques for purchase, it’s also fascinating as a museum. In its basement is perhaps the most overwhelming collection of St. Paul Winter Carnival memorabilia ever assembled in one place. Where else could you find the marching band uniforms of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s 1948 Torchlight Parade Drill Team?
Farther down Smith toward Dodd Road, a few more small shops build on the arts-and-crafts theme of the corner. The Lisan Gallery of Art and Design shows mostly local artists such as June Young and Jodi Hills but is also providing a venue for artists from the Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, scene that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Next door at Fine Restorations, woodworking artisan Vanya Hoeffding does complicated repair jobs on treasured antique furniture while Classic Upholstery handles the more rank-and-file cases. Throw in a pair of picture framing shops, and you have a reminder of what it was to walk Grand Avenue in the 1970s.


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