Author: Julie Hessler

The
antithesis of Milwaukee Avenue—the Seward neighborhood’s secret
boulevard of late 19^th century homes—is the Cedars 94 apartment
complex, located just across from Milwaukee on Franklin’s north side.
Where Milwaukee Avenue has dozens of brick homes with low front porches
and gingerbread gables, the apartments have faded wooden shingles and
a chain-link security fence. Where Milwaukee Avenue has forsythia, lilac,
and crabapple trees along its center, Cedars 94 has cement courtyards
and is bound by the roar of traffic from Franklin and Interstate 94.

But
both places share a similar legacy. Milwaukee Avenue’s homes, built
between 1883 and 1895, were intended for Scandinavian immigrants who
labored in the nearby railroad yards. Crowding as many homes as he could
onto narrow lots, developer William Ragan created the first planned
workers’ community in Minneapolis, and got the most for his buck.
Then, Milwaukee Avenue was a starting place for newcomers—not a destination.

In
1974, the quaint homes, in disrepair and slated for demolition, were
listed on the National Register of Historic Places and gradually revitalized,
some with mind-blowing color schemes: a yellow brick home with buttercup
yellow gables, sky-blue trim, and tangerine accents. Part of its charm
today lies in its relative silence—a pedestrian-only urban avenue
where it’s possible to hear the wind in the trees, the faint tinkling
of glass wind chimes, or nothing.

In
the window of Charles A. Hoffman Handmade Guitars and Stringed Instrument
Repair, on the corner of Milwaukee and Franklin, a young man bends over
a honey-colored guitar and gently restrings it. Mr. Hoffman builds 25
guitars per year and runs a brisk repair business. On a Saturday morning
the small shop, fragrant with the sharp, clean smell of wood, is warm
and musical as customers try out guitars. Easy, a black poodle with
a ‘70s afro, pads behind the counter where an ornate silver cash register
sits beside a flat-screen monitor and ergonomic keyboard.

The
Swedish potato sausage and lingonberry jam that might have been here
100 years ago have given way to green tea spices and spongy disks of
Ethiopian flatbread at the Shabelle Grocery and Meat Market and to the
Seward Community Coop’s dark and leafy organic produce. At the 2^nd
Moon Coffee Café, two poets, bathed in the blue haze of a Mac screen,
discuss publication: "Do you have any work out there?"

"I’m
still struck (as when I saw my first Pasque-flower)/Now at the single
soft shoot of daffodil arching, slow/Through the face of the rock-like
ground and on: up: through/The flinty shingle of March-blown sleet and
snow/On the winter-wasted ice-bound lawns of Milwaukee Avenue."

The
lyrical, hardscrabble poet Thomas McGrath lived in Cedars 94 in the
1980s until his death in 1990. The first-floor, single-level apartment
was easier for him to manage, and he chain smoked and wrote poems like
"The Black Train" in longhand at his dining-room table. Many afternoons,
he crossed Franklin to Tracy’s Saloon for a hamburger and a Scotch.
It seems unlikely that he would have been out on Milwaukee Avenue on
such a March day, negotiating the slick sidewalks with his cane and
unsteady gait. More likely, he was at home, looking out of the sliding
glass doors to his own winter-wasted concrete patio, imagining something
beautiful rising up out of the snow.

Notes:

1. Paragraph 2: Building
   dates for Milwaukee Avenue, developer and reference to Scandinavian
   workers: Minnesota Historical Society; Rail workers reference from "Milwaukee
   Avenue" by Gary Hiebert, 2001. Reference to Scandinavian immigrants
   also found in "History of Milwaukee Avenue," Milwaukee Avenue Homeowners
   Association.
2. Paragraph 3: Date
   for listing on National Register of Historic Places: Minnesota Historical
   Society.
3. Paragraph 4: Reference
   for number of guitars built each year by Charles Hoffman-conversation
   with Mr. Hoffman on January 6, 2007.
4. Paragraph 6: Lines
   from "The Black Train," by Thomas McGrath, from Selected Poems:
   1938-1988, Copper Canyon Press, 1988; page 156.
5. Paragraph 7: Notes
   about Thomas McGrath are my own personal notes. I worked for Tom from
   1986-1988, transcribing his poems and letters in his apartment at Cedars
   94.

I’m standing at the Dairy Queen on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, waiting to order a chocolate cone. Ahead of me is the new American nuclear family: two boys, a father, and a mother cooing to a Chihuahua clutched to her chest in a front-loading doggy knapsack. A few weeks later, Us Weekly runs a photograph of Susan Sarandon with a suede bag dangling from the crook of her elbow, a frothy little white dog peering out of it.

Like cell phones, lattes to go, and iPods, the toy dog has become something of a fashion accessory, not so much walked these days as worn. According to the American Kennel Club, four of the top ten most popular breeds since 2000 have been small ones—Yorkshire terriers, dachshunds, shih tzus, and miniature schnauzers. The most popular dogs of the day are not much bigger than the designer bags in which they are carried. To me, they seem more like the white mice I owned as a child—forever in danger of being crushed or having a nervous breakdown.

But there is one meaty exception. The toy dog for me, and anyone else who’s grouchy about the trends (dog-related or otherwise), is the pug—the anti-toy-dog toy dog.

Technically the largest member of the toy-dog category, the pug has the disarming quality of looking simultaneously guilty and repentant. And, unlike my friend’s perpetually quaking toy poodle, pugs are steadfast and substantial; petting one is like petting a packaged ham, and with the largest of the breed weighing in at around eighteen pounds, they are too heavy to carry on your person.

With their bulging, Peter-Lorre-like eyes and deeply furrowed brows, pugs seem to have a melancholy response to all questions directed at them—whether regarding a red rubber ball or the current state of the world. The Dutch call them mopshond, taken from the word mopperen, which means to grumble. A pug would be the perfect companion to join me when I rent Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth on DVD.

Pim was the first pug I ever met. She lived across the street, and I would watch her taking short, slow walks with her owner. One night, my boyfriend and I stopped to say hello. But Pim seemed to be growling at us, so we backed away. “That means she likes you,” said her owner.

This made sense to me. I am the sort of person who is routinely told to lighten up, and my own relatives have been known to wonder aloud whether it’s OK to hug me. Despite my ferocious love for family and friends, my desire to be embraced and cherished, there’s something about me that roars when people get close. But if I had a pug at the end of my leash, my way of showing affection might start to make sense. Both the pug and I growl with pleasure.

At a recent pet store Pug Meetup in Burnsville, where pug owners and potential owners had gathered, a woman asked if I wanted a black or fawn-colored pug. On her lap was Daisy, a fawn—giddy and wheezing from running, her tongue curled up like ribbon candy beneath her nose. I was smitten but uncertain. I didn’t want to be exposed as a pug-loving imposter, especially not here, with a high-spirited herd of twenty circling the room in great bursts of speed. “I’m still trying to decide,” I replied, which was true enough.

For now, I’ve got a pug reference manual and a mug shot of Pugsy Malone, a canine malcontent made famous by the Internet and greeting cards. His grave expression confirms that I’m in good company for all my worrying about the war, my old car, drowning polar bears, and roaming centipedes.

Tornadoes don’t have names, they have dates and times. The inky spiral that drops from the sky is memorialized according to the moment it touches down and stays, cuts the power, and skitters any which way it pleases across a field or farm or town.

St. Peter’s tornado struck at 5:20 p.m. on March 29, 1998. Before that day, this place was a stately, tree-lined town on the Minnesota River, home to Gustavus Adolphus College and more than forty buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Sites.

The twister destroyed some five hundred homes and buildings; it damaged 1,700 more. Trees that shaded the streets and squares of Gustavus were uprooted, leaving the school’s blond-brick buildings suddenly exposed on the hill above town. On Minnesota Avenue, St. Peter’s main thoroughfare, the century-old courthouse lost its soaring tower. Two people died in the storm, a six-year-old boy and an eighty-five-year-old man.

The Eugene St. Julien Cox House was damaged, but has since been repaired. Cox, St. Peter’s first mayor, was said to be “affable, genial, and always daintily dressed.” From June through August, visitors can tour his 1871 home, a neo-Gothic Italianate with a tower and carved eaves. It’s a fancy, gift-wrapped package that stands out among the suburban-style homes and spindly trees that went up after the storm. St. Peter’s curious mix of architecture—Summit Avenue meets Woodbury meets early, pre-condo Stillwater—causes time and geography to shift from corner to corner.

One landmark that went unharmed was the Drugstore Pharmacy Museum. Located inside Soderlund Village Drug on South Third Street, the museum offers a look at the history of corner drugstores. Before pharmaceutical companies began manufacturing drugs, local pharmacists made them from scratch. Extracts like sage or belladonna were compounded with chemicals into tablets or capsules. The museum displays Victorian and Art Deco-style glass globes containing rich-colored liquids that once identified individual pharmacies. A druggist’s ability to mix his own color combinations demonstrated his competence. Glass cabinets display mortars and pestles, dozens of blue and beer-colored apothecary bottles, and some quackery—an earthenware jug holds Radam’s “Microbe Killer No. 1,” patented in 1886, the ingredients of which included wine and pink dye.

Today, Soderlund remains a working pharmacy with old-time amenities: Visitors can sit on red stools at the ornate 1920s-era marble-topped soda fountain and drink root beer, compliments of the drugstore.

A block from the river is Mike’s Stuff, an antique shop with a pleasant jumble of dishes, milk bottles, embroidered tea towels and aprons, and the adjoining St. Peter Woolen Mill. Bright skeins of wool are shelved around the room, a backdrop to women examining pattern books. Usually, an orange tabby naps in a chair near the cash register. Pinned to the bulletin board are notices for knitting and quilt-making classes. There are also some absorbing color photos that document St. Peter, old and new, before and after. One shot is of the woolen mill newly smashed by the tornado, its roof collapsed. Another shows the mill now, fully restored. —Julie Hessler

Just around the corner from Como Zoo’s polar bears, snow leopards, and other winter-loving creatures is a Victorian-era tropical oasis. The Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in Como Park floats on the horizon like a series of great, sparkling glass beads. Up close, the building’s steel and aluminum frame and solid Ionic columns are less ethereal, but the dominating impression is of glass and light.

Call it a reverse snow globe. Outside: a winter tableau—snow falling on the rolling park’s pine, elm, and willow trees, and people wrapped in bulky coats. Inside: thousands of extraordinary palms, plants, ferns, and orchids in four different gardens; pools and fountains; and visitors disrobing, coats on their arms.

The Palm Dome is the hottest and most fragrant room in the complex, dripping in jasmine-infused humidity year-round. Each plant is carefully identified. The stubby King Sago, Cycadaceae cycas revoluta, with its coarse, woody trunk and elaborate crown of elongated green fronds, looks disarmingly like a palm. The edifying sign at its base, however, identifies it as a cycad, a living fossil that covered the earth 150 million years ago, whose closest living relatives are the pine and the spruce.

Near King Sago is the soaring fifty-foot Chinese fan palm with broad leaves and a trunk that looks like rough husks bound together. Next to that stands a thin cousin—the hurricane palm—equally tall, but with a smooth, narrow trunk and oval-shaped fronds.

The conservatory opened on November 7, 1915, under Park Superintendent Frederick Nussbaumer’s direction. As a young man, Nussbaumer had worked at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, where ornate glasshouses like the Palm House were popular. He was hired by the city of St. Paul as a gardener around 1887 and became superintendent in 1892.

In the Sunken Garden, a balcony overlooks a long, rectangular pool full of water lilies and thick, piebald goldfish, which leads to a bronze maiden. Dozens of red, pink, and apricot-colored poinsettias—eight different varieties—are on display in the winter, ringed by blue Italian cypresses, to spectacular effect.

Most visitors enter and leave the conservatory by way of the new Fern Room, which opened in 2005. The addition’s boxy shape is at odds with the curving original, but the interior is serene. Beside a waterfall, there are wishing ponds and ferns unfurling in every imaginable way: wooly tree ferns, rasp ferns, and racks of staghorns sprout from the walls.

St. Paul, Nussbaumer believed, must always have a “recreation ground for all classes of people.” And this is it. Their voices rise above the star fruit and common fig in the North Garden. They photograph their children in the Sunken Garden. They take refuge from the cold and the wet, whale-gray winter sky, and exclaim with delight at the sight of a spider-like brown and yellow orchid descending from its stem.—Julie Hessler

At Como and Carter, next to the St. Anthony Park neighborhood’s library, the remains of an old tree trunk have been carved into a statue of a boy reading a book, an owl perched on his back.

A few blocks northwest, sightings of a real owl—a great gray with a five-foot wingspan—have delighted the Park’s bookish inhabitants, a mix of professors, creative professionals, and university farm-campus students. Lately, many of them, toting high-powered binoculars and dog-eared copies of Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds, have been spotted roaming the Park’s hilly streets, trying to catch a glimpse of the spectacular creature.

Just outside the corner’s combined Dunn Brothers and Finnish Bistro—where café au lait mingles with sweet, cardamom-rich pulla rolls—a battered wooden kiosk with a shingled roof provides ethnographic clues to the neighborhood. Handmade signs announce organic produce, private piano lessons, preschool French, a statewide rally for public school funding, a lecture—“Circuses: No Fun for Animals”—by a PETA activist, feng shui classes, and a new flower store, claiming, “We deliver love.”

The good life, even the exceedingly comfortable life, is clearly evident here, but it’s steeped in earnestness and civic-mindedness. And no wonder. The corner’s architectural jewel, its anchor, is the St. Anthony Park branch library, a splendid 1917 Beaux Arts-style Carnegie that stands like a luxury liner on a triangle of lawn, just kitty-corner from the kiosk.

Inside, banks of windows frame the neighborhood’s trees, and green window seats are offered at each end of the main room. In the children’s section, three primitive watercolor paintings of the library are displayed. All depict the façade’s essentials—the six elegant, arched windows with glistening panes, and the black cast-iron staircase railings. One child has colored the panes a dazzling flame blue, exactly capturing the windows’ inner glow and reflection.

The past and the future are visible from the library’s front staircase. There is the commodious St. Anthony Park Home for the elderly, built in 1903 by the Children’s Aid Society of Minnesota as an orphanage for children coming west on the orphan trains; Milton Square’s half-timbered buildings, home to the restaurant Muffuletta, apartments for University grad students, and Micawber’s Books, one of St. Paul’s only remaining independent bookstores; the blue awnings of the original Bibelot Shop; and, everywhere, trees.

Charles Pratt, who helped develop St. Anthony Park in the late 1800s, is largely responsible for the neighborhood’s park-like setting and nature-loving sensibility, insisting that neighborhood lots and blocks be “laid out in accordance with the topography of the ground, due regard being had to the natural beauties of the situation.”

A quilt displayed in the library’s basement commemorates St. Anthony Park’s 1987 centennial and dutifully honors its trees. A notice reads: “Trees of St. Anthony Park represented in quilting: birch, poplar, hackberry, elm, linden, gingko, mulberry, sugar maple, red maple, red oak, white oak.”—Julie Hessler