AUDIO STORY: Neighborhood of St. Anthony Main is where Minneapolis began

By Jeffrey Cartwright, a senior at Hopkins High School

An antique cobblestone main street.
Tales of a red-light district.
A short-lived shopping area.
St Anthony Main is home to the first main street in Minneapolis. The area has a turbulent history unknown to many Minnesotans.
ThreeSixty’s Jeff Cartwright has the story.

St. Anthony Main’s history can be traced down the river to Fort Snelling back in the early 19th century. The area known today as St. Paul became the government and trade center of the area when people settled there. But St. Anthony offered something Fort Snelling and St. Paul didn’t have – power.

“The one thing that Minneapolis, or what eventually becomes Minneapolis, has that St. Paul doesn’t have are St. Anthony Falls,” said Annette Atkins, a history professor at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University. “There are saw mills that grow up along there and there are flour mills that grow up along there and so the water power there is the main engine, and the main driver of settlement.”

St. Anthony used to be a separate city across the river from downtown Minneapolis. To this day, the original cobblestone street is still there. St. Anthony is considered the seed from which Minneapolis eventually grew, and this is mainly because of St. Anthony Falls, but the falls collapsed after many attempts tunnel under them and share power with Nicollet Island.

“There are people who said that you could hear the falls from a distance of six miles because they were so big. So most of what you see now are broken down, very much diminished versions of what were then the St. Anthony falls,” Atkins said.

Most of the township known as St. Anthony had become a part of Minneapolis by 1887. Until the 1960’s, St. Anthony remained the industrial heart of Minneapolis. Upper class people viewed St. Anthony as a place for alcohol, prostitution, and seasonal workers, who were considered bums.

Atkins says people moved away from St. Anthony once they earned some more money. “It would like living on an interstate highway,” she said. “That was the business part, that was the industrial part, and so as long as there were big powerful factories along there, as long as there was a lot of transportation along there, it wasn’t considered a scenic place.”

There were two attempts to renew St. Anthony Main.

“Both sides of the river were still pretty run down in the 1960s, but the federal government wanted to clear out much of the area around the river … lots of itinerate travelers, itinerate workers like field hands and railroad workers … so there was a kind of activity, and liveliness and vitality around there that was also swept away when urban renewal came in,” Atkins said.

The second attempt on urban renewal was in the 1980’s when a a big retail and office complex was added to St. Anthony Main. It was called The Riverplace. It only lasted for about 8 years with clothing stores, bars, and boutiques. Eventually the shops faltered and most of the space was turned into offices.

“There still is a movie theater and Pracna on Main, are the only remnants of what was once a pretty active, lively, commercial place,” Atkins said.

Pracna is the oldest restaurant on Main Street, built in 1890. Breann Rapp is the general manager of Pracna.

“I’ve heard that since the Mall of America was built, it kind of took away from a lot of the shops that were here,” she said.

Rapp says that today there are five restaurants in the area.

“The summer time it’s really busy a lot all the time and there’s a lot of festivals and stuff that are down here. In the winter it’s a little bit slower and the regulars from the neighborhood like to come here in the winter because it’s like quieter and it’s not so touristy feeling,” she said.

St. Anthony Main remains sleepier than nearby streets like Central and University. But its industrial and cultural history helped make Minneapolis what it is today. It’s the place to be on a summer’s night with a view to the west of the Minneapolis skyline towering over the river, a cobblestone main street and remnants of a trying past.

For ThreeSixty, I’m Jeff Cartwright, Minneapolis.