Of all the neighborhoods in this study, perhaps no other has attained as legendary status as the West Side Flats, due to the books and memoirs written by those who grew up there, research papers published by sociologists examining their lives, historians, and geographers trying to accurately reconstruct what the now-demolished neighborhood was once like. Few original documents exist; the immigrants who settled on the Flats were far too busy trying to survive to reflect or write about their experiences. Even church and synagogue records are scarcely making the task of reconstructing their histories difficult as well. The memoirs and books that look back at the early years were usually written by the second generation, the original settlers’ children who, as adults, had fled the Flats for a more comfortable life elsewhere. Their recollections are seen through a mist of nostalgia, which provides some insight into their families’ lives, but often glosses over the challenges confronting them. Life was difficult, they admit, but those were “the good old days,” peopled with colorful characters, neighborhood camaraderie, and shared poverty, but the pain and suffering are all but forgotten. While numbers and statistics do provide historians with the neighborhood’s demographics over time, and maps and photographs can provide a sense of place, they are just the framework upon which history must be built. From these sources, including oral histories conducted in the latter decades of the 20th century with folks who lived on the Flats, we can gain some insight into what life must have been like in a neighborhood that has been compared to Ellis Island because, for many immigrants, it became their first place of settlement in America. As one respondent remarked in an oral interview, it wasn’t until his family left the Flats and crossed the Robert Street Bridge to move to Lower Town that he felt they had finally arrived in America.
A bend in the Mississippi River at Fort Snelling causes the river to change its flow from north to south to almost due east. As a result, once it reaches St. Paul the area across the river south of downtown, is considered to be on its west bank. Although annexed by Saint Paul in 1878, the West Side continues to maintain its own very independent identity. An identity carefully nurtured by those still living there, and the descendants of those who once called the West Side their home. The curve of the river bounds the West Side on the north, east, and west, and the city limits create its southern border. Geography has divided the neighborhood into two distinct entities, The Flats described in a tour brochure as being physically small and easily traversed in an afternoon is bounded by Robert Street on the west, Concord on the south, and the river everywhere else. State Street, its main road, was just ten blocks long. The Bluffs towering over the Flats are bounded by Prospect Boulevard, Isabel, Ohio, and George Streets. There was an effort in 1917 to change the neighborhood’s name to “Riverview.” While officially accepted, the name never gained popular support, and West Side remains today.
Until the 1851 treaties, this land along the west bank of the river belonged to the Dakota people who would bury their dead along the river in low burial mounds, now obliterated. Alongside the Dakota lived French-Canadians many of whom were voyageurs engaged in the fur trade and married to Dakota women. When Saint Paul began to open up land for settlement north and west of downtown, many of the French-Canadians left, and like Joseph Rondo began to stake claims in the expanding city. In their place came German and Irish immigrants, but they were few in number, and as soon as they were able they would move to the higher and drier ground on the bluffs where they established separate parishes: St. Michael’s for Irish Catholics and St. Matthew for German. As attractive as the bluffs were, and the views from them were and are spectacular, the area was fairly isolated. The streetcars that provided access to the city ran on the Flats but were nearly impossible to access. As a result, in 1916 an eight-storied staircase was finally built connecting the bluffs and the Flats that remain in use. The area, in contrast to the overcrowded and dilapidated housing on the Flats, has many substantial and beautiful homes that were erected in the late 19thh and early 20th centuries, particularly in the area known as Prospect Terrace, the West Side’s answer to Summit Avenue.
Moving into the housing on the Flats abandoned by earlier settlers were Yiddish-speaking Jews fleeing pogroms sweeping through the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and a lesser number of Syrian Christians seeking a safe haven in the years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The impoverished Jewish immigrants received some aid from their more prosperous German-speaking co-religionists who had established Mount Zion Temple on Minnesota Avenue, particularly following the organization of Neighborhood House by the women of Mount Zion. However, most eked out a living by being junk dealers, peddlers, or operating small businesses in the neighborhood. Of greatest importance to the Orthodox immigrants was the establishment of synagogues with their landsmen, fellow Jews who had emigrated from the same region of the Pale of Settlement. By the early 20th century, the Flats were home to at least nine congregations.
Syrian/Lebanese immigrants arriving in the latter years of the 19th century were as impoverished as their Jewish counterparts and found affordable housing along the river Flats. Many were Maronite Christians who initially worshiped in St. Michael’s before purchasing Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in 1918 and establishing their own parish, Holy Family Maronite Catholic Church. Orthodox Syrian Christians established St. George Syrian Orthodox Church in 1913. A second Orthodox church was established by Belorussian and Serbian Christians, the Russian Serbian Holy Trinity Orthodox Church. Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Christians lived in relative harmony on the Flats. One respondent recalls attending Jewish weddings and other religious ceremonies and even living for a while in a rabbi’s home. Like their Jewish neighbors, the Syrians, too, strived for the day they could move out of the Flats. When they were finally able to leave they followed the German and Irish up to the Bluffs that reminded them of their native land, where they erected a new church in 1982.
The last group to settle on the Flats before the entire area was demolished for urban renewal in the 1960s was Mexicans who began to arrive in Minnesota in the early 20th century seeking seasonal work harvesting sugar beets. Most returned to their homes in Mexico in the winter, but others chose to remain in the area finding cheap housing in the Flats as Jews were moving out. A mission was established in 1931 and Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish was founded. A church was built on the Bluffs in 1960.