If You Live Long Enough

Easter Sunday when good Catholic boys and girls dress up in their finest outfits to impress each other and grandma. Oh, the memories that old French church in downtown Saint Paul bring back. If you live long enough, you can see it still there but everything else…gone.

So many of the landmarks, monuments and buildings that played wallpaper to my youth are gone now. Their history now exists only in old black and white photos. Decades of growth, change and development have effectively erased many of the landmarks that surrounded my life back then.

I was born and raised in Saint Paul. Even though I now find myself in a third-tier suburb out of the city, most of those memories are still back there. I can go back and find connections all over the city, watching the curious and sometimes neglectful changes the city has gone through in mostly subtle but profound ways.

I think where you grew up, to a certain extent, can define who you are and what you’ve become. It can be a reflection of your values, interests and affiliations. Old Saint Paul isn’t a bad place to be from. So, while you can’t ‘go back home again’ figuratively speaking you can revisit those places that impacted your life in so many profound ways.

The first home I vaguely remember was on Smith Avenue. It was a tired old duplex that never survived the creation of the United Hospital complex across the street. Then there was a six-plex apartment building near Irving Park. That structure also succumbed to the realignment of the neighborhood. Little Sisters of the Poor is still there but in a new building and mission.

When I was in first grade, we moved to a new house my mother built by herself in the Highland Park neighborhood. Her total cost of materials, not counting free labor from her brother and the cost of the foundation, was eight thousand dollars. Awhile back it went on the market for more than a quarter of a million dollars. My, how times have changed.

The list of my own landmarks now gone is numerous. My grade school was torn down a couple of years after I left. My high school, once an all-boys military school, has gone co-ed. My college was an all-man’s private college. It’s now a D 1 co-ed university. The original Twin Cities Public Television building where I began my career in television and video production is now the Minnesota State Fair headquarters. A jog over to East Saint Paul brought even more surprises.

I can still remember my Aunt Clara’s house in East Saint Paul and her favorite watering hole, the Viaduct Bar. How, at seven or eight, I somehow picked up that she and her husband frequented that place, is beyond me. But they did and I must have overheard it from my mother.

We didn’t go to see my aunt often but it must have been enough to imprint in my pea-brain. A recent venture back along old East Seventh Street brought confusion and amazement. That whole neighborhood is gone now. No more viaduct bar. No more viaduct bridge and no bridge abutments. Years ago, the resulting road alignment either erased Aunt Clara’s house or put it where I never could find it. Nothing there has remained the same.

Even the venerable village of Dinky town, famed for Bob Dylan’s coffee house start, fraternity panty raids and my own late-night romantic liaisons has morphed into something totally different.

What had once been a rundown artistic bohemian neighborhood has slowly evolved into a sad morass of fast-food chains, a university t-shirt shop, a drug store turned frou-frou restaurant and a poor excuse for a coffee shop (circ. 2013).

Even more development is now threatening to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of edgy urban living. All in the name of progress.

Not far from the debris that Dinkytown has become is an empty lot where a rundown hovel I affectionately called my ‘broken down palace’ once stood. It was my first apartment building after returning from my sojourn abroad.

That whole period in my life was really a preamble for things to come from career choices, traveling, friendships, writing and finally love and family. The building itself, like my apartment inside, would never meet code today. But it did provide me a place to sleep, a place to write and a place to experience life on so many different levels. It’s where my first venture into poetry and song writing began.

My unit on the second floor of that rundown relic had been carved out of a once spacious master bedroom. One hundred years earlier the building had been someone’s elegant home on University Avenue. By the time I moved in, it was a chopped-up, divided, subdivided and probably illegal set of apartments for whoever could afford the cheap rent.

There was a group of Pakistan students’ downstairs. They were all graduate students who were probably as suspicious of me as I was of them. I don’t know who lived on the other side of my living room wall but the nighttime noises indicated it was either Charley Harper or one of his protégés. The front of the building housed a strange assortment of folks who came and went with such regularly they might have been renting by the evening or weekend.

The overall mantra of the place seemed to be “Say Hi,” don’t ask questions, and ignore what’s going on unless you think the place might burn down. In retrospect, I think I was nuts to live in such a dump but it suited my lifestyle back then and my frame of mind. I thought of my place as bohemian chic. Visitors might have had a different impression. Shortly after I moved out, they tore the building down and replaced it with a new General Mills Research Lab.

My girlfriend at the time was a Mexican American girl named Susan. She was vivacious, outgoing, ambitious and shared a lot of my own dreams and aspirations. One of those ‘ships in the night’ I was lucky to pass along the way to adulthood.

Having found the spot where Susan and I once sat on my creaky back steps and waxed philosophically about life and love and the future, I thought I might venture back and try to find the house of where she used to live. My meandering route through that neighborhood was just part of a much larger circuitous bike ride that particular morning. There were still a lot of good memories lingering back there in the hood even after all these years.

I was about to give up my search when I rode past an old red brick row house and immediately recognized it as the spot where I used to turn left to go to Susan’s house. Even after fifty plus years, the memory of that trail marker still stood out like a homing beacon. Now I knew exactly where Susan’s house was. Only it wasn’t there.

A large apartment building had taken up a good part of her old city block. Not surprisingly, at some point back in time, a developer had come along and put up an apartment building where Susan’s house used to stand.

While I didn’t find Susan’s house, I did find something more profound. Just as Susan’s house had disappeared under the guise of progress and development, so too had most of the other vestiges of my existence back in that neighborhood. Everywhere I rode, the old buildings were gone or had been refurbished into something else.

During its heyday, the Triangle Bar was the flash point for the burgeoning music scene centered on the West Bank. Since they didn’t card, the bar attracted a lot of U of M students. I’m guessing the term ‘jail bait’ was first coined there. Not me, I either went there alone or with Susan.

But beyond the surface of that melting pot of hippies, junkies, college drop-outs, undercover cops and other assorted flotsam from civilization, came a wonderful collection of lost souls and seekers. Every night brought another stimulating conversation with some colorful character who usually gave a false last name, lied about their background but presented fascinating suppositions on life and love and war and college and our future in general. It was a true college education outside of the classroom.

The bar died in the 70’s along with the whole hippie scene. The Triangle Bar building became a phycologist's office. That period in my life which I’ve euphemistically labeled my ‘lost years’ encompassed a lot of lost real estate, friends who have come and gone, several women I truly cared about, and ultimately a lifestyle that has sustained and nurtured me for many years. The loss of those buildings was probably the most visible manifestation of my own change and evolution.

Deep down, I never really expected to find anyone or anything there from my past. The only place still standing is the duplex where Sharon and I first lived when we got married. Still, I’ve got a couple of pictures, fragmented memories and just enough foolishness left in me to think of it as a great period in my life. A time when I was young and dumb and poor. What better ingredients to fertilize the mind of an aging writer. Now that I’m old enough, oh, the stories I could tell.

On the Street Where You Live

Like the emptiness of a Paris winter, we often times don’t see what’s all around us as we trudge through the streets of life. In 1929, the great French architect Le Corbusier turned from designing houses to the planning of cities. His classic book shocked and thrilled a world already deep in the throes of the modern age.

One of Le Corbusier’s favorite arguments was that there is an order to things and an order in our lives whether we know it or not. Growing up in Saint Paul, I was hardly aware of the urban changes going on all around me. It signaled the end of one period of growth for the City and a slow painful aging process that followed. Old St. Paul was gradually being replaced with a newer version of itself. Turns out there were subtle changes going on all around me while I was pondering third grade math in grade school downtown.

Old Saint Paul proper was going through its last death rattles as I boarded a city bus each day to attend ‘the little French school’ on a hill overlooking downtown. The city, which had once prided itself as the steamboat capitol of the upper Midwest, had long ago thrown on the cloak of growing wealth and opulence of its early pioneers. Thus had begun a new period of brick and mortar replacing stick buildings with turn-of-the-century modernism. Yet by the mid-to-late-forties, time and a changing demographic had spelled the end of its downtown area as a core of business, social and economic growth.

Le Corbusier had defined the parameters of a great city back around the turn of the century and metropolitan areas like the Twin Cities and New York were struggling to find and define a new definition of a livable city. Urban development ran rampant and old neighborhoods were falling victim to the times.

Old St. Paul was a Midwestern repeat of New York City’s Jane Jacobs and her continuing battles with transportation czar Robert Moses fighting to save whole neighborhoods from being swept away by elevated highways slashing through their communities. Only in the case of Saint Paul, Interstate Highway 94 won out and the Rondo community fell by the wayside.

From 1943 through 1949, I was living on the outskirts of downtown, moving from one rental to the next. Growing up near downtown St. Paul, I was too young to understand the organic changes happening all around me. Even after we moved to the Highland Park neighborhood, I was still too young to understand the ever-changing cityscape from 1949 through 1957, as I traveled to downtown St. Paul each day.

photo courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

From 1957 through 1961, I was pretty much cloistered in my own neighborhood with frequent trips to first ring suburbs like Roseville. After 1961and high school graduation, downtown St. Paul had become a place to avoid because there was nothing there of interest for me.

My horizons broadened with time in the service, living abroad, and finally settling into a hovel near the University of Minnesota. The West Bank, Como area, and Dinkytown became a place of refuge for me. Little did I know at the time that the entire area, especially north of Dinkytown, was going through revitalization with dozens of old mansions like my ghetto being torn down for modern student apartments.

Fast forward many years later and I was working at our public television’s new digs in downtown St. Paul. By the late seventies, the Lowertown area of St. Paul had started to come out of its century’s old shell of neglect and decay. The area east of the downtown core began to take on the accoutrements of an urban village; at least in the minds of developers and real estate speculators.

By then I was settled into a third ring suburb and raising kids in a modest yet comfortable environment. The thought of living in the cities never occurred to me. Jump ahead another twenty years and my daughter now lives in St. Paul, less than five blocks from where I was raised. She and her husband love their home, their neighborhood, and new St. Paul.

Sharon and I now have to travel to my old stomping grounds to see our grandchildren in a neighborhood filled with young families eager to enjoy the benefits of living in the city.

I guess it’s true; what goes around comes around.

Living with an Artist

Retirement is a funny thing. Everyone approaches it differently. Some folks embrace the concept with enthusiasm for the measured time ahead. Other take a more cautious approach, judging time and money spent in return for what?   I found my calling pretty quickly and have settled into a routine that satisfies my soul as well as my curious mind. Sharon took a little longer but has finally found her focus.

I’m living with an artist now. Her lifestyle has changed and evolved over the past couple of years. The changes were subtle at first then grew more focused as an interest in the arts became her new found passion. In the beginning, it was metal art and welding. Gradually those endeavors evolved into alcohol ink and acrylics. Now it’s become a full blown exploration and examination of various painting mediums, methods and techniques. In that process of experimentation, my wife has begun mixing and matching a plethora of textures, patterns and applications to see the results. She is also learning the disciplines associated with her many different approaches to her art.

The residue of her artistic endeavors can be seen everywhere; on the kitchen table, in corners, the basement and even Brian’s old bedroom. There is evidence of her art projects all over the place. Picture frames and paints are stacked everywhere.

Sharon can no longer chide me for stacking papers on the floor of my writing room (Melanie’s old bedroom). The artist’s ammunition has come to rest and now even Sharon understands it must go somewhere.

Out west, our kitchen nook has become her artist’s work space and there will soon be a new gallery up in the hallway. There already is a wall of art back in Minnesota.

Sharon takes art classes at the Northrup King Building in Norde East Minneapolis and at the Palm Springs Art Center. Her work is being displayed in a design store at International Market Square and she hopes to soon be represented in the desert.

It has given both of us both a new focus on life…not that the old one wasn’t pretty good too. We are attending art gallery openings, finding new venues where Sharon might display her work and meeting fellow artists here and there. It’s prompted me to explore new venues for my plays both here and throughout the Coachella Valley.

Sharon’s venture into painting is less impressive than her embracing the true spirit of her craft. She is experimenting, succeeding at times and failing at others and trying again. There is a sense of urgency and a crusade that she is on. She is finding her voice, her comfort level and self-expression in her art. Sharon’s art is the story of her thoughts and feelings and moods and ambitions.

Sharon’s paintings energize her and give her a reason to care. It is carrying her beyond past academic success to newfound pleasures of the soul. Now she is passing on that knowledge to her grandchildren.

Family paintings inspired by Sharon

It means fulfillment for Sharon as an artist, an explorer, and a person. It now defines who she is and what she has become. It is a life filled with purpose and meaning.

Been there, done that, doing it.  I know what it’s like. I couldn’t be more proud of everything she’s accomplished thus far and will in the future.