Lost Twin Cities 2: Swede Hollow

In the 1950's, Minneapolis and St. Paul demolished hundreds of structures in the name of urban renewal. New construction ground to a halt during the Depression and World War II, and downtown areas were filled with dilapidated, crumbling structures. As families and commerce fled to the new modern suburbs, both cities initiated massive redevelopment projects to halt the deterioration of their downtowns. Many historic and architecturally significant buildings unfortunately came down along with the derelict and unsafe. But while we lament the disappearance of grand homes and structures, for some the most painful loss was that of an entire neighborhood.

On a little side street on the east side of St. Paul you'll still find, offset on a corner lot, a tunnel leading from the city above into a large ravine below. It was the only road in or out of a hidden valley called "Swede Hollow", where one of Minnesota's oldest and most overlooked immigrant settlements flourished for 140 years.

The Hollow was named by its earliest arrivals, Swedish peasants, who called it Svenska Dalen, or "Swedish Dale", and for over a century it was a haven for wave after wave of poor immigrant families.

Jim Sazevich: "Imagine this little valley. In 1905 our state census shows us there were over a thousand people living in this little valley. You look at it today, you can't imagine over a thousand people."

The modest homes of Swede Hollow nestled in the valley below mansions on Dayton's Bluff. Phalen Creek - named for the first white inhabitant, Edward Phalen - flowed the length of the valley. As the city grew, life for the residents of Swede Hollow remained primitive - fresh springs provided drinking water, electricity was never known and in true "Old World" fashion, the creek was their sewer.

Jim Sazevich: "Of course, the privy was an important part of their life, and it was built over the creek on stilts, and it had to project out enough into the creek. And of course, every time you'd get a heavy rain, that would make this very sedate creek a rushing torrent, and many of the privies would end up at the far end of the hollow... and would have to be retrieved by their owners!"

Mike Sanchelli: "One of these lower privies that was down by the small stream, now they were a little bit too handy for somebody to drop a flat rock into the water, which would make the water splash up into the privy. And you could hear a lot of swearing in Italian, and, I mean, it was unprintable even in Italian!"

Newly arrived immigrants walked up the railway tracks from Union Depot where they were directed to relatives' homes by notes pinned to their lapels. Many simply moved into the first vacant house they reached. In the early 20th century Italian immigrants became the largest group of residents in Swede Hollow. Phalen Creek suddenly reflected a new culture - Mike Sanchelli who was born at 17 North Phalen Creek in 1914 remembers men making their own wine and his Father singing while stomping the grapes. During the Depression, families grew vegetables and raised chickens, pigs and rabbits in the land adjacent to their homes. At that time the kids ran around in two groups called the "big gang" and the "little gang", and all the families looked out for each other's children.

Mike Sanchelli: "The City had announced that one of the slums in St. Paul was Swede Hollow. I didn't know this until years later when they had a documentary at the historical society showing the slums of Swede Hollow. I says, 'Hmm, 1933, I was still living down there.' I says, 'that was the best place to be!'"

Mike Sanchelli: "My father had a great voice. But he used to get home between 9 and 10 o'clock and the last thing he would do was sit on the middle of the big bridge and sing 'America' and then he would go to bed. One time the Steels, down the other end, Mrs. Steel said, was telling one of the kids to go to bed because there was school tomorrow but little Donald Steel piped up and said, 'Oh no, ma, Tony Sanchelli hasn't sung "America" yet!'"

The last group to live in the Hollow were Mexican-Americans. Most came north in the 1920s to work the sugar beet fields. The houses were now filled by families with names like Bravo, Herradia, and Sanchez. Our Lady of Guadaloupe Church even arranged for a boxcar to be installed along Phalen Creek to serve as a chapel.

Lola Herradia Galvan: "I guess they would be what a lot of people referred to as tar paper shacks. I guess I just don't think that we lacked for anything. When we moved down there in 1942, there were 17 homes down there, and out of those 17 homes, maybe 3 white families, the rest were all Mexicans."

With its clear spring water and cool caves for storage, Swede Hollow was a perfect place for brewing beer. Recognizing the valley's potential, Theodore Hamm started brewing at the north end of the Hollow in the 1860's. By 1894 the Hamm's brew house was an imposing five stories high, built of red brick and stone, with long rows of arched windows, ornate North Germanic gables, and a splendid baroque dome crowned by a cupola. At its opening, the expanded "Excelsior Brewery" drew a crowd of ten thousand curious people. One stop on the tour was the employees' refreshment room, where, claimed one newspaper, some workers fortified themselves with forty or fifty glasses of beer a day!

Crowning Dayton's Bluff was the Hamm mansion. For 67 years the house would create an almost medieval scene, standing like a baronial castle over Swede Hollow. Inside, the house offered twenty rooms, eight fireplaces, and all the other accoutrements of the good life in the 1880s.

Jim Sazevich: "Hamm would throw very elegant parties. The band would be imported from the city, a good German band. The lawn was all lit with Chinese lanterns, and he had tame deer that he kept in a barn below the bluff, and peacocks. And these animals would roam among his dinner guests as they danced away the night. And I picture these children climbing up and peeking through the lilac bushes and seeing all of this, and, I think, being inspired by this grandeur, when their lives were being lived in abject poverty."

But in the 1950's, the Hamm Mansion and Swede Hollow were relics from an earlier time. So with city councils eager to reverse urban decay, it was only a matter of time for old-world enclaves like Swede Hollow.

But before developers reached the east St. Paul neighborhood, the Hamm Mansion had already fallen victim to a different kind of urban destruction. In April 1954, a 14-year-old arsonist set fire to the Hamm Mansion -- out of boredom, he said. The last Hamm to live there died in 1933 and the house had become a nursing home. Fortunately, it had been abandoned just a few weeks before the blaze. By the time the mansion lay in ashes, the brewery's magnificent dome was also gone, along with most of its Victorian trappings. Beginning in 1946, it had all disappeared beneath a series of remodelings and expansions.

Then in 1956 a project to redevelop St. Paul's Eastside led to an investigation of Swede Hollow. Health officials were amazed to find a situation they had ignored for a hundred years. Since the people paid no property taxes, the city provided no services. They found sixteen families living in thirteen homes without sewer or water facilities.

The City of St. Paul offered housing to the displaced families, though in one case, only enough for five of one family's 10 children. After the last evictions, the St. Paul Fire Department doused the ramshackle houses of Swede Hollow with gasoline, and on December 11th, 1956, this unlikely little community was burned out of existence.

Jim Sazevich: "When the city fathers decided to close the hollow, and remove the last residents in 1956, in my opinion they only turned down the volume. If you close your eyes today and listen, really carefully, you can still hear the laughter of those immigrant children, you can hear the constant chatter of their geese and chickens and pigs that they lived in close harmony with, all with a backdrop of railroad noises, steam locomotives, train whistles. I don't know what we've lost. I think its still here. All over America, people still talk about their New World beginnings here in this hollow, and will long after you and I are gone."

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