Swede Hollow
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Swede Hollow was a neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was one of a large group of neighborhoods collectively known as the East Side, lying just to the east of the near-downtown Railroad Island neighborhood, and at the northwestern base of Dayton's Bluff. It was capped in the north by the sprawling Hamm's Brewery (with its imposing Hamm family mansion), and in the south by the historic Seventh Street Improvement Arches. Although one of the oldest settlements in the city, it was also arguably the poorest.[1]
Originally the area was a small, steep, wooded ravine cut through by Phalen Creek. Among the earliest inhabitants to settle permanently in the isolated spot were Swedish immigrants. First arriving in the 1850's, they gave their new home the name "Svenska Dalen," a title (or, rather, its English translation) which remained long after the original settlers had moved on, to be replaced by a wave of Italian immigrants in the early twentieth century. At the time of the neighborhood's demise in the mid-fifties, it had attracted a collection of Mexican families as well.
Although remembered with a certain sense of nostalgia today, it is not an exaggeration to describe the former area as a true slum. People and industries occupying the surrounding "upper" neighborhoods used the Hollow for an impromptu dump, which the inhabitants down below routinely scavenged for clothing, metals, building supplies, and even shoe repair needs.[2] Quite remarkable for a neighborhood in the heart of a major American city of the mid-twentieth century (and even more so considering the challenging climate of the Twin Cities region), Swede Hollow was never electrified, and plumbing conditions were extremely primitive. The residences were constructed almost entirely out of recovered and scrapped building materials, and the entire affair was serviced by a single meandering dirt road. Toilet facilities consisted of outhouses constructed directly over Phalen Creek -- the same stream which served as the neighborhood's source of drinking water and laundry facilities.
So squalid were the conditions of the Hollow, in fact, that in 1956 the entire neighborhood was declared a health hazard by the city. The last remaining families were forcibly evicted, and the entire housing stock was burnt to the ground on December 11th of the same year.
At one time (1905) as many as 1,000 people called the tiny little glade their home, although there was much less remaining (17 families in all) at the time of the 1956 clearing.
The area remains uninhabited to this day. The original woodland state has returned (although some of the building foundations apparently still remain), the creek was partially restored, and the entire valley has been made a part of the Bruce Vento Regional Trail.
[edit] Connemara Patch
Just south of Swede Hollow (and downstream of it) was a lesser-known Irish neighborhood called Connemara Patch. It was so named after the original home of the group that was settled there, who arrived in the United States under the sponsorship of Archbishop John Ireland. When the original rural colonization plan was aborted by the infamously long, blizzard-wracked winter of 1880 (a season so harsh that it was immortalized by the Laura Ingalls Wilder book The Long Winter), the desperate immigrants were resettled along lower Phalen Creek in the area between East Seventh and East Fourth streets as a stopgap measure -- one which ultimately became a permanent situation.
Like Swede Hollow, Connemara Patch was eventually cleared of its inhabitants. Interstate 94 currently occupies a substantial portion of the old enclave. The rest of the site is largely vacant, except for a few dilapidated industrial structures.
