Swede Hollow

 

 

Although one of the oldest settlements in the city,  Swede Hollow was also arguably the poorest as each wave of immigrants settled in the valley.

 

The area was originally a small, steep, wooded ravine cut through by Phalen Creek, with its first settlers arriving in the 1850's. Unusually for a neighborhood in the heart of a mid-20th-century major American city, Swede Hollow was never electrified, and plumbing was extremely primitive. The residences were constructed almost entirely out of recovered and scrapped building materials and serviced by a single dirt road.

 

The former area was a true slum. People and industries occupying the surrounding "upper" neighborhoods used the Hollow as a makeshift dump, which the inhabitants down below routinely scavenged for clothing, metals, building supplies, and even shoe repair needs.^[4] Several gristmills operated on the creek by the 1850s. Railroad tracks were built along the creek in 1865 because the creek bed provided an easier grade up from the Mississippi River than bluffs elsewhere.

capped in the north by the sprawling Hamm's Brewery with its imposing Hamm family mansion overlooking the area,  the poorest as each wave of immigrants settled in the valley.^[1] Swedes, Poles, Italians and Mexicans all at one point called the valley home. A similar community just downstream called Connemara Patch also existed for Irish immigrants.

So squalid were the conditions of the Hollow, in fact, that in 1956 the city declared the entire neighborhood a health hazard. The last remaining families were forcibly evicted, and the entire housing stock was burnt to the ground.

Phelan Creek ran down from a chain of lakes to the North, part of a larger floodplain molded by oceans, jet streams and glacier, later diverted underground to accommodate streets and homes and schools and neighborhoods diverse in origin, culture, and language. This process repeats again, with different players, a hundred years later, its microcosms occurring block by block, progress determined by destruction, perpetuity and fate. 

 

It emerges near  the vestiges of an expansive garden space gone to ruin, the creek bed rises again, in sight of remnants of an orchard, with plum gone wild, some favored by spring reservoirs  and mostly overgrown.  The slow moving trickle wends it's way, receiving numerous inlets of spring water running from the hills above to form a lagoon that eventually spills toward a goal.

Nothing is quite ordinary here; a sense of time passing sustains even in the thin soil of its slopes, shedding, eroding and re-birthing through wear and weather, invasive saplings mixing with ancient seed stock blown from the prairie. A few heroic elms, tall, skeletal, foreboding in death and sheer size, demarcate an age and boundaries surpassed by people and goods arriving and leaving, their destinies bound by this northernmost port to the breadbasket of America. 

Eventually, the creek diverts underground again,  through culvert and sandstone worn by the waters of the Mississippi itself, dropping millennia to millennia in the space of a few hundred feet.

 

 

as now, in eras' past

traces of the Mississippi

mark a current's flux

they beckon that we follow

make entreaties we depart