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By Erik Hare

The streets of Saint Paul are laid out in ways that baffle most people.  Governor Ventura famously observed on Leno’s show that they were laid out by Irish people, “And you all know what they like to do” (as he made the drinky-drinky motion with his hand).  This popular belief, that our streets could only have come from some kind of problem, is not only wrong but it hides a more interesting story.

It all started with the Fort Road, which ran from Fort Snelling to the Upper Landing. The fort was built starting in 1819, but the settlement around it was limited by the “reservation” that the military claimed 3 miles in any direction.  The nearest point with a good break in the bluffs to reach the Mississippi was the Upper Landing, and that’s where a rough town was founded.  Fort Road connected the two.

When the town of Saint Paul became the capitol of the Minnesota Territory in 1849, the residents started laying out streets in earnest.  They decided to use a rough grid system, but since they were so heavily tied to the Mississippi the roads had to follow the natural topography of bluffs and breaks.  The result was a system of “Town Streets” that followed the Mississippi and “River Streets” that went down to it. 

The natural curves meant that some of streets came together.  This worked well in a horsecart kind of world where getting around was difficult; the streets, like Fort Road, were primarily about connecting two things rather than about following something as abstract as the points of the compass.  In the most famous result, Third, Fourth, Seventh, Main, and Eagle streets all came together in one central “Seven Corners”.  It looked confusing on a map, but from that one point you could directly get to where you wanted to go.

As time went on, however, the grid system based on cardinal directions became more desirable.  Where these two meet is where it gets really confusing.  The old Fort Road, now called West Seventh Street, has a tremendous number of triangles and odd intersections where the diagonal street that always wants to go somewhere runs into the surveyor’s rigid grid.  But that’s only part of the charm.

The city has worked long and hard to make sense of the old system, usually making things more confusing.  For example, when the High Bridge was installed the street it connected to was named Smith Avenue, after a popular Mayor, and divided reasonably into South Smith and North Smith at the Mississippi River. Exchange Street was cut off from its Downtown section to isolate the residential portion.  The result of this in my own neighborhood is that in the 4 blocks from the bluff of the Mississippi to the rise of Cathedral Hill we have North Smith, West Seventh, South Exchange, and (just plain) Ryan.  The numbering system on Smith runs the opposite direction from the other three as well.

Another feature of Saint Paul is how narrow many of the major streets are.  This is also an artifact of the early days when surveyors used very traditional systems to give developers the maximum amount of land between public roads.  When you have 16 blocks to the mile, that’s 330 feet between streets.   To a surveyor, that’s 20 Rods (a Rod being 16.5 feet).  If you make the streets a narrow 4 Rods, or 66 feet, you have a full 16 rods or 264 feet left over.    Many of our streets, even major streets such as West Seventh and Randolph, were built as 66 foot wide streets.  West Seventh was widened to 80 feet in 1956, and Randolph was built to an 80 foot standard west of Hamline; it is only the later major streets like Snelling that are a full 100 feet wide; University Avenue is our only truly grand street at 120 feet.

When you’re confronted with the strange streets of Saint Paul, remember that we did what we did on purpose.  The examples of the early streets were used to provide quiet neighborhoods later on, but mostly the planners of the twentieth century were doing their best to widen and make sense of what they had.  Sometimes, they only made it worse, but they were trying.  We didn’t make them all as we did because of some problem, we did it because we had our own needs.  They may just seem a little quaint by now.  Quaint is good when it’s your home.