Interview with John Chaffee

Interviewed by Linda Mack

October 21, 2008

Minneapolis Riverfront Redevelopment Oral History Project

John Chaffee - JC Linda Mack - LM

LM: This is Linda Mack interviewing John Chaffee at 163 Nicollet Street, a.k.a. 27 Maple Place, on . It is October 21, 2008. Redevelopment You are the one with the incredible memory that set off this whole project, actually. When I had my interview with you, I said, “Oh, my heavens, we Societyhave to get this down.” Because you do have a fabulous memory. So tell meProject your first encounter with the riverfront.

JC: Well, I was driving around with a friend and he wanted to visit somebody down here. I remember thinking, where theRiverfront heck am I? HistoryHistorical LM: [Chuckles]

JC: He took an almost invisibleOral side road off Hennepin Avenue and, suddenly, I was in a place I never knew existed, namely the Island. In those days, Hennepin Avenue was sort of, how would you say, the relocated skid row, such as it was. The Gateway Urban Renewal Project had displaced all of the old hard timers from the Gateway District, and that wholeMinneapolis area had been flattened and turned into parking lots. So Hennepin Avenue on the Island was a skid row. The rest of the Island was a mixture of light industry and old, ramshackle low-rent housing. Generally speaking, it was not a skid row. The Grove Street Flats was a skid row building.

LM: Like single-room occupancy [SRO]?

JC: Single-room occupancy, yes. My sister worked on the rehab of the building in 1980 through 1982, and she said that they counted eighty units in that building, which now contains eighteen. There were all kinds of crazy things, like sinks screwed onto doors, doors nailed shut to create a separate unit. The condition of the building was not great. But that was kind of the only incursion of skid row off of Hennepin Avenue.

1

LM: Now do you know when this approximately would have been?

JC: This would be early 1970s. I think that the Grove Street Flats was closed down not long after I moved here, and I think that was 1972. There was a newspaper reporter who came down and wrote a story about the conditions in the building and, you know, the next day the city swooped in and condemned it.

LM: [Chuckles]

JC: All these poor old fellows who had been living there more or less peacefully for years had to move out with little or no warning. In 1973, the reconstruction of Hennepin Avenue took out the remaining traces of the old skid row and SRO Hotels. I’m quite sure that was deliberate on the part of the planners. They wanted these buildings gone. At the very least, it was kind of fortuitous that the new improved Hennepin Avenue took in enough land to take out the old skid row hotels.

LM: When we talked before, you could actually reconstruct what was on Hennepin. Was that from that era?

JC: That was from that era, yes. As I say, it was Redevelopmentgone within a year or two of when I arrived, but I remember it fairly distinctly. Society LM: Do you want to go through those? [Chuckles] Project

JC: Yes, I’ll try to remember. I think I worked out a little map of it at one time.

LM: Oh. Riverfront HistoryHistorical JC: Someone was writing a novel which had some scenes set on the Island in the early 1970s. I think it was a mystery novel. Oral LM: Could it be Larry Millett?

JC: No. I would have recognized that name. It was a woman. I’ve noted her down somewhere. In any event, on the south side of Hennepin, the first prominent building next to the bridge to downtownMinnesota was Brother De Paul’s House of Charity. It was, I’m pretty sure, a converted commercial building. It was a long, low, one-story building with aluminum siding tacked across the front of it. Very ugly. It had one little door and no windows. You could see all of the old fellows lined up there several times a day whenever they were serving meals. Next there were several old brick buildings about two stories or thereabouts, which had, I believe, like hotel rooms or sleeping rooms up above and storefronts below. That brings you to the north/south street, which is Wilder Street. That’s the one that runs at right angles to Hennepin. It’s still there. It goes down to the cross street, which is Merriam Street. Merriam is the one that goes across the old steel bridge.

2 LM: Right.

JC: On Hennepin and Wilder on the other side, that would be the southeast corner, there were several other old, brick two-story and three-story buildings, nothing much bigger than that. I know there were one or two taverns. I think there was one on the corner of Merriam and Hennepin, not more than that, but there was at least one or two. There was a barbershop. I can’t remember where the barbershop was. It may have been west of Merriam or it may have been east. It’s been a long time. I believe that the last building on the Island on the south side—that would be the extreme southeast end of Hennepin on the Island—would be the Salvation Army Thrift Store.

LM: So if we’re thinking about where this was, the Nicollet Island Inn, which is still there, would have been . . .?

JC: The relationship was the Thrift Store and the Nicollet Island Inn were joined at the corner.

LM: Oh!

JC: That is, it would be the southwest corner of theRedevelopment Thrift Store joined the northeast corner of what’s now the Nicollet Island Inn. Society LM: Okay. Project

JC: The Inn itself was a rooming house run by the Salvation Army, what they called the Men’s Residence. It was also full of old pensioners and hard-times guys. I don’t believe that the Salvation Army eitherRiverfront then or now allowed any drinking on their premises. Those who lived there had to find someplaceHistory else to drink,Historical if they wanted to do so, to the best of their ability.

LM: [Chuckles] Oral

JC: That was what it was. And of course that’s a good-sized building.

LM: MinneapolisYes. Minnesota JC: So bringing us to the north side of Hennepin, the building at the corner of West Island and Hennepin—that would be toward downtown—contained Dave Lerner’s liquor store and grocery. I believe it was called the Island Grocery. It had the address of 7 East Hennepin.

LM: That was a mainstay of the Island economy, I assume.

JC: It was, indeed. Above it, there were, of course, the usual sleeping rooms. I think that the next building over was also a hotel and then there was the Island Cycle Company. Here, I’m a little fuzzy about what came next. Then there was a vacant lot, a gravel

3 parking lot. And then one or two more old hotels, again with storefronts below. That was kind of the universal thing. I’ve seen a photo that the Minnesota Historical Society [MHS] has of Hennepin Avenue there as it looked in 1935. There wasn’t a whole lot of difference from what I saw in the early 1970s.

LM: This gets us back to what happened to you. You ended up on Nicollet Island one day and then . . .?

JC: Well, I moved down here a couple of times. I had been traveling around working as a surveyor and most recently had been up in Alaska. I moved down here first . . . I had broken up with my ex and had my little boy with me. He was five years old. I was looking for an inexpensive place to live. I didn’t have a job at the time. So I ended up moving in with some friends down here in a house that no longer exists at 31 Maple Place.

LM: Was there something about the Island that captivated you or was it just convenient?

JC: It had a couple of things that I liked. One was I had come from Duluth, which is not really a big urban area. I didn’t enjoy city life. I thought it was kind of a little too intense, and this area was kind of rural. Redevelopment

LM: Yes. Society Project JC: The other thing was that Dave Lerner, who was the landlord, didn’t make himself a part of your life in a way that other landlords tended to do. All he wanted was the rent.

LM: [Chuckles] Riverfront HistoryHistorical JC: He didn’t want you bringing the authorities down on him for some reason, you know, not too many police calls and that sort of thing, but other than that, he didn’t care. If you wanted to repair cars inOral your side yard or if you wanted to paint all the walls black in your apartment and saw off a few extra doors here and there, he really did not care. If the building had fallen down or got caught on fire, he was a little unhappy. [Laughter] Now and then, that did happen. In those old buildings, something would catch fire. Minneapolis It seemed to me like it wasMinnesota nearer to living in the country and having your own place, as opposed to living in the city and being constantly under the thumb of a landlord. That was kind of what it was. And I had met a few people that lived down here and got along with them, so that was another aspect of it. The whole of the Island, as I recall, from Hennepin north, was zoned industrial in those days. It was M-1 or light manufacturing.

LM: All this way?

JC: Yes.

LM: Wow.

4 JC: Housing was grandfathered in. It was a non-conforming use, as was DeLaSalle, I believe.

LM: Was there still any active industry on the south end?

JC: On the south end, there was Durkee-Atwood where they made fan belts and radiator hoses. I was looking at some old pictures that a neighbor had collected some years ago, and I saw, where in addition to Durkee-Atwood, there was a company called the Kunz Oil Company. They had a little gas station there, and they may have delivered heating fuel or something. I don’t really know their history. There was a billboard company. Another thing that I saw in one of these old pictures, which I sort of dimly remember, was a garage painted with a sign indicating that it was a hot rod or motorcycle club.

LM: Oh. [Chuckles]

JC: The story went—I never heard it confirmed—that, supposedly, the bikers would steal cars now and then, and parts them out for pocket money. When they were done stripping them, they would haul them up onto this end of the Island and light them on fire.

LM: Oh, gosh. Redevelopment

JC: I only saw, you know, three or four of those burning cars duringSociety the time that I lived here. But it was one of their little sources of income.Project [Chuckles] The bulk of the south end of the Island was taken up by Durkee-Atwood. You know, it was quite a large place. The building had a number of additions on it that aren’t there now. The city stripped them off and saved the very oldest part when they took it over. Riverfront LM: So that’s the pavilion? HistoryHistorical

JC: That’s the pavilion, right. They said, what, the William Bros. or the Williams Brothers. I’ve never known whatOral it is. I think it’s the Williams Bros. Boiler Works. I think I first saw that name in Foster Dunwiddie’s study that they did in 1974. That’s still around.

LM: MinneapolisYes. That was the study where they found that there were historical buildings that should be saved. Minnesota

JC: Right.

LM: It was kind of a revelation, evidently. [Chuckles]

JC: It kind of came as a surprise to all the bureaucrats. Their historic and architectural value was, what you might say, not obvious to the casual eye.

LM: Right. So Nicollet Island was going its own idiosyncratic way until the Urban Renewal Plan?

5 JC: Until urban renewal, yes. The date that I remember was that the original Urban Renewal Plan was adopted in 1969, coming on the heels of what the bureaucrats regarded as a successful operation in the Gateway District. It called for total clearance for the Island. Flatten everything. I think the general idea was that the area ought to be used for high-rise apartments in a park-like setting.

LM: Yes.

JC: Kind of the, what is it, Le Corbusier?

LM: Yes.

JC: The model that was popular in those days. It didn’t get that far, mainly because of all of the historic activists that sprang up from the weeds.

LM: [Chuckles] You were telling about the PAC. Is that how it all sort of started with the Project Area Committee?

JC: The Project Area Committee was kind of the nucleus. Because they had Federal Urban Renewal money, there was a requirement Redevelopmentthat there would be a Project Area Committee set up. The MHRA [Minnesota Housing and Redevelopment Authority], as it was then, sent staff people around knocking on doors asking peopleSociety to organize and join the Project Area Committee. There was one kind of Projectinfamous memo that was part of the, what would you say, initial package that said that the residents of the Island were in poor physical and mental health and needed to be referred to the appropriate social service agencies. Riverfront LM: Oh wow! [Laughter] This is whatHistory they foundHistorical when they went out door knocking?

JC: No, no. This was kind of their, how would you say, view from the office. Oral LM: [Laughter]

JC: They kind of incautiously circulated this. This was just their first message to the residents.Minneapolis We know you’re in poor physical and mental health and need to be looked after. But here we are andMinnesota you need to form this committee anyway.

LM: Oh, boy.

JC: Obviously, the first staff people that circulated this thing got an earful from the residents.

LM: Yes, I bet.

JC: They quickly calmed down and realized that we were no crazier than they were.

6 LM: A marvelous beginning. [Chuckles]

JC: The PAC was organized according to all the regulations and exists to this day. It was the forerunner of NIEBNA, which is the Nicollet Island East Bank Neighborhood Organization.

LM: So you were part of the PAC?

JC: I was involved in it, yes.

LM: What other notable souls were?

JC: Fred Markus was a pretty active fellow in the early days. He’s kind of an odd character, but you can judge for yourself if you track him down and interview him. He had come from Wisconsin where he’d been a legislative aide and then a candidate for city council in Madison where he lost by fifteen votes or some such thing . . . generally an activist and a community organizer. He was the one that spearheaded the PAC in the first place, got the paperwork done, arranged to get funding from the city, which was, again, part of the federal package. That was one of the things that was required, that the neighborhood groups be funded at least enough toRedevelopment operate. And they did fund us. Fred, and to some extent others, started roaming around the city hall reading regulations. And everybody understood pretty well that they meant to flatten the placeSociety and kick us all out. The question was, what could be done about this? Project

It wasn’t long before someone in the group, probably Fred, noticed there was an unusually large percentage of historic buildings in the neighborhood. And despite the patina of grime and slum on theirRiverfront surface, they were mostly intact because it would have cost too much money to tear off their Historyfaçades andHistorical redo them. They had all been operated as industry or slum housing. In neither case had their owners seen fit to spend a lot of money. They patched what was clearly falling off, but they didn’t patch beyond that. In addition to the houses, there Oralwere some interesting industrial buildings, all now gone of course, except for the Inn and the pavilion. There were several kind of neat, old industrial buildings, some of which I think ought to have been preserved.

LM: MinneapolisAnd they probably would be now. Minnesota JC: They would be now. They would have been preserved. They’d have been made into condos. But that wasn’t being done in those days.

LM: No. Right.

JC: Politically, it was difficult enough to save just the houses. There was plenty of opposition just to doing that.

7 LM: So the opposition to the Urban Renewal Plan really rested on the finding of historic resources. It wasn’t that you all said, “We’re not moving.” There was no way to fight it on a social basis.

JC: Right. You couldn’t fight it on a social basis. You couldn’t say . . .

LM: “We don’t want to go.”

JC: You couldn’t say, “We don’t want to go,” because that had been tried before.

LM: [Chuckles]

JC: It never had worked. It didn’t work on skid row and it wasn’t going to work here.

LM: So Foster’s study, I assume, was part of that?

JC: That was part of it, yes. Actually, my recollection is that there was enough lobbying by Fred, plus other people. There was kind of a resurgence of interest in the historic buildings along the riverfront at about that same time, and that was, more or less, coincidental. Peter Hall is a fellow that you certainlyRedevelopment ought to interview, because he was right in the thick of that. Society LM: I’m trying to. He won’t answer his phone. [Chuckles]Project

JC: Well, you know, maybe he’s . . .

LM: Actually, Dave Stevens Riverfrontsaid, “Just drive down there.” He’s down in Maiden Rock, Minnesota now, and he’ll be there [unclear].History Historical

JC: That’s probably not a bad idea. Oral LM: No, because he was there.

JC: It’s kind of odd . . . if I met Peter Hall, it was just very briefly. I can’t say that I knew him, althoughMinneapolis we were kind of working on similar issues at the same time. In any event, due to what Peter Hall wasMinnesota up to, and there were some other people involved who I’m not exactly aware of, there was an interest being generated about that time. So with all of the lobbying that was going on, the MHRA decided to change the Urban Renewal Plan—I think that took place in 1973—to call for preservation. So more or less about the time they commissioned the Dunwiddie Study.

LM: Oh, okay. So they actually made that call before the study and then called for the study?

JC: MHRA paid for that study. I’m pretty sure it was Fred who talked them into it.

8 LM: The study was 1974.

JC: Foster himself, too, would no doubt be a very valuable source for what went down, but that’s the way I remember it.

LM: It’s really fascinating to think back to that point. That was really the beginnings of historic preservation in . . .

JC: Certainly on the riverfront.

LM: Yes.

JC: Well, and the HPC [Heritage Preservation Commission] itself was organized right around that time.

LM: Right.

JC: This was the first historic district in Minneapolis, the first federal registered district.

LM: I think that was 1971, actually. Redevelopment

JC: There, you’d be ahead of me. Because the HPC, I don’t know,Society must have been formed not long after the district was designated as historicProject.

LM: Right.

JC: Yes, it was all kind of happeningRiverfront at once there. HistoryHistorical LM: To go back to MHRA changing its mind . . . So it sort of saw the handwriting on the wall because of federal laws, in fact, that they wouldn’t be able to just come in and level this if they were going to useOral federal funds?

JC: You know, I’m not sure how the regulations would have worked there. They may have been able to use federal funds had they gone through the correct procedures and showedMinneapolis that these buildings couldn’t be saved or made the case that they couldn’t be saved. I don’t really knowMinnesota how that affected the funding. Certainly, there was enough interest in it to make them stop and think. I don’t know if I can think of anybody who was on staff at the MHRA in those days; although there are, of course, records of it.

LM: Maybe Jerry Luesse.

JC: Jerry Luesse was one of the very early ones, yes. He was an area director at the time that they were tearing down some old buildings on Hennepin Avenue. The agency was kind of decentralized. Jerry Luesse’s office was up on Marshall Street somewhere. They kicked a bunch of old fellows out of a place called the Wilder Hotel on Hennepin. I think it stood opposite Wilder Street. So we went up there one time and had a little

9 demonstration in his office to complain about his eviction of these old fellows. It didn’t do much good, but it kind of got attention. Jerry left a meeting downtown where he’d been talking with the higher ups and came back to his office to negotiate. [Laughter] It was a very civilized and low-key demonstration, I think. I’m not even sure if I’ve been in any other demonstrations. We just took some pieces of purple cloth for banners and some garbage can lids to bang together for about six or eight blocks.

LM: [Laughter]

JC: And I suppose there were about six or eight people. We just went there and kind of invaded the office and stood around and complained—for all the good it did. Yes, Jerry Luesse, if he’s still around, would, no doubt, remember this. There were several executive directors of MHRA at the time and we didn’t get along very well with any of them. We didn’t get much traction. There was one guy called Ned Pratt who was a really fine guy to work with. He was one of the people that worked on Rediscovered. He took a lot of the photos in there.

LM: Yes, I knew him.

JC: I think he’s down in like Kentucky or TennesseeRedevelopment now these days. Edward K. Pratt, that was his actual name. He trained as an architect. He had been in the Army where he’d been working on construction management in Vietnam or Thailand.Society He was one of the few people that understood anything about design, orProject cared, so he was a real pleasure to work with always. I think he was one of the people that kind of swung the agency in a more favorable direction.

LM: Hmmm. So we’re at theRiverfront historic study. Then that came out. HistoryHistorical JC: That came out. And after that there was a period of a couple years there when things were relatively quiet and relatively favorable. What the MHRA had to deal with was the fact that, first of all, they couOralldn’t tear these buildings down. Second of all, they were historic and cost a lot to fix up in the proper way. And third, they didn’t have much money for that purpose. In 1976, they came up with some money somehow, and they stabilized several of the buildings. They did 107-109 West Island, that being the one with the tower.Minneapolis Then they did this one here, 27 Maple, with its distinctive mansard roof. They did a fairly complete exteriorMinnesota rehab on both of those.

LM: The 107-109 is the yellow one?

JC: The yellow one, yes.

LM: There’s a picture of you that I think I gave you, right?

JC: Right.

LM: That would have been right about this time?

10 JC: I think the picture dated from maybe 1974.

LM: Oh.

JC: 1974 or 1976. It was about that time. In 1977, they put a cedar roof on this building and on one or two others. I think they might have put a roof on that one there. Meanwhile, they were in the process of acquiring them from Dave Lerner and the other private landlords. They didn’t own them all.

LM: Okay. And the Park Board was not . . .?

JC: In the early 1970s, most of them still belonged to Dave Lerner. As I say, there were one or two other private landlords, but he was kind of the principal one. As they acquired them and as they were able to scrounge funds from here or there, they would do some repairs to them. Meanwhile, the planning for the Riverfront Regional Park was moving forward. I think that dates from about 1976. I’m a little vague on that.

LM: That was in the Met Council?

JC: Correct, yes. Redevelopment

LM: I believe that Al Hofstede was on the Met Council. Society Project JC: You know, he may have been. I don’t remember.

LM: He takes credit for that. Riverfront JC: One person who was pretty heavilyHistory involved,Historical I understood later, was Dave Durenberger. That was before he was in the Senate. He is still around.

LM: Yes. Oral

JC: He’s over at the University of St. Thomas. He’s probably quite familiar with the history of the Regional Park. This I got from a program on Channel 2. You know, I never met himMinneapolis or had much to do with him. Minnesota LM: Right. I vaguely remember him a little bit.

JC: With the inception of the Regional Park, the Minneapolis Park Board right away decided they wanted all of Nicollet Island.

LM: So they actually didn’t own anything here?

JC: They didn’t own anything at that time, right. They hadn’t had the money.

LM: And they had no money to acquire it.

11 JC: Yes. The MHRA was the head of it because they at least had federal money to acquire the properties.

In 1974, 1975, Scott Wiley took over as PAC chair. I’ve kind of lost track of him. There are two Scott Wileys in the phone book. I don’t know which one it is. I think it’s Scott W. Wiley. If you want to make a few blind phone calls, you’ll probably find him. Scott was a hard worker and conscientious and, you know, did his best to at least hold the ground that we had gained. There were all these forces amassing in the background on such as the Regional Park.

LM: Did that threaten you all? Because it meant that it was supposed to become an open space that was not occupied.

JC: It did, yes. I think it was about 1978 that the river board was organized. That date is readily available, I’m sure. The Riverfront Development Coordination Board was its formal name. It was supposed to eliminate the jurisdictional disputes and bring all of the agencies together and agree on what was to be done down here.

LM: [Laughter] Right! Redevelopment JC: It didn’t quite work that way. Society LM: No. [Chuckles] It gave them a forum for their argumentsProject though.

JC: A forum for their arguments. Yes, I think that’s a very good way of putting it.

LM: Do you know more aboutRiverfront the Park Board’s arrival? They seemed to become a force very quickly. HistoryHistorical

JC: I think it started about 1978, more or less about the same time as the river board, that they started pushing to acquireOral the Island, as well as other large chunks of the riverfront. As I heard it explained at the time, the Park Board staff and the staff of the Met Council were all in agreement on this. There was a practice where the Met Council staff would write these memos to the Park Board saying, “If you want the state money, you have to acquireMinneapolis Nicollet Island.” Minnesota LM: Ah.

JC: There was a lot of that going on. The MCDA [Minneapolis Community Development Agency], I forget when it was reconstituted; I think in the early 1980s. The MHRA was continuing to acquire the old houses and other old buildings from the private owners. They tended to concentrate on residential, that being the purpose of their agency after all. They concentrated on acquiring residential land, although they did acquire some commercial properties as well. The residential was cheaper, and that was probably another factor. So they continued to acquire it. There was a sort of ambivalence about their handling of the residential property. There appeared to be two factions within the

12 MHRA: one that favored preservation and one that favored demolition and was trying to accomplish it through neglect. They would acquire a property and if it was vacant, the maintenance crew would go into the property, and under the guise of protecting the building from damage, they would dismantle all the plumbing.

LM: Hmmm.

JC: They would take it all apart, so the place was no longer habitable under the code. Sometimes, when an apartment became vacant in one of the buildings that were occupied, they would refuse to rent it again. On the other hand, there were people like Ned Pratt who were doing what they could to get the houses rehabbed and preserve them, so there was kind of factionalism going on. All of this was happening at the same time that the Park Board was planning to take the whole place over, say from 1974 to about 1983. When the agreement was signed, there were all these cross currents. There were different parties doing different things. From our point of view, we had several short-term goals. One was to try to keep buildings occupied as much as possible. The other was to protect buildings that were already vacant from being broken into and lit on fire by homeless guys.

LM: Were you successful at both? Redevelopment

JC: Mostly. I think that the last house on the Island that was tornSociety down was 31 Maple in 1974. At that point, as you recall, the plan called for Projectpreservation. This is an example of the faction. The people that were in charge of maintaining the buildings were all, or almost all, in favor of tearing them down, so you kind of had the fox guarding the hen houses. There were one of two decent people in the maintenance department, but there were some real jerks as well, Riverfrontand hard to deal with. They would acquire property. The maintenance crew would go in and, asHistory I say, dismantleHistorical all the plumbing under the guise of protecting the building from water damage. The water would be shut off. They would unscrew the pipes on the water heater and push it into a corner, things like that. Quite unnecessary. Then weeks or Oralmonths later, a building inspector would come down from yet another city department and condemn the place.

LM: Ah. Yes. Minneapolis JC: After a while, it got toMinnesota where the maintenance people would try to pull demo permits, and the residents would go downtown and complain to the council member. Or the HPC would refuse their demo permit. So they would have to board the building up and let it sit vacant. The boards would get pried off and homeless guys would move in. There was the threat of fire all the time in the vacant buildings. This was all going on, more or less, simultaneously with the tug of war between the Park Board and the MHRA over who would ultimately control the Island.

LM: I’m trying to think of who was the council person at this time. Or I’m sure there were a couple.

13 JC: There was Lou DeMars there in the early part of that period.

LM: Right.

JC: Then there was Van White for a good many years.

LM: Where did they come down on this?

JC: They were both helpful; they were both sympathetic. They couldn’t compel the MHRA to fix up buildings when they didn’t have the money to fix them up. They could, and did on several occasions, save them from being demolished. Obviously, it was a stop gap. Something more permanent needed to be done. That had to await the outcome of the battle between the Park Board and the MHRA.

LM: Which you said was resolved in 1983?

JC: In 1983, correct.

LM: How did that happen? Redevelopment JC: Well, there was a lot of political pressure going in all directions. Ultimately, it kind of fell out that the Park Board had to give up their ambitions of acquiringSociety all the housing. Their plans for the housing had never been what you’dProject call real well thought out. They said they’d use all these old houses for “park buildings” but they had no funds to fix them up. They had funds to buy the land, but no funds to fix them up. I think what they probably would have done was kick all the residents out and board up the places and let them sit empty for twenty yearsRiverfront or more as they did with the so-called Longfellow House down there. HistoryHistorical

LM: Wow. Oral JC: That one, I believe, sat vacant for twenty years. It wouldn’t have worked out well.

LM: You were saying that you thought that the resolution came out of the mayor’s office?Minneapolis Minnesota JC: The mayor’s office. Don Fraser was the one that suggested this resolution, I believe. He said, at a meeting later on, that the ground lease arrangement had been his idea. I’ve never talked to him about it.

LM: He didn’t remember too much about it.

JC: You’ve spoken to him, I take it?

LM: But it might be that Tom Johnson or Jan Hively . . . I don’t know if Jan was the deputy mayor then.

14 JC: Jan would probably remember some about it, although much of this kind of took place in the shadows. That is, we weren’t involved in all of the discussions. We were involved in the discussions about the language of the agreement, because we could see this was going to affect the condition of the neighborhood. Some of the earlier . . . no, I’m thinking of the ground lease. There was some real scary language in some of the earlier ground lease drafts. That Tom Johnson you’re thinking of, was he a council member?

LM: Yes, or county board, was he? He’s a lawyer with Gray Plant Mooty. He’s been active in Marcy Holmes [Neighborhood Association].

JC: Yes, I know the fellow you mean.

LM: He may have worked with the mayor’s office?

JC: I don’t know. He might have. Fraser’s papers are over at MHS. That would be a good source.

LM: Yes. I can’t think who was deputy mayor before Jan Hively was deputy mayor. Redevelopment JC: I can’t either. Before Fraser, who did we have? Hofstede, I believe. Society LM: Al Hofstede, right. Project

JC: He was no particular friend of preservation.

LM: No. Riverfront HistoryHistorical JC: Before that, it was . . . what’s his name?

LM: Stenvig. Oral

JC: Charles Stenvig, yes.

LM: MinneapolisI don’t think preservation was a known entity. Minnesota JC: That wasn’t on his mind at all.

LM: Describe this resolution.

JC: Well, what it came down to was the MCDA, as it was by then, would turn all of the housing properties over to the Park Board free. The Park Board would then lease them back to the MCDA, and the MCDA in turn would sublease them to private developers.

LM: That makes perfect sense. [Chuckles]

15 JC: My understanding of the reason for the lease agreement was to put historical controls on the property in a more durable way. You know, you can put a covenant document on a property that says, “This property can’t be altered from its historic appearance,” and it is a legal document. But there are some lawyers that say, “The covenant expires after thirty- five years.”

LM: Oh.

JC: I’m curious to know how the legal thinking went on it, but I believe that’s what it was. I think there may be some clue in Fraser’s papers.

LM: So the Park Board kept some sense that it owned the land?

JC: They own the fee title, but they own it only for the purpose of controlling how it’s used and maintained and occupied. I’ve got a copy of our ground lease. If you want to look at it, you can get the ground lease document at the courthouse.

LM: Okay.

JC: I might even have the document reference forRedevelopment you. The 1983 agreement, I don’t know if it has ever been recorded [unclear]. Society LM: Wow. Project

JC: I really don’t know. It might have been, but I’m not sure that it was. The other provisions of the 1983 agreement were that the Park Board would buy the non-housing properties that the MCDA ownedRiverfront at their cost. In other words, they would reimburse them for the cost of acquiring those. TheHistory Park HistoricalBoard would go ahead and acquire the remaining industrial property on the Island and develop it as a park. Then there was that infamous provision that the Park Board would use its best efforts to get DeLaSalle a football field, which was purelyOral a political deal.

LM: Oh, yes, that was part of that.

JC: TheyMinneapolis had enough political support to get it in there, so that was why it was there. Minnesota LM: And did that change things?

JC: Well, it certainly made things a lot quieter in the political sense of no longer having to lobby everybody on a more or less continual basis to keep houses from being torn down. We still had vacant ones to look after. I and other people would periodically go around and look at the boarding on all of the vacant houses. If it was pried loose, we’d go inside and shine a flashlight around and see if anybody was there.

LM: [Chuckles]

16 JC: Normally, there wasn’t. The fellows that camp in vacant houses, they don’t stick around during the daylight hours. They come and go in the darkness. But we’d make sure there was nobody there. Then we’d board it back up again. Periodically, we would harass the MCDA to repair roofs on the vacant buildings. That was very hard to get done.

LM: When did the actual redevelopment happen?

JC: That began to follow. One of the things that had to be done following the 1983 agreement was to negotiate the master ground lease, that being the lease from the Park Board to the MCDA. All of the leases to other parties were going to be subleases, so they’d be much same the same wording. The wording of that had to be worked out. That took two years of negotiations. As I was saying, there were some kind of draconian provisions in some of the early lease drafts. One of them was that all Island residents had to have a building inspector come through their house once a year to look it over and see if it was being kept up to code. You know, we were kind of regarded with suspicion, I guess you’d say.

LM: [Chuckles]

JC: Many of the bureaucrats felt that the conditionRedevelopment of the houses was our fault. They had given us some guilt by association. We lived in these ratty, rundown houses; therefore, we must be irresponsible people. They couldn’t quite fathom anySociety other reason why we would be there. [Laughter] There was that provision.Project We got that taken out with some difficulty. There was another provision that said, “Island residents agree not to object to anything that the Park Board might do in the future,” In other words, waive our civil rights. Riverfront LM: Geez! HistoryHistorical

JC: That got taken out, in part due to Phyllis Kahn’s intervention. Oral LM: That’s amazing.

JC: That was some scary stuff there. They were going to have us living like kind of serfs here. Minneapolis Minnesota LM: Yes. Did Phyllis live on the Island by then?

JC: No. She came much later. She went through the same lottery developer selection process that everybody else did. She’s been accused of bending the rules in her favor, but it didn’t happen that way. I think she did her house about 1992, along in there. She’d probably be happy to talk about it.

LM: Oh, I’m sure! I’m working up to that. [Laughter]

17 JC: You’ve got to get some more background. So anyway, the ground lease negotiations took a couple of years. By that time, a group of us had formed a neighborhood development corporation. Our intention was to take over the houses, or as many of them as we could afford, and fix them up and create affordable housing. Again, there was provision for this in the federal law. The law was, and is to this day I believe, that if you had a federally funded Urban Renewal Project and if a neighborhood-based development corporation were set up to redevelop some of the property in question, that corporation’s proposal would get priority over outside groups.

LM: Hmmm.

JC: So having learned this, we got some consultants in, and we got a couple of seed money grants and got some lawyers. The first thing we were involved in was wrangling over this master ground lease, which, obviously, was going to affect the conditions of the future redevelopment. So we had many meetings with the MCDA and the Park Board and our lawyers and their lawyers wrangling over this ground lease. I think it was signed in 1985. Let me see if I can find this ground lease of ours. [Mr. Chaffee retrieves a copy of the ground lease.] It refers to the master ground lease. There’s a document number there. One of the provisions was there were five vacant lots set apart for move-in houses. So the first thing that happened was houses began to be Redevelopmentmoved in.

LM: Okay. Society Project JC: The existing houses weren’t redeveloped until sometime later. Jeff and Dorothy Siegel were the first ones to move houses in. They moved two of them. Jeff is mostly in North Carolina these days, although he still owns a house here. He and Dorothy are split. Dorothy still lives in the first Riverfronthouse they moved in, which is the blue one with the yellow and cream trim on the corner of MapleHistory and WestHistorical Island . She’s kind of a quiet person, almost reclusive, I guess you’d say. So I don’t know how she would feel about talking about the subject. I think she has gone back to her maiden name, which is Sams. Oral LM: Oh, okay.

JC: Dorothy Sams and Jeffrey Siegel. Minneapolis LM: So the MCDA didn’tMinnesota actually move in any the houses but private developers?

JC: Well, the first three lots were filled by houses moved in by private parties. The remaining two lots . . . The MCDA had two mirror-image houses over on the West Bank that were in the way of a parking lot. They moved those houses in themselves. They set them on foundations. They made the utility connections, or at least the sewer and water, which were expensive, and then they turned them over to private developers through the same lottery process that was used for the other single homes and duplexes.

LM: Okay.

18 JC: Siegel’s houses were 1985 and 1986. The next one that came in was Bergman and Daly’s house and that would have been, I’m trying to think, 1987, 1988, along in there. The two Loberg houses, as they call them, were moved in by the MCDA. Those had to have been on into the early 1990s.

LM: In that time period, was there some renovation of existing houses?

JC: The first existing house renovation was the one done by the neighborhood development corporation. That corporation was called the Mid River Neighborhood Restoration.

LM: Okay.

JC: Mid River closed on its project in June of 1988. It had taken all of the intervening three years from 1985 to 1988 to put together the financing for the affordable housing. There was a conflict, as one might say, between keeping it affordable and doing the historic restoration, the high cost of that. So it was a very complicated deal. It involved syndicating historic tax credits and, also, syndicating low-income tax credits. A couple of attempts were made to put it together. With a tax law change in the middle, it kind of slowed things down, but, eventually, after three yearsRedevelopment of fooling around, the project was put together. Mid River did five four-plex buildings and one duplex, so there’s a total of twenty-two units in the Affordable Housing Co-op, which remainsSociety to this day. Project LM: Those are mostly [unclear].

JC: The brick one here is one of them. There’s one four-plex and a duplex over on East Island [Avenue]. That’s that pinkRiverfront four-plex and the duplex next to it. Then the purple house on Maple Place and the yellow Historyone withHistorical the tower and the green one with the white trim that’s next to the one with the tower. Those are the Co-op units. About the same time, or shortly after that, I guess it was, they started giving out the individual houses in batches of two or three at a time.Oral

LM: Okay. Individual homeowners just . . .?

JC: Again,Minneapolis under the federal law, they gave priority to existing residents, but there were only a couple of us that wereMinnesota in a position to do it, because there was no subsidy on the single family and duplex houses. The private developers got no subsidy. In many cases, the cost of the rehab was more than the MCDA figured the house was going to be worth when it was done. So, you know, it took a fair amount of financial backing and a certain amount of risk taking.

What they did is they would advertise them. They put ads in the Star Tribune. They had a list that they had kept over the years. It contained, they said, the names of every person who had ever inquired about getting a house on Nicollet Island, and it was said to contain two or three thousand names. All those people received a notice any time a group of houses was offered. As I say, they offered them in groups of two or three. I suppose what

19 they figured was they wanted to be able to keep a close eye on what went on, as opposed to just disposing of them all and walking away.

LM: So then people signed a contract that required them to fix up the house to a certain status?

JC: Correct. When you applied, the first thing you had to send in was a financial statement showing how you were going to finance the rehab. They had estimated amounts. They were sizable amounts, especially for the late 1980s. They ran from $100,000 to $200,000 and that was a lot more money then that it is now. That would be the equivalent of nearly twice as much. So the first thing you had to do was submit a financial statement. If you could not finance the project, you could not take part in the selection process. For each house, I’d say it got it down to eight or ten people on average that were interested in a particular house and had the funds to restore it. So those eight or ten names would be put in a hat to be drawn. They did the drawing at the MCDA office. On a couple of occasions, a council member was there to do the drawing. I think Jackie Cherryhomes drew a couple of those. [Chuckles] I don’t know if she wants to talk about those days or not. For each house, they would draw one first-choice developer and one second-choice developer. The second-choice person was called on if the first-choice developer did not get the project together. Redevelopment

Then the chosen developer, the first one whose name was drawn,Society would be given what they called an exclusive right to negotiate a redevelopmentProject contract. This is the way the MCDA always does it. For the project to move forward, you have to a lot of plans and contracts and estimates and financing all pulled together in one neat package, and it costs money to do that. They’ll select a developer by whatever process, in this case by lottery. The developer then has . . . I thinkRiverfront they usually allowed about a year to put together the development package. So the developerHistory wouldHistorical go and most likely hire an architect and a contractor and put together a complete set of plans and specifications and get bids. There would be a complete set of plans and a construction contract all ready to be signed, and the MCDA would review these.Oral When they were satisfied, then they would have a closing. At the closing, you would get the ground sublease, like you have there, and what they called a structure deed for the building itself, as opposed to the land. On this same table, you had to sign the contract for the rehab, the previously approved contract. Also, if thereMinneapolis was a construction mortgage, as there often was, you had to sign that as well. All these documents were signedMinnesota simultaneously.

The MCDA staff said that they had tried in other parts of town having people give some sweat equity in their houses, and they hadn’t been very satisfied with the results. People would start fixing up their house and eight, ten years would go by and they would be still about half done. This was an area where they wanted fast and consistent results. They wanted things to get done.

A lot of people had trouble. On Phyllis’s house, there were the usual two developers drawn the first time. Phyllis wasn’t drawn for either one of those slots. The first developer spent about a year or so trying to pull together the project, the plans, the

20 contract and the financing. The MCDA said, “Well, you know, you’ve had you chance here. You’re not getting it together. We’ll give it to the second developer.” I met the first one, but I don’t think I ever met the second one. The second one tried and failed. So then they put it back in the process again, advertised it once more, and Phyllis put her name in for the second time, the second lottery. That time, she was the only one that was willing to try it. That was how she got that one, but it took about three or four years for that to take place.

LM: So bringing the Island back was a slow process?

JC: It was very slow. Under the circumstances, I think it was really managed as well as it could have been. I thought that the MCDA did a really good job of, on the one hand, functioning without any public subsidy, because they didn’t have any funds and, on the other hand, apportioning these houses as fairly as they could to the general public.

LM: How long would you say this kind of rehab time frame was?

JC: I think the whole thing from start to finish was from the earliest, as I say, about 1985 when the Siegels moved their first house in . . . I think most of the rehabs were done by the mid-1990s. It was the better part of ten years.Redevelopment

LM: Yes. Society Project JC: Mary Nadeau’s house across the street was the last one. That one is a replica house. They allowed a couple of them because the original house was in dreadful condition. I mean, even you and I thought it was in dreadful condition . . . and we were fairly optimistic about those things.Riverfront HistoryHistorical LM: [Chuckles]

JC: She got the property in theOral lottery. She had to come up with an architecturally compatible design. I shouldn’t call it a replica. It wasn’t replicating anything. Bob Roscoe designed it. He did a pretty good job, I thought, to make it harmonious.

LM: MinneapolisIn the meantime, were there any public improvements being made? Minnesota JC: That came very late. It came late in the game after all of the houses were done.

LM: So the brick streets and . . .?

JC: My recollection is the first thing that was done was the Nicollet Street overpass. That was like 1996 or 1997. It’s got a plaque on it. I believe it has the date of 1997. I could be wrong. The streets were done in 1998 and 1999, to the best of my recollection. All of this was after all of the initial homeowner developers, who had spent $200,000 or some such number, had to drive to and from their newly restored house on streets that were not technically paved at all. In engineering terms, they were called oiled dirt.

21 LM: Were the streets redone by the Park Board or the city?

JC: They were redone by the city with some Park Board funding in kind of a joint design process, which was not entirely wrangle-free. But it could have been worse.

LM: Yes. [Chuckles]

JC: At the same time, the kind of minimal park improvements that now exist were put in. It consisted of some paths, and they built the tennis court, which was, at DeLaSalle’s request, another political deal.

LM: Unpaved paths?

JC: Paved paths, paved bituminous paths. They put in the street lights. I think the street lights were . . . Well, the Park Board did a design which included the street lights and the paths and sidewalks. The city designed the streets but the design was modified after some negotiations. The brick pavers were the neighborhood’s idea. The Park Board initially had not wanted to allow parking on the streets at all. Through some negotiations, the policy was modified and the streets were modified to allow there to be parking on the streets. Then the brick pavers were put in. It was Redevelopmentkind of a complicated deal there. One thing that was involved was some NRP [Neighborhood Revitalization Program] money. The neighborhood divided up the NRP money between the IslandSociety and East Hennepin. The Island got money toward the brick pavers and theProject East Hennepin merchants got basically, I think, some façade improvements to their historic buildings.

LM: We’re kind of running out of time, but we’re really not done with the story, I’m sure. Riverfront HistoryHistorical JC: Let’s resume it some other time.

LM: I’m sort of thinking fromOral where we are . . .

JC: We’ve been, more or less, chronological here.

LM: MinneapolisWe’re about at 2000, let us say. It sounds like that at about 2000, the Island looks about like it looks now? Minnesota

JC: About like it does now, yes.

LM: How many residents are there?

JC: I’ve never counted them exactly, but I think there are about ninety-five dwelling units.

LM: It doesn’t seem like that many, does it?

22 JC: There are forty-five dwelling units north of the tracks. Now, south of the tracks, you have the Grove Street Flats with eighteen and the West Island Flats with ten. And the truck company building, Kerwin’s Building, are just loft apartments, and I think there are ten or eleven there, but I don’t know for sure.

LM: Do you know how to reach John Kerwin? Is he still around?

JC: He’s hard to reach.

LM: Yes. I have a defunct phone number for him.

JC: I think what I’d do is ask one of the people at the Grove Street Flats that have been more . . .

LM: Like Judy Martin.

JC: Yes, like Judy Martin. Judy Martin is probably a good person to get in touch with Kerwin through. I know there’s a certain amount of, what would you say, factionalism.

LM: [Chuckles] Redevelopment

JC: Not everybody gets along with Kerwin. Society Project LM: Yes. Well, this has been great. Fantastic, in fact.

JC: It’s amazing how much there is when you start to go through it. Riverfront LM: I know. Isn’t it something? Yes. HistoryHistorical

JC: Time goes by . . . Oral LM: The things that have to happen for a place to come back . . .

JC: Twenty or thirty years go by. Minneapolis LM: How hard you all worked.Minnesota It sounds like it was like a full time job to be in the PAC.

JC: It was, pretty much.

LM: [Chuckles] Certainly for whoever the chair was.

JC: Yes. Happily, we managed to shift that around. I did that from 1980 on through, gosh, I don’t know, more or less wrapping up with the street project in 1999.

LM: From 1980 to 1999, you were the chair of the PAC?

23 JC: More or less. Yes, it’s probably that long. I don’t remember when I was chair or when I was in some other role. Certainly, I was actively involved from1980 through 1988 when we got the Co-op project closed. That was pretty intense. After that, I was, you know, less involved. Other people were more so.

LM: Did you actually physically work on that Co-op project, too? I mean the rehab?

JC: The rehab, I didn’t do any carpentry on it. The general contractor asked me if I would do some surveying for the parking lots, but I declined. I said, “First of all, I don’t have time. Second of all, it’s conflict of interest because, in effect, I’m your client.” So I didn’t. I did a little bit of what you might call site design, strictly on a volunteer basis. I worked on dividing up the land between the co-ops and the private homes. I figured those divisions out. The MCDA had no problem with it. In some cases, I think I screwed up, but nobody else was doing it.

LM: [Laughter]

JC: I pitched in now and then on the Grove Street Flats when they were being rehabbed in 1980 through 1982. My sister was contracting there, and now and then I ended up doing things like helping to pour a retaining wallRedevelopment in the middle of the night in a mud hole, I remember that. And helping to pry slate off the mansard roof. Society LM: Oh, my gosh. This is amazing history and a wonderfulProject place.

JC: It is. It’s got some kind of, how would you say, karma, some kind of spiritual [unclear]. There used to be an old Chippewa woman who lived next door here some years back. She said there were spiritsRiverfront watching the Island, and anybody that tried to mess with it, they would have lots of bad luck. [Laughter]HistoryHistorical I hope she was right.

LM: Yes. It might not bode well for some people. Well, thank you so much. Oral

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