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 Nicollet Island. 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.Minnesota 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.Minneapolis 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.