The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

The antithesis of Milwaukee Avenue—the Seward neighborhood's secret boulevard of late 19^th century homes—is the Cedars 94 apartment complex, located just across from Milwaukee on Franklin's north side. Where Milwaukee Avenue has dozens of brick homes with low front porches and gingerbread gables, the apartments have faded wooden shingles and a chain-link security fence. Where Milwaukee Avenue has forsythia, lilac, and crabapple trees along its center, Cedars 94 has cement courtyards and is bound by the roar of traffic from Franklin and Interstate 94.

But both places share a similar legacy. Milwaukee Avenue's homes, built between 1883 and 1895, were intended for Scandinavian immigrants who labored in the nearby railroad yards. Crowding as many homes as he could onto narrow lots, developer William Ragan created the first planned workers' community in Minneapolis, and got the most for his buck. Then, Milwaukee Avenue was a starting place for newcomers—not a destination.

In 1974, the quaint homes, in disrepair and slated for demolition, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places and gradually revitalized, some with mind-blowing color schemes: a yellow brick home with buttercup yellow gables, sky-blue trim, and tangerine accents. Part of its charm today lies in its relative silence—a pedestrian-only urban avenue where it's possible to hear the wind in the trees, the faint tinkling of glass wind chimes, or nothing.

In the window of Charles A. Hoffman Handmade Guitars and Stringed Instrument Repair, on the corner of Milwaukee and Franklin, a young man bends over a honey-colored guitar and gently restrings it. Mr. Hoffman builds 25 guitars per year and runs a brisk repair business. On a Saturday morning the small shop, fragrant with the sharp, clean smell of wood, is warm and musical as customers try out guitars. Easy, a black poodle with a ‘70s afro, pads behind the counter where an ornate silver cash register sits beside a flat-screen monitor and ergonomic keyboard.

The Swedish potato sausage and lingonberry jam that might have been here 100 years ago have given way to green tea spices and spongy disks of Ethiopian flatbread at the Shabelle Grocery and Meat Market and to the Seward Community Coop's dark and leafy organic produce. At the 2^nd Moon Coffee Café, two poets, bathed in the blue haze of a Mac screen, discuss publication: "Do you have any work out there?"

"I'm still struck (as when I saw my first Pasque-flower)/Now at the single soft shoot of daffodil arching, slow/Through the face of the rock-like ground and on: up: through/The flinty shingle of March-blown sleet and snow/On the winter-wasted ice-bound lawns of Milwaukee Avenue."

The lyrical, hardscrabble poet Thomas McGrath lived in Cedars 94 in the 1980s until his death in 1990. The first-floor, single-level apartment was easier for him to manage, and he chain smoked and wrote poems like "The Black Train" in longhand at his dining-room table. Many afternoons, he crossed Franklin to Tracy's Saloon for a hamburger and a Scotch. It seems unlikely that he would have been out on Milwaukee Avenue on such a March day, negotiating the slick sidewalks with his cane and unsteady gait. More likely, he was at home, looking out of the sliding glass doors to his own winter-wasted concrete patio, imagining something beautiful rising up out of the snow.

Notes:

1. Paragraph 2: Building dates for Milwaukee Avenue, developer and reference to Scandinavian workers: Minnesota Historical Society; Rail workers reference from "Milwaukee Avenue" by Gary Hiebert, 2001. Reference to Scandinavian immigrants also found in "History of Milwaukee Avenue," Milwaukee Avenue Homeowners Association.
2. Paragraph 3: Date for listing on National Register of Historic Places: Minnesota Historical Society.
3. Paragraph 4: Reference for number of guitars built each year by Charles Hoffman-conversation with Mr. Hoffman on January 6, 2007.
4. Paragraph 6: Lines from "The Black Train," by Thomas McGrath, from Selected Poems: 1938-1988, Copper Canyon Press, 1988; page 156.
5. Paragraph 7: Notes about Thomas McGrath are my own personal notes. I worked for Tom from 1986-1988, transcribing his poems and letters in his apartment at Cedars 94.