Historic Jewish St. Paul Tour
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| City/locality- State/province |
St. Paul, Minnesota |
| County- State/province: |
Ramsey County, Minnesota |
| State/province: | Minnesota |
| Country: | United States |
| Tour Created by: | Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest |
(44.9541667° N, 93.1138889° W)
St. Paul's West Side Jewish Community
When the second wave of Jewish refugees arrived in St. Paul in early 1882, the Lower West Side of St Paul was already established as a way station for laboring immigrants. The area, located at a bend in the Mississippi River, was sparsely populated by French, Irish and German immigrants, most of whom remained as several waves of Eastern European and Russian Jews built and moved into small houses and wooden apartment houses. Because the area flooded with predictable regularity, it was an ongoing source of cheap housing, and quickly became a rich, if worn center of St. Paul Jewish life and culture. The West Side was Orthodox, Yiddish speaking and working class, with many breadwinners holding down blue collar jobs in the garment, needlework and manufacturing industries in downtown St Paul. Most of the early arrivals were single men and families who found work and saved to bring over other family members remaining in the old country. Jewish loan associations provided access to seed capital for starting small businesses which served the neighborhood. Bill Hoffman, the noted memoirist of the West Side, explained the process in his book, Tales of Hoffman:
"To open a little store, the husband would take out a maximum loan of $300, and his wife would take out another loan of the same amount. With $600 in cash, it was a relatively simple matter to secure an additional $600 in credit. With $1200, you could open up a well stocked store without fearing a run on case goods. After all, nobody bought more than a dollars worth [of goods] on any one trip, and since it would take 1200 customers in one day to empty the shelves, and since at that time there were 1200 little grocery stores, there seemed little danger in selling out to the bare walls. The prevailing philosophy of course was, "So if we don't sell it, the family will eat it," and many did." Pg. 63
