I was a young Philadelphian, freshly divorced, and looking for a new city in which to start my new life. I was tired of rat-filled alleys and dirty heaps of black snow that lined the streets like piles of coal. At a library, I happened upon a travel magazine. And on those glossy, full-color pages, I spotted a picture of the Saint Paul Winter Carnival.
Print This Post 
Homemade snow pants of thick wool, ice caked on my jacket sleeves and on my mittens: I head out with my best friend, Rita doll...
Print This Post 
It is difficult to choose from Bill Hoffman’s writings because they are all so compelling. Street by street and door by door and character by character he documented an important piece of Saint Paul—Jewish life on the West Side flats—that no longer exists. Hoffman should be required reading for recent immigrants and for those who have forgotten that their families were once immigrants.
Print This Post 
It was around 9:55 a.m. I was waiting for the library to open.
I saw a cute Ethiopian girl coming toward me. She had dark brown skin, short hair, and a pretty baby face.
“What time is it?” She asked me. Her English accent was very good.
Print This Post 
We speak of it
as though it were a place,
a battlefield strewn
with corpses,
a burial ground
of shattered statues
hooded with snow.
Print This Post 
Although I live in Minneapolis, I have a strong connection to Saint Paul. When I worked as a legal secretary in downtown Saint Paul, I could see across the Mississippi from my twenty-second-floor window to where my mother, Ione, worked in 1943 during World War II: Holman Field. Born in Spicer, Minnesota, Ione moved to Minneapolis in her early twenties. During the war, she had a long commute from North Minneapolis to her job in Saint Paul: A bus took her to downtown Minneapolis, then a streetcar brought her to downtown Saint Paul, and a shuttle carried her across the Robert Street Bridge to the Northwest Airlines Modification Center, where she worked on a radio crew for the B-24 bomber plane known as the Liberator.
Print This Post 
You resist when I take you down, refusing
to end your dance with the October breeze.
Flapping, twirling in your many threaded cotton
gowns, which contain the smells of maple, grass
and the geese sound, which blew in
and won’t release.
