The City of St. Paul’s Overlook at Mounds Park has always been a “go to” place to illustrate changes in the Mississippi River landscape. Figure 1, taken in the late 1990s, shows layers of transportation corridors, river infrastructure for commercial navigation, and the basic geomorphology of the valley, with a bluff to the left, across from downtown St. Paul. But the space in the foreground is hard to read; aside from the railroad tracks there appear to be informal pathways and scruffy vegetation.

Getting down into the floodplain didn’t necessarily make things clearer. In the spring of 2005, I went to the site, by this time being referred to as the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, to ascertain if it would make a good fieldwork site for college students. The landscape captured in Figure 2 showed me that I had a lot to learn before I could send students to this site: What had happened here? What were the vegetation patterns? What was going on here now? I had begun to hear about the work of the Lower Phalen Creek Project, the Trust for Public Land, and other partners in St. Paul that would turn this overlooked (literally, see Figure 1) space into an important river location. However, I didn’t know anything, didn’t have a language for what I was looking at, and, therefore, couldn’t really see this place.

Many people, if not most of us, take for granted the ground beneath our feet and the waters that make up parts of our daily landscape. We imagine that the river (or lake, or pond, as the case may be) has always been pretty much where it is now, in the configuration we presently see. This exploration examines one place, now known as the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and will contain provocations and assumptions that can’t be demonstrated within the confines offered here, but which, nevertheless, might help make sense of the complexity of one particular location on the Mississippi River. The land and water at the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary offer a case study of how humans have lived on the land and with the water systems, have successively dominated these systems and ignored them, and have tried to “restore” those systems, each time following a pattern that seemed like the logical, normative “right,” or the “only” thing to do.

I am not Dakota, but I have learned from Dakota people that all of the area where the “Twin Cities” now sit is Dakota homeland. There are many Dakota names across this landscape; in the immediate vicinity of Figures 1 and 2, three names that recur are Wakan Tipi (House of Spirits) for one of the area’s caves, Kap’oza, where a Dakota community was, and mnížaska (White cliffs, per the Decolonial Atlas). There is much more to know about Dakota relationships with this place, but these are not my stories to tell. More voices from Dakota people about this place can be found online at the Bdote Memory Map and in an article published in the online journal Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place, and Community.11Mona Smith, “Learning from the Dakota: Water and Place,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 11 (2018), http://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/learning-from-the-dakota-water-and-place/ As Gwen Westerman and Bruce White note in their indispensable volume of 2012, Mni Sota Makoce, Dakota people have always understood the area around the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers as their home, their place of origin on the Earth. Furthermore, “The Dakota knew Mni Sota Makoce as a network of connected places, each defined in specific ways.”22Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012, p. 81. Between 1805 and 1817, the vicinity of the Vento Sanctuary was the location of Kap’oza village, but that village moved often.33Ibid., p. 127. These points are significant: often non-Indigenous people want to “fix” locations or meanings to a particular cartographic point or area. However, this insistence can conflict with some indigenous notions of “where” a “place” even is, and why or how it is important.

Dakota names and people remain in this place; subsequent layers of settler, industrial inhabitation have not erased the names or the people, although these later layers make it difficult to see through them to the palimpsest of meanings underneath. British explorer Jonathan Carver “discovered” this space in 1766, and for over 200 years, a cave on the site was known as “Carver’s Cave.” A succession of treaties with the Dakota, all subsequently broken, allowed settlers to come to this bend in the Mississippi River and, beginning in 1841, establish the City of St. Paul.

Early images and descriptions show the space between the downtown and Dayton’s Bluff to the east to be largely water, where Trout Brook and Phalen Creek come into the Mississippi. Over time in the first few decades of St. Paul’s existence, the “bottomless bog” between downtown and Dayton’s Bluff posed a substantial obstacle to transportation. A few streets crossed the creeks and bottomlands, beginning in the 1870s, using a variety of bridges, culverts, and trestles. Most notably, a 50-foot mound of soil, clay, and miscellaneous materials located in what is now Lowertown was cleared in the late 1870s and hauled east, to fill the “slough of despond” and create space for the rail infrastructure and the city’s first Union Depot.44See Greg Brick, Historic Waters of the Capitol Region Watershed District, Ramsey County, MN. Oakdale, MN: Prepared for Emmons & Olivier Resources, Inc., 2008; Josiah B. Chaney, Early Bridges and Changes of the Land and Water Surface in the City of St. Paul. St. Paul, MN: Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, vol. 12, 1908, pp. 131–48; and Paul Hesterman, “The Mississippi and St. Paul: Change is a Constant for River and the City that Shaped It,” Ramsey County History, vol. 21, no. 1 (1986): pp. 3–22. A few frame houses hugged the bluff, and at least one brewery made use of the caves in the soft St. Peter sandstone. Yet, the advent of the railroads brought the most dramatic physical change to this space over time. During the second half of the nineteenth century, St. Paul assumed a position as the uppermost port on the Mississippi River and a major transshipment point between riverboat and rails that took goods and people out across the northern plains. What had been a “bottomless slough” had become one of the country’s busiest railyards.

It is no mean feat to achieve this sort of land- and waterscape transformation. Writing in the early twentieth century, Josiah Chaney described projects that had filled in sections of the Mississippi River bank between the downtown bluff and Phalen Creek. He lists two projects that created approximately 16 acres of new land, filling out between 100 and 190 feet from the previous shore for a distance of some 4,300 feet (over three-quarters of a mile).55Chaney, Ibid. Historian Paul Hesterman also notes that Dayton’s Bluff was cut back extensively during this period, to make more room for the railroad, but nearly destroying “Carver’s Cave.”66Hesterman, Ibid. Later, during an era of extensive highway construction, the building of Warner Road across this space, which entailed building a raised prism of land to elevate the roadway above ordinary high water levels, further cut the land off from the Mississippi River channel.

Students of the class Dimensions of Urban Change will be surprised to learn that an affluent neighborhood, including houses for some of the railroad executives themselves, were demolished in the effort to create more land for the railroad. Marshall Hatfield details the eradication of Lafayette Park and its nearby elegant mansions, how they were swept aside—when “opportunity came knocking”—to serve the interests of commerce.77Marshall R. Hatfield, “Once Upon a Time—‘Tasteful, Elegant’ Lafayette Park and the Homes of the Elite,” Ramsey County History, vol. 29, no. 2 (1994): pp. 4–21, here p. 20.

The urban planner Ken Greenberg coined the term “the retreat of the industrial glacier,” and the phrase aptly describes what ensued at the Vento Sanctuary site between the mid-twentieth century and the 1990s.88Ken Greenberg, Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2019. As the railroads gradually deserted the area and the “empty” space filled with trash and junk, the once unwelcoming place that had been dominated by railcars and heavy machinery now became a site of dereliction. During this time, the city and the region’s attention turned to highways and air transportation. The “Swede Hollow” community, which is located immediately upstream (north) along Phalen Creek, was wiped out by the City of St. Paul in 1956, after being described as a health hazard. And although numerous published accounts tell nostalgically of life in “Swede Hollow,” the reports of privies suspended over the creek and an absence of running water or electricity in the community give some credence to this claim. So now, instead of being the city’s “front door,” the Mississippi River corridor had become the “mud room,” a space where dirty, wet things are discarded out of sight of the more polite parts of the city (or house, to continue the metaphor).

Beginning in the 1990s, residents of adjacent neighborhoods started to be concerned that the former railroad site and the hollow where people had lived until recently were detrimental to neighborhood development and well-being. Neighborhood organizations such as Friends of Swede Hollow and the Lower Phalen Creek Project began a series of transformative efforts that have restored the landscape. The area’s new name—Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary—is after a local US congressman who was instrumental in establishing the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (Mississippi NRRA), a unit of the National Park Service (NPS) that follows the river through the Twin Cities. Years of focused effort has replaced the trash-strewn site with ecologically sustainable prairie and oak-savannah planting. A coalition of neighborhood groups, environmental advocacy organizations, and commitments from local, state, and federal government came about to achieve the transformation of a 27-acre brownfield into a valuable, if still hidden, gem, within roughly a decade of intensive activity. Since 2005, after extended community-engagement processes that have centered on the perspectives of Dakota people, an abandoned warehouse building has been demolished, to be replaced, project leaders hope, with a “Wakan Tipi Center” that would be a community resource for all.

The case of the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary raises three immediate questions: The site has “deindustrialized,” but to what end? To serve whose needs? At whose behest? Two decades ago, when I first got involved with Mississippi River work, it seemed to be enough to bring people to the river by providing open space and allowing city governments to drive development/redevelopment projects in the vicinity. These projects, we thought, would bring a constituency to the river. While it is true that they have, it is also true to say that they have remade the river as a “green gentrification” zone, attractive to the elite and generating specialty coffee shops, high-end restaurants, and other businesses that are hallmarks of gentrification elsewhere. Thus far, the Vento Sanctuary has resisted this fate, but it’s an open question as to for how long. Thus far, there is minimal signage or other “intrusions” upon the landscape, with only a series of interpretive markers required by the state Department of Natural Resources as a condition for its participation in the land-acquisition project in the early 2000s. But the heavily “branded,” bustling “Lowertown District” and CHS Field, home of the St. Paul’s Saints baseball team, are only a couple of blocks away. As more urban elites come into the area, how much will the essential qualities of the Vento Sanctuary remain? Can “restoration” or “deindustrialization” escape “capital,” or is this space, in its latest manifestation, destined to attract the wealthy—albeit demonstrated differently than 100 years ago?

If we are unable to return to “nature” then what do we call this hybrid human-biological-physical system? The Anthropocene, the term for the “age defined by humans,” may provide us with language that focuses our attention to the significant features of this place. “Anthropocene” points to the roles of the between spaces like this, as spaces distinctive in and of themselves as well as embedded in larger human and nonhuman systems. Places like the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary are connectors to infrastructure systems, are unqiue points along systems such as the Mississippi migratory bird flyway, and have a particular located history expressed through the stories of wakan tipi. We can see the Vento site as important in its own right, as a place where human meaning and efforts have been layered for thousands of years, and also as a central connector, reaching both upstream and down to more readily visible places such as St. Anthony Falls, the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and Lake Pepin. What we must have is the language that enables us to see through the palimpsest, to describe the layers of the landscape’s history, and to understand the dynamics of how people made places, understood, and inhabited them over centuries.