407 Central Avenue; one visit worth a million words

I made my way to the address I had learned from the 1910 U.S. Census, hoping to find clues to…well, I didn’t know what…where my maternal grandmother had lived when she was seven. I knew the neighborhood well before this current exploratory mission. Some 25 years before discovering this address of my child-grandmother, I had regularly visited a hair salon across the street from it. I must have, once or twice, looked straight out at the building while the beautician snipped my hair.

This blustery, snow-threatened December day, I found 407 Central Avenue and fell into a time machine. I stepped to the curb to take in the whole building, obviously once a none-too-fancy apartment building; still showing its original divisions into tiny, dark apartments, echoes of crowded rooms and family gatherings wafting out its drafty windows.

This building had survived the yuppification of the surrounding neighborhood, a neighborhood I had passed through as a child, riding the bus from the suburbs, heading to the student dentists who would repair my hopeless baby teeth. This neighborhood, where my boss for 10 years now owned a luxury condo, one I visited often. This neighborhood where my grandfather had attended union meetings. (Had he known his wife had once lived across the street?) This neighborhood where my college mates and I once drank cheap beer. This neighborhood, easily overlooked today, straddling Polish and Scandinavian enclaves, but today just a place busy people sped through on their way to work or happy hours.

Some time between 1905 and 1910, five children were brought to live here. Brought from what I presume to be a decrepit rooming house for railroad workers down in Albert Lea. Only five were brought. Two had died. Two more would die here.

Luxury and overly tattooed hair stylists dripped across the street. Progress had given this side of the street a miss.

In my time machine, all the yuppification vanished, replaced by tenements by the dozen, like the one I stood before. I could see the 3rd Avenue Bridge peppered with horse-drawn carriages. I could smell the coal burning fires. I could hear the clang of rail cars at the flour mills that had birthed this city. I could see children huddle on the steps, playing games, trading matches, trying to keep warm.