Viewed from road construction equipment working on this section of Lowry Avenue, the former store at 1701 Lowry Ave. NE is a single-famliy house. (Michael McKinney)
Penny candy, packs of sunflower seeds for 5 cents and baseball cards could be had at the now-“ghost” groceries of Windom Park.
Drawing on building permit records, newspaper clippings, Facebook requests and her own family history, Beth Sowden took a capacity crowd on a walk Sunday, Sept. 14, for a first-time Preserve Minneapolis tour of the former groceries. Several participants added their recollections, “making this so much better,” Sowden said.
Many stores were established in the early 1900s; in 1915, there were 118 throughout Northeast, most with the owners living above or behind their stores. By the 1970s, when the number dwindled to 30, it was not uncommon for the owners to live elsewhere.
The former stores are now residences, some multi-family and others single-family. They are of particular interest to artists or others who appreciate the flexible open space on the first floor.
The tour started at 1701 Lowry Ave. NE with a structure moved from its original location at 2515 Ulysses St. NE. During a bubble gum shortage, Pillsbury School students heard a rumor that they had bubble gum and packed into the store tight enough to burst the front window.
Ralph and Nina Murphey, an Irish couple among the mostly German and Scandinavian store owners, owned 1954 Hayes St. NE. Customers could find Nina ironing when not retrieving their items from high shelves with a long-handled pincer. In the evenings after his day job, Ralph would serve and chat. Their sign was misspelled without the “e.”
Blomberg’s B-Line Foods was the last Windom Park area grocery to go dark. It almost lived on as an ice cream parlor associated with Bonicelli Kitchen. Doron Clark and Gayle Bonneville were the neighborhood organization’s chair and staff person at the time, and filled in the detail. After discovering what was behind the walls, “and the money it would take to fix,” the owner pivoted to establish her operation at 1839 Central Ave. NE, at what is now the fire-damaged Momo Sushi.
B-Line started out as Hedean’s in 1905. Robbers once tried to hold up Otto Hedean but were foiled by the arrival of a couple of customers and ran out.
The tour was sprinkled with examples of how tight-knit the community was: how shop owners kept an eye on kids, for example.
The tour ended at the oldest of the former stores, an 1887 structure at 1211 23rd Ave. NE, formerly 2301 Fillmore St. NE. The building didn’t move, but it had been part of the larger parcel on Fillmore. It is the least discernable, looking more like a home than a store, though, as Sowden pointed out, its parapets were perfect places for signage.
The tour was one of 30 this year that Preserve Minneapolis sponsored. That’s “a few more than usual,” according to the coordinator, Vasiliki Papanikolopoulos. Other Northeast Minneapolis tours included Historic East Hennepin, Nicollet Island and Architect Avenue. Most attendees on this tour were from the immediate neighborhood or Northeast.