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From the 1860s to 1931, thousands of people built homes on the west bank of the Mississippi River as it wends through Minneapolis, just south of St. Anthony Falls. The diverse immigrant community that residents created there — Bohemian Flats — survived seasonal floods and eviction threats until its demolition by the City of Minneapolis. It was sometimes called Slovak Flats and Washington Flats, among other, rougher names. But for the people who lived, worked and worshipped there, it was simply called home.
Bohemian Flats was one of several “landing place” communities in the Twin Cities where recently arrived, working-class immigrants could speak their languages, find cheap housing, live near workplaces and begin their lives in America. These neighborhoods reflected the immense inequality of America’s Gilded Age: The rich occupied leafy hilltop neighborhoods like Lowry Hill and Summit Avenue, while many poor people, new immigrants and laborers lived in leftover land, including floodplains, slums and industrial areas. As they were in Connemara Patch, West Side Flats and Swede Hollow, houses in Bohemian Flats were small and crowded. They were also built close together, with room between each only for gardens, woodpiles, animal pens and outhouses.
The labor of Bohemian Flats residents was essential for Minneapolis’ burgeoning industries, including flour and lumber milling, beer brewing and construction. Factories sat just a few hundred yards up the hill from the workers’ homes. The streets that ran through the neighborhood were named after residents’ professions: Cooper, Mill and Wood. Many performed unpaid labor: raising children, running households, tending gardens and keeping dogs, cats, chickens, cows, ducks and pigs. The 1900 census recorded about 1,200 Slovaks, Swedes, Czechs (Bohemians), Irish, Norwegians, Poles, Germans and Austrians living there, among other nationalities.
Minneapolis did not extend sewage service to the flats, and it struggled to build and maintain water infrastructure. Thus, the neighborhood suffered from poor sanitation and infectious disease, including diphtheria and typhoid. In 1889, residents collected funds to build a church of their own in the flats, the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Emmanuel. The community also gathered in the flats’ one large apartment building, grocery stores and saloon. The Westminster Presbyterian Church opened a charitable mission in the neighborhood, too, and in 1913 it built a chapel (later the Cedar–Riverside People’s Community Center) at Twentieth and Riverside Avenue, just “up the hill” from the flats…