Boxmeyer columns

The local paper ran Don Boxmeyer columns back to back this week which doesn’t happen very often. In fact I’m not sure that it has happened since his retirement in 2002.

I have always enjoyed his writings. He is a little older than I and has been here longer. Most of the time it seems it seems the people of whom he writes are people I don’t know or know only a bit, but are on subjects I find interesting and even if I don’t know the people being written about, it seems that I must know several people who do know them. And, perhaps because I was raised in a lost neighborhood someplace else, I enjoy reading about the lost neighborhoods, even though it seems that most of them were lost shortly before I arrived here.

Montgomery Ward's Midway store, the subject of Monday’s column, was one of the first places I patronized when I came to Minnesota. It was large and hard to miss. With Brown and Bigelow, their towers made the Midway identifiable from quite a way off.

Tuesday’s column was about the lost neighborhood known as “Connemara Patch” and the Cardenas family in particular. I know Rick Cardenas and I know his sister. In 1985 I placed his name into nomination for DFL endorsement for Fifth Ward City Council. [For the record, the convention endorsed nobody. Rick did not run in the ensuing election and Hugo Masanz went on to be unseated by Janice Rettman.] I had heard of Connemara Patch and recognized that the name had an obvious Irish derivation, but did not know where it had been. I actually thought it had been over somewhere closer to the Badlands. Nor was I aware of the financial shenanigans of Archbishop Ireland and James. J. Hill in the matter, although I had been aware of personal financial matters involving both Bishop Cretin and Archbishop Ireland which some local Catholics might find a little uneasy to talk about.

We treat our history haphazardly and inconsistently. But one thread that goes though all of is that progress has to happen and progress is defined by those with money.

Wards had to go because some people found a way to make more money convincing us that Midway Marketplace would be a good substitute and that a new Wards in the new center could survive. It turned out that Wards was too sick to survive in any format. There were four anchor tenants of Midway Marketplace. Only one – Cub Foods – is still there.

Connemara Patch, like the West Side Flats, Williams Hill, Swede Hollow, Rondo, and others had to go. The homes and neighborhoods of poor people [Someday I’m going to go off on the semantics here. We use the adjective “poor” to refer to both wealth and quality. This often seems to give the wrong messages.] go.

As Linda Ellerbee used to sign off, “So it goes.”

When they put Mr. Boxmeyer out to pasture in January 2002 [Mr. Boxmeyer assured me it was voluntary, but considering all that has gone on there that probably needs to be taken with a whole bag of Morton’s finest] I was afraid we wouldn’t be seeing his work any more. So this week’s double exposure was indeed a treat.