BY ED FELIEN
Probably the first illegal immigrants on Chicago Avenue (before it was a city street) were the Ojibwe. In 1745 the Lakota lived in the area around Chicago Avenue, but the British gave guns to the Ojibwe, their allies in Canada and New England, and the Ojibwe used this advanced weaponry to expand their empire and drive the Lakota south of the Minnesota River and west of the Red River.
The Objibwe were the first illegal immigrants we’ve heard about, but they were soon followed by illegal French trappers, pioneer farmers, shopkeepers and the U.S. Cavalry.
When we first see Chicago Avenue on a map it runs from downtown Minneapolis to Richfield. Richfield, the undeveloped township south of Minneapolis, began at Lake Street. The center of Richfield was 54th Street and Lyndale with a town hall, post office, general stores and a flour mill powered by Minnehaha Creek. But by 1900 farmland in those rich fields was giving way to housing development.
To encourage further development of Minneapolis, the streetcar lines were expanded to run all the way out to 35th Street. The intersection at 35th and Chicago is wider than the average because that’s where the streetcars turned around. Most of the housing and commercial buildings in that area date from this period.
The original building that holds the offices of Southside Pride at 3200 Chicago Avenue was built in 1905. It was a common structure for the period, brick façade over wood framed building, a business on the first floor and living quarters on the second floor. Probably the first owners were the Skoglund brothers, the uncles of former South Minneapolis State Senator Wesley Skoglund. They operated a meat market, and by the 1920s had a truck with “Skoglund Brothers Meat Market” on the side that advertised their business. Wes used a picture of that truck in his campaign literature to establish his South Minneapolis credentials. The meat market was downstairs where the Modern Times Café is now, and the brothers probably lived upstairs where Southside Pride has its offices.
Sometime in the 1930s the Skoglunds sold the building and the new owners turned the downstairs into a dry cleaning factory. In 1940 they installed the new façade with Streamline Moderne letters that spelled out “Modern Cleaners.” The “Modern” remains, and the newly painted “Times” in Streamline Moderne style is below it.
Sometime in the 1940s or ’50s the upstairs over the dry cleaning business was used as a house of prostitution, according to some old-timers in the neighborhood. There is no way other than hearsay to corroborate this, but the frosted glass windows in one room along with a small hand sink, seem to suggest the illicit possibilities.
I was completely unaware of that reality when I moved into the area in 1970. I bought a house on Powderhorn Park to have a place to publish Hundred Flowers, an underground anti-war weekly newspaper. I had always loved the Modern sign, and when I came back to Powderhorn in 1978, after teaching for a couple of years at Wayne State University, I bought the building with plans to open it as a restaurant. Thirteen months later I opened the first Modern Times Café. The Loft and the state headquarters of the Farmer Labor Association were on the second floor. We had music and entertainment at night and the best chili in the Twin Cities according to the Twin City Reader. After three years I burned out on the restaurant business and began renting out the building. In 1991 I started Southside Pride and moved back into the building, this time upstairs. Southside Pride grew from a monthly, delivered to just the Powderhorn and Central neighborhoods, to three monthly newspapers delivering 46,500 copies door to door from downtown to Richfield at 62nd Street and from 35W over to the Mississippi River.
The history of the Modern Times building is not typical of buildings in South Minneapolis, but each building on Chicago Avenue has its own unique history. Every building has its own story to tell.
