Last Look: Beneath the Surface

By Ely Sheinfeld

This summer, Grand Avenue is being resurfaced through the heart of campus. Watching the former brick surface and streetcar tracks emerge from underneath the modern asphalt gives us the opportunity to go into some history about that road’s surface using archival materials. The earliest photos of campus show Snelling and Summit avenues as dirt roads. This photo, dated to 1889, shows the first buildings of the Macalester campus as we know it today—homes of the college president and professors in the forefront along Summit Avenue, with Old Main in the distance behind them.

The below Twin Cities street map dated 1889 depicts the new electric cable and streetcar railway lines that were soon to open across the metropolitan area. The lines, highlighted in red, clearly show an electric streetcar line running down Grand Avenue from downtown St. Paul to Cleveland Avenue. The line’s first run occurred on February 22, 1890.

The next mention of Grand Avenue paving has a start date of 1899, with the street surface comprised of fired brick—the same bricks that were uncovered in the roadwork this spring (pictured below).

The streetcar lines ran until the early 1950s, and shortly thereafter the street was paved with asphalt. It is now obvious that the earlier fired-brick surface of the street, as well as the railway tracks, were left in place to act as a foundation for the asphalt surfacing.

According to the workers on site, Grand Avenue’s reconstruction plans do not include the re-use of the fired brick—so this is our last chance to see an important part of the street’s history.

Ely Sheinfeld is the Macalester College archivist.