By Dave Healy

They live across the street from Hampden Park, but they remember it as Green Grass Park.

They went to a 1973 festival there sponsored by the Green Grass Grocery, a forerunner of today’s Hampden Park Coop. That festival might have been considered a precursor of the St. Anthony Park Arts Festival, although the latter event has never included one feature of the former: a kissing booth.

Self-described south-siders, Karen and Steve Flink have lived in St. Anthony Park since 1965. Their first eight years were as renters on Manvel Street.

“By the time we were ready to buy a house, we already felt embraced by the neighborhood,” Steve said.

The Flinks’ older son, Matt, went to Baker School through second grade. When Baker closed, Matt and the other students were obliged to walk to St. Anthony Park Elementary, which meant crossing the railroad tracks on the old Raymond Avenue trestle bridge, a journey that filled their parents with dread.

“We advocated with the school district for a bus,” Karen said. “Although guidelines at the time put us just inside the boundary for walking, we persuaded the powers that be to give our kids a bus. It helped that a neighbor took photographs of the bridge highlighting its lack of safety for children.”

In the late 1960s, the Flinks and many of their neighbors worried that encroaching industrial development would squeeze out the residential sector of south St. Anthony Park.

The neighborhood was a project area for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Steve served as a volunteer member of the project area committee, whose goal was to stabilize housing and stop industry-creep.

“It was David vs. Goliath, and the older generation worked with younger people,” Steve said. “It was a good example of neighborhood solidarity.”

Steve noted the neighborhood supported both Section 8 development that went in on Hampden Avenue and the nearby Seal Hi-Rise because both of those replaced industrial buildings.

People involved with those early efforts doubtless never envisioned the extent to which housing—specifically, multi-family housing—would take off in the area.

Today, there are eight apartment buildings recently built east of Highway 280, and two new apartment blocks and townhouses west of 280 on both sides of Franklin Avenue.

Two nearby junkyards are long gone, as are trucking companies and several heavy industrial businesses. In their place are light industrial companies, offices, medical clinics and a University of Minnesota research center.

Also gone are Johnny’s Bar and the Triangle Bar, which once anchored the eastern and western boundaries of the neighborhood. They’ve been supplanted throughout the area by craft breweries, six of which are within a mile of the Flinks.

Many neighbors have moved out, but the Flinks have welcomed new ones, including their son and his family. For the most part, they’ve been cheered by the changes all around them.

“But I still miss the old Raymond Avenue Dairy Queen,” Karen said. 

Dave Healy lives in St. Anthony Park and was editor of the Bugle in the was editor of the Bugle from 2000 to 2010.