Anthony Waldman House - Stranded By Shifting Development Patterns

Stranded By Shifting Development Patterns

The reason for this is one of the most interesting aspects of the stone house's history. As mentioned above, the historic thoroughfare from St. Paul to the ferry at Fort Snelling ran along the Mississippi River bluff line, mostly through unplatted land west of the City. The developers of Leech's Addition effectively cut the City off from this causeway by interposing the Addition's rigid grid of north-south/east-west streets, which ran right through to the bluff line. Doubtless this was not a problem in the earliest years when streets only existed on paper. Nevertheless, in May 1857, at the urging of the St. Paul Common Council, the Territorial Legislature appointed five street commissioners, three of whom were St. Paul residents, to "lay out a public street and road from the present westerly termination of Fort Street in said City to the westerly limits of said City, and thence to the ferry landing opposite Fort Snelling, on the Mississippi River." The street commissioners began work that summer, causing a survey and plat of the new Fort Road extension to be made. Public notice of the plans were given in the newspapers and the plat was displayed at the Registrar's Office. It was the early autumn of 1857, just weeks before the sudden onslaught of the Panic. This is about the time Fuchs began building his stone commercial building on Forbes Street.

What does the Fort Road extension have to do with the stone house? It explains the most frequently asked question people ask when they are told that the Waldman "House" used to be a commercial building: "Why would anyone put a commercial building there, in the middle of a residential neighborhood?" While the survey and plat drawing for this original Fort Road extension plan have been lost, newspaper accounts and court records suggest that the commissioners’ initial survey and plat proposed to bring the Fort Road extension down Forbes Street (renamed Smith Avenue today) right past the Waldman House to the Mississippi bluff line, and then along Bluff Street/Old Fort Road to the Fort Snelling ferry. If that is correct, Fuchs knew what he was doing when he built his commercial building facing a street that he and other observant property owners expected to become a major business thoroughfare.

Fatefully, however, the route first proposed by the street commissioners met with suspicion and hostility. As the St. Paul Financial Real Estate and Railroad Advisor opined on September 5, 1857:

This Avenue was intended by its projectors and by the Legislature to be some atonement to the people of St. Paul for the narrow, crooked, tortuous, bewildering and labryrinthine mases of the city streets. Nature has anticipated it, and provided for it in a broad, smooth, level plateau, stretching uninterruptedly to Fort Snelling. But instead of running it straight on to its terminous, the engineers are twisting it and coiling it through hills and ravines, out of a direct course, for the accommodation of private interests. Now we object to this perversion of the purpose of this road. We protest against this sacrifice of the beauty and convenience of this Avenue to the interests of anyone who can pay for its diversion."

A. Vance Brown, who had sold the stone house lot to Fuchs in 1854, may have been among those suspected by the paper as exerting their influence. Brown was among the wealthiest real estate speculators of the day, and he owned several lots and commercial buildings along Bluff Street. There is no direct evidence linking Fuchs to the politics of the Fort Road extension. However, contemporaneous evidence shows he was not above pulling the levers of City government to improve the value of his properties. While no other street in Leech's Addition would be graded for another twenty years, in 1858 Fuchs and a handful of other owners along Forbes Street repeatedly petitioned the Common Council to grade Forbes and build a sidewalk on its west side, purportedly out of a concern that it was "impossible for school children to get to the School House from the upper part of the Town." Obviously unconvinced of their motives, Mayor Norman Kittson vetoed these improvements, stating that "the streets designated have as yet few buildings erected on them, and being situated on the outskirts of the populated parts of the City, must be for the convenience only of a few of the property owners."

Whether or not Fuchs himself was influential in bending the path of the Fort Road extension past his property, he was surely disappointed by what happened next. Apparently stung by what Judge Palmer called, in a report to the Ramsey County Commissioners, "many difficult and embarrassing questions," the 1858 State Legislature voided the 1857 Act appointing the original street commissioners. Also voided were the commissioners' first survey and plat. In their place the Legislature appointed a new set of commissioners, overseen by Judge Palmer, to "lay out and establish the said public street . . . on the most direct and practicable route." This is the route of the present-day West 7th Street, the grading of which was completed in 1859. Senator William Davern led the charge for the corrected straight-line plan of West 7th Street, which coincidentally was drawn to pass immediately adjacent to Davern's 80-acre (320,000 m2) farm southwest of the City.

The end result was the veritable stranding of Fuchs' commercial building in what became a predominantly residential area. From 1858 on, almost all commercial development in Uppertown converged along West 7th Street. This made inevitable the re-purposing of the Waldman House as residence—which likely occurred in 1863, shortly after Waldman's purchase. Fetzer's Saloon next door also closed and became the Fetzer family's residence. One can imagine Fuchs' reaction, long after selling his property, when the construction of the High Bridge in 1889 once again turned (now) Smith Avenue into a major thoroughfare.