Flour mills, rail yards, and ironworks once surrounded these residential blocks of Northeast Minneapolis, which went up in the 1880s and 1890s to house their workers. The streets are a working-class grid: modest two-story frame houses, corner saloons that became corner bars, Catholic churches built large enough to suggest permanence and ambition. The Eastern European immigrants who settled here — Polish families on one block, Ukrainian on the next, Czech and Slovenian parishes a few streets over — built a neighborhood whose cultural institutions have outlasted the industries that brought them here.
St. Cyril Ukrainian Catholic Church on Northeast Fourth Street dates to 1913. Holy Cross Polish Catholic Church has operated continuously since 1886. The Nye's Polonaise Room, a bar and Polish restaurant that became one of the most beloved institutions in Minneapolis, operated at Second Street and Hennepin for fifty years before closing in 2016.
The neighborhood is changing: the artists and young professionals who have moved in since the 1990s have brought wine bars and farm-to-table restaurants alongside the Ukrainian social halls and the Polish sausage makers. Whether this is revival or displacement depends on who you ask and how long they have lived here.