Cross to the east bank and your first steps land in what was once a separate city. St. Anthony was incorporated in 1855, three years before Minneapolis on the west bank, and the two cities were rivals until they merged in 1872. This east-bank neighborhood was the commercial heart of early settlement: the first flour mills, the first sawmill, the first suspension bridge across the Mississippi.
The building you see along Main Street here were built from the 1850s through the 1880s as warehouses, stables, and commercial blocks serving the river trade. By the early twentieth century the neighborhood had declined, and by the 1970s many of these buildings sat abandoned. They were renovated in the 1980s into what became St. Anthony Main — one of the early festival marketplace redevelopments that tried to draw people back to urban riverfronts.
It was more successful as preservation than as retail, but today this stretch of the river is exactly what city planners dreamed it would be: cafes, restaurants, a film theater, and on summer evenings a constant flow of people walking, biking, and watching the river move.