‘Why couldn’t they just leave us alone?’: Pain of displacement from St. Paul’s West Side Flats lingers decades later

Linda Castillo looked out at Highway 52 near downtown St. Paul, jammed with cars during rush hour. Childhood memories flooded back.

She remembers crossing an old bridge, known as the black bridge, to attend Lafayette Elementary School with her four older brothers. Her brothers cooked pigeons and frogs on a grill their father built at her childhood home. Her father grew vegetables in a garden.

Most significant places connected to the 74-year-old’s childhood are gone, having been pushed out in the 1960s when homes and businesses were cleared from the West Side Flats to build the Riverview Industrial Park.

“Why couldn’t they just leave us alone?” Castillo asked as she reminisced on a July afternoon.

Castillo was 12 years old when she and her Mexican American family were among 2,147 residents displaced from their neighborhood located along the Mississippi River across from downtown St. Paul.

She and others who were forced to relocate are calling for the city and the St. Paul Port Authority to follow recommendations in a recent report that highlights the lingering effects of the displacement.

The report recommends that the city and port authority publicly apologize for the displacement, and provide monetary reparations to the descendants of people who were affected.

The report also recommends that city leaders engage in a “healing dialogue” with former West Side Flats residents and affected community members. It recommends investing in neighborhood infrastructure in the West Side Flats, such as parks; ensuring that new developments are environmentally friendly; and investing in affordable housing that is accessible to descendants of West Side Flats residents.

“Fix up our community, that’s what I feel,” said Castillo, who lives in the nearby suburb of West St. Paul. “I know I’m not gonna be here, I’m 74 years old, but I have kids and I have grandchildren and great grandchildren.”

Castillo has three daughters, 21 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren, some of whom still live on the West Side.

According to the joint report issued by the West Side Community Organization and Research in Action, the displacement pushed out 204 households that consisted of homeowners, 350 households that were renters, 28 businesses, one church, one school and one rail yard.

“The displacement was an injustice against the West Side Flats community on several levels,” the report said. “The City and Port Authority targeted a working class and predominantly non-white community to be displaced… The once close-knit community and many cultural institutions and gathering places were dislocated.”

The West Side Flats were a “landing place” for many immigrants in St. Paul, according to the report. The diverse community included Jewish, Lebanese and Black residents. Mexican Americans were the largest ethnic group displaced from the area, but continued to establish deep roots in other parts of St. Paul’s West Side that remain prominent today.

Castillo flipped through old photos of her family home on a recent afternoon. Her eyes teared up. Today, mostly warehouses, large concrete lots and corporate buildings sit on the land. A couple of apartment buildings, a coffee shop and a few restaurants are nestled near the Wabasha Street bridge.

“I miss it,” Castillo said of her old neighborhood. “There was so much to do. We were never in the house.”

Castillo’s mother, Tomasa Castillo, gave birth to five children in the family’s one-story, three-bedroom house on Minnetonka Street in the West Side Flats. Many families in the neighborhood had the same midwife help deliver their children at home. But those homes are gone, replaced by Highway 52 and the Riverview Industrial Park.

A massive blue manufacturing plant that shut down in 2022 sits where Castillo’s family worshiped at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church every Sunday. Many neighborhood families held their children’s baptisms at the church, where Castillo’s mother worked.

Another major pillar in the community was the Neighborhood House, a hub for services and gatherings. The three-story building with a gymnasium, nursery, kitchen, laundry room, game room and outside playground was the site of many weddings and dances.

A parking lot now occupies the Neighborhood House space.

“You can kind of visualize what was what, and what we used to do,” Castillo said of the industrial park. “There’s really nothing there.”

She didn’t know at the time why the houses, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the community center and the playground started disappearing around her when she was 12. One day, her parents came home to a bulldozer in their living room.

Flats to the Future report

The West Side Community Organization, a neighborhood-based advocacy group, began interviewing elders in 2021 who lived in the Flats, sparking conversations about displacement. The organization partnered with Research in Action, a corporation that leads research projects on racial equity and community engagement, in January 2023. The two groups hosted community engagement sessions and analyzed data and historical documents to find answers about the long-term effects of the displacement.

The groups published a 88-page report, Flats to the Future, this past July with their findings. The report also called on St. Paul and the city’s port authority to address economic and environmental harms caused by the displacement.

The Flats flooded often because it was close to the Mississippi River. The city and port authority set a plan into motion in 1956 to replace the neighborhood with the Riverview Industrial Park, arguing that families had to move because of flooding risks. Families were forced to move between 1960 and 1964.

The St. Paul City Council and Chamber of Commerce then pushed for the construction of an approximately $4 million floodwall to protect the industrial park that replaced the homes. The report and many displaced residents criticized the city for not taking the same measures to protect residents of the Flats before pushing them out.

“We’re seeing that the city and the Port Authority really chose profit over people in this instance, because they could have protected the land earlier, and they chose not to,” said Ayize James, assistant data research manager at Research in Action.

The report cited a 1960 news article that quoted port authority President Philip W. Fitzpatrick saying that the industrial park could add about $100 million to the city’s valuation.

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said he will work to fulfill the report’s recommendations.

“I propose we finally own up to the injustice and harm caused by the displacement of our historic West Side Flats neighborhood by expanding the Inheritance Fund to include descendants of residents who were displaced from property ownership in our historic West Side Flats neighborhood,” Carter said in his 2025 city budget address.

The Inheritance Fund offers down payment and home improvement assistance for descendants of families displaced from the historically Black Rondo neighborhood to make way for Interstate 94. Descendents who qualify can receive up to $100,000, and are required to use the financial assistance for property in St. Paul.

Todd Hurley, president of the port authority, issued a written statement saying the port authority acknowledges the “profound impact and hardship” of the displacement. He repeated statements from the 1960s that redevelopment of the Flats was driven by “severe flooding, inadequate infrastructure, and unsafe living conditions.”

The port authority did not respond to messages from Sahan Journal seeking further comment on the report and its recommendations.

The Riverview Industrial Park provides 7,500 jobs and contributes more than $7.5 million in annual property taxes to the city, Hurley said in his statement.

The St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority built a public housing tower, Dunedin Terrace, in 1966 on the West Side, making units available for elders of families displaced from the Flats and other projects.

‘We took care of each other’

Every time the Castillo house flooded, they cleaned it up and moved back in. The house, which was built in 1908, was in “fair to poor” condition when the family moved out, according to records from the port authority.

“The port authority, they never did anything about [the flooding] back then,” Castillo said.

Castillo’s father, Nicolas Castillo, worked as a migrant field worker most of his life, traveling between Texas and Minnesota to work on farms growing radishes and wheat. He took a break to fight in World War II.

Her mother, Tomasa Castillo, met Nicolas in the West Side Flats. Their relationship took off when she attended a wedding at the Neighborhood House, where he was working as a musician. She was visiting from her hometown of Hampton, Iowa.

Tomasa and Nicolas stayed in touch through letters for three years. After Nicolas finished his military service in 1945, they married and settled in the West Side Flats. He purchased the house on Minnetonka Street where Castillo and her siblings were raised. Nicolas worked as a cement finisher in the summertime, and as a musician in the wintertime. Tomasa worked at Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Growing up, life was carefree for their children, who spent hours playing outside with neighborhood children.

“Everybody knew each other,” Castillo said. “We took care of each other.”

A bulldozer in the living room

Castillo’s parents kept her out of “grown-up” conversations, so she didn’t know about the forced displacement at the time.

Castillo said she was staying at her grandparents’ house, when her parents came home from the store to find a bulldozer in the living room. She said she learned of the incident from her older brothers, who were with her parents. Some furniture, a stereo and a truck full of family artifacts, including her father’s military uniform and the childrens’ baptismal items, were destroyed, she said.

Castillo could not recall with complete certainty whether her family was still living in the home when the demolition began, but said her parents had been informed that the port authority planned to buy out homeowners in the area. Emily Cavazos, a quantitative research expert at Research in Action, said that bulldozers were used to level homes with the port authority’s permission.

Former West Side Flats resident, Larry Lucio, said his family had also been informed about the redevelopment, and had moved out before a bulldozer destroyed his home, which he witnessed firsthand as a child.

The Castillos were one of the last families to leave, Castillo said, adding that her parents were stubborn about getting compensation for the house.

Many West Side Flat homeowners were offered very little compensation for their houses, and it wasn’t enough to buy a house elsewhere, according to the report. The port authority offered homeowners a buyout or put their property into condemnation without any financial assistance.

A total of 421 buildings were purchased or condemned, including apartment buildings, stores, office buildings and one trailer, according to the report.

More homes were also appraised at a higher value before the port authority offered to buy them, but suddenly dropped in value after the city wanted to replace them with the industrial park, the report found.

In 1960, before the port authority offered to buy the houses, 20% percent of the homes were valued at less than $5,000, about $50,000 today. But when the port authority offered to buy them a year later, city assessors determined that 46% percent were valued at less than $5,000.

About half of the homeowners received less than $5,000 as compensation, said the report, which suggested that bias may have influenced the home valuations.

A special committee formed in 1961 to determine compensation after advocates from the Neighborhood House pushed for relocation assistance. But an estimated 100 families had already left the area by then.

If a household, which included renters and homeowners, qualified for moving assistance, the compensation would depend on whether residents owned furniture. Assistance was only offered to households that earned a certain monthly income; about a quarter of households did not qualify.

Individuals who did not own furniture received $3.50 in assistance, which amounts to $35 today. A family who didn’t own furniture received $7, which amounts to $71. For homeowners, relocation assistance was a separate payment from the money they received for the value of their homes.

If a household owned furniture, they received between $25 to $100 total, depending on the number of occupied rooms in the house. That amounts to $253 to $1,013 in today’s dollars.

Residents who did not speak English had trouble accessing compensation, the report stated.

According to a 1963 news article cited in the report, 334 displaced households were surveyed, and 165 relocated elsewhere in St. Paul, 141 relocated to St. Paul’s West Side and 24 residents relocated outside of the city.

‘Constant reminders’

Castillo remembers people crying when they returned to the Flats after their homes and other buildings had been demolished. One former resident stole the street sign in front of their flattened house.

Former resident, Larry Lucio, said his family lost “dignity, community, businesses,” and that many families were separated from each other because of the displacement.

Lucio, who is Mexican American, said his family experienced racism and classism on the upper West Side, where his family and many former Flats residents relocated.

“There were those constant reminders of what we were, where we came from and where we belonged throughout a lifetime,” he said.

The most significant message from established residents of the upper West Side, he said, was, “You gotta leave, with no questions.”

Castillo’s family struggled for a few years to find a long-term home after they were forced out of the West Side Flats. They eventually settled on the upper West Side in a house on Oakdale Street her father purchased with a veteran’s loan.

Castillo stood with a cane in front of a vacant lot on Oakdale Street on a July afternoon. The grass was overgrown. A concrete driveway remained visible, hinting at where the house once sat.

“I haven’t been on this — this is probably the same sidewalk — I haven’t been in this area since, wow, it’s amazing,” she said, gazing into the lot.

Just like the house on Minnetonka Street the Castillo family left during the displacement, the Oakdale Street house is gone, too, but for other reasons that aren’t clear to Castillo. The family lived there until 1996, when they moved out because they couldn’t pay the mortgage.

“Daddy was so proud of this house,” she said.

Despite the loss Castillo’s family experienced, her parents made important strides as community activists for St. Paul’s West Side and the Latino community.

In the late 1960s, Nicolas and Tomasa founded La Clinica, a community center that offers low-cost and bilingual healthcare to West Side residents. The two also worked alongside leaders of the United Farm Workers group to demand better working conditions for Latino migrant workers.

In the early 1970s, Tomasa and older brother Nick Jr. also helped found the University of Minnesota’s Department of Chicano Studies.

After Nicolas died in 1987, Tomasa led an effort to name a park on the West Side after him — Parque Castillo, which still exists today. La Clinica still exists, too. It operates right next to the park on Concord Street.

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