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Part 3: Cruising this stunning stretch of the upper Mississippi, you’d never know you were in a former haven for the likes of Bugsy Siegel and the Ma Barker gang.
By Liz Pasch — Spring 2006
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
A couple of blocks from the Science Museum is The Landmark Center. Built in 1902, it originally served as St. Paul’s Federal Courts Building and housed the office of Minnesota Congressman Andrew Volstead, author of the national Prohibition Law, which many people say actually spurred the growth of organized crime in America. Ironically the former office of the city’s most prominent bootlegger, Leon Gleckman (a.k.a. the “Al Capone of St. Paul”), is just across the street in the St. Paul Hotel.
I walk toward the hotel and recall what the bus tour guide had said earlier, that gangsters used its circular driveway to transfer illegal alcohol. I find myself standing on the red brick, maybe on the very spot where they once stood, and wonder if any of today’s hotel guests know they’re staying where gangsters once conducted clandestine “business affairs.”
Before my imagination gets too carried away, I treat myself to a late-afternoon cocktail at the lobby bar, watching men dressed in power suits check in at the front desk. They’re the movers and shakers of the business world, much like gangsters were in their day, using the hotel as a temporary base. Today, I think, the goods being moved are legal and the shaking isn’t deadly. Nevertheless, I skip the second drink, leave a big tip, and take my overactive imagination out the side door.
The marina is only a 15-minute walk across the river, but I read somewhere that the bridge is yet another chapter in gangster history, and an unpleasant one at that.
On that thought, I quicken my step while it’s still light. I’d like to get one last look at the colorful autumn landscape before the cold settles over St. Paul again.
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