Separated at Birth: The Sibling Rivalry of Minneapolis and St. Paul

The skylines and built environment are tangible manifestations of their distinct histories. Even the topography differs, though both cities owe their existence to the Mississippi. Steamboats could go no farther upriver than the site of St. Paul. Consequently, traders, merchants, and speculators congregated there, eventually carving out a city from the adjacent bluffs and valleys. St. Paul hugged the river and made its fortune as a transportation and mercantile hub. Canny politicians and Catholic immigrants secured its place as the state capital. Today the illuminated domes of the capitol and the mammoth St. Paul Cathedral stand out on the hills above the skyline, tangible reminders of the city’s history.

The terrain changes just across the river, the hills smoothing out into the beginning of the western plains. The skyscrapers of Minneapolis rise out of the flatland, visible for miles, glittering like the towers of Oz. Nineteenth-century boosters liked to claim that Minneapolis was the “first city of the West.” Progress and profit were always the name of the game. Established at the site of St. Anthony Falls, Minneapolis was the child of enterprising Yankee capitalists who harnessed the waterpower to create an industrial dynamo. Feeding on the northern forests and western wheat fields, by the 1880s, Minneapolis produced more lumber than any other city in the country; a decade later it had become the flour milling capital of the world.

The two cities are different in a hundred ways that stem back to their origins. St. Paul began as a fur trade post that provided whiskey to soldiers at nearby Fort Snelling. Originally known as Pig’s Eye, it took its name from its most notorious whiskey trader, Pig’s Eye Parrant. French Canadians, Anglo traders, Indians, and soldiers from the fort comfortably mingled at the multicultural watering hole. But as a town haphazardly began to develop, residents (many of them French-Canadian Catholics) took the advice of the local priest to rechristen the settlement with a more respectable name.

Minneapolis, on the other hand, was a planned community from the outset. The west side of the river was closed to settlement until 1854—thirteen years after the citizens of Pig’s Eye changed its name to St. Paul. But well-heeled, politically connected Yankee capitalists were poised to take control of the falls long before the land became officially available. Even the city’s name was chosen in advance. They considered Lowell since they intended to emulate that New England industrial center. They settled on Minneapolis, a combination of the Dakota word for water and the Greek word for city that advertised both local identity and cosmopolitan ambition. Unlike St. Paul’s somewhat chaotic multicultural character, Minneapolis originated as a well-ordered, homogeneous, New England Protestant enclave, fixed firmly on industrial development.

The cities were rivals from their infancy, each one opposing anything that might advantage the other. The rivalry only grew more intense by the turn of the century as Minneapolis, with its industrial base, grew steadily more powerful, while St. Paul’s heyday as a transportation entrepot was clearly on the wane. Increasingly overshadowed by their upstart neighbor, St. Paulites remade their image of themselves into the “last city of the East”—gracious rather than grasping, neighborly rather than competitive, defining themselves fundamentally as “not Minneapolis.” In short, they turned economic stagnation into a cultural virtue—at least in their own minds. Minneapolitans, for their part, sneered at St. Paul (when they thought of it at all) as a hidebound backwater. By the 1930s Fortune magazine declared that the most important fact to know about the Twin Cities was that “they hate each other.”

Minneapolis embraced progress with enthusiasm, a project that often pitted business against labor; whereas, in St. Paul, a culture of compromise grew out of necessity, as city residents worked across class, religious, and ethnic differences, to sustain the struggling economy and defend embattled St. Paul against outsiders. The first commandment children learned at their parent’s knee was never to spend their money in Minneapolis!

Today, of course, the world has changed and most of the economic circumstances that fed the rivalry are no longer relevant. St. Paulites and Minneapolitans happily partake in the amenities and jobs on both sides of the river. Most often, the cities also find themselves on the same side of political issues that pit urban priorities against suburban ones. Even so, the cultural distinctiveness persists. Minneapolis seems to embody progress, everything shiny and new, from trendy loft apartments to the mirror-like steel explosion of Frank Gehry’s Weisman Museum, to the new Guthrie Theater, which opened in September to widespread architectural acclaim. St. Paul has a different style, a slower pace. Prosperous at last, it has reclaimed its historic buildings and emanates an undeniable charm, from the mansions of beautiful Summit Avenue to the leafy neighborhoods that have always been the city’s centerpiece; from the lovingly restored, nineteenth-century federal courthouse, home to many of the city’s arts organizations, to the fabulous Minnesota History Center.

Together, the cities offer the best of the old and the new. Still, most Minneapolitans would never consider relocating to St. Paul, and most St. Paulites would move to the moon before they would put down roots in Minneapolis. Fortunately, as visitors to the Twin Cities, you can enjoy them both.

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