Photo by Mathew Benoit on Unsplash
I live along the Mississippi River in Lilydale, Minnesota, a few hundred yards across the water from Saint Paul. It is a scenic locale I like, and a historic location I love.
When the weather is fair—about six months out of the year in this part of the country—I like nothing better than a lengthy bicycle ride along the boulevards and parkways of Saint Paul and its twin city neighbor, Minneapolis. I have done it for years and I never tire of it.
“Same old ride?” my neighbor Doris asks whenever she spots me about to embark on my aging Trek road bike.
“Same old ride,” I cheerfully respond. “Why change what works?”
I wave, Doris shakes her head, and I’m off.
I ride five miles downstream along the river, past three bald eagle nests—-two high up in tall trees and one improbably but solidly built in the crook of a utility pole—-to Harriet Island Park. There I pause for a few minutes to gaze over the water at the glorious riverside view of downtown Saint Paul. I cross the river on the imposing Robert Street bridge and ride up Kellogg Boulevard to Cathedral Hill, the eastern end of Summit Avenue, a street five miles long that the Saint Paul Visitors Center calls “the longest stretch of breathtaking Victorian homes in the entire country.”
Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who grew up along and near Summit Avenue, had a decidedly different view of the street, once calling it “a museum of American architectural failures.”
I will not pick sides in that quarrel. I just like to ride by the Summit Avenue rowhouse where Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise, his first novel, and ran out into the street to stop traffic and spread the news that Scribner’s had agreed to publish his book. Fitzgerald’s exuberance is now offset by a plaque mounted outside the rowhouse listing it as a National Historic Landmark but not saying why, a more modest, Minnesota-like approach for sure.
Summit Avenue ends at the river, where it connects with Mississippi River Boulevard. I ride north along the boulevard toward Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota, where I was a law student in the mid-1970s. The homes, which grow larger and grander as I proceed, include the first University of Minnesota building I encounter on this route—Eastcliff, formerly a lumber baron’s manor house, now the official residence of the university president.
Less than a mile north of Eastcliff is the even larger and grander Cardozo house, now converted to a half dozen luxury condominium homes. Chris Cardozo, scion of the prominent Saint Paul family that lived there, was a law school classmate of mine. A reticent law student, Chris later impressed me, another reticent law student, by never practicing law. Instead, he forged his own path, becoming the world’s foremost authority on Edward Curtis, a 19th Century American photographer noted for his moving portraits of Indigenous Americans [https://edwardcurtis.com/].
Chris was not the only Cardozo to impress me in law school. Justice Benjamin Cardozo, distantly related to Chris and one of the most important appellate judges in U.S. legal history, grabbed my attention early during our first year. Between classes one morning, while sitting at the end of one of the law library’s long oak reading tables, I opened my torts casebook to our next assigned case, Justice Cardozo’s landmark opinion in Wagner v. International Railway Company, 133 N.E. 437 (N.Y. 1921).
Wagner, a seminal personal injury case, introduced the legal doctrine “Danger invites rescue.” In leading to that outcome, Justice Cardozo laid out a complicated statement of facts involving an electric trolley, several high rail bridges, a couple sharp turns, and a crowded passenger car with unsecured platform doors. A sudden violent lurch threw a trolley passenger out an open door and off a rail bridge. The cry “man overboard” was raised. The train stopped at the end of the bridge, and other passengers, including Wagner, the plaintiff, rushed out to search for their fellow passenger.
“Night and darkness had come on,” Justice Cardozo wrote. “Reaching the bridge, plaintiff found upon a beam the fallen passenger’s hat, but nothing else. About him was darkness. He missed his footing, and fell.”
I was spellbound. Instead of the dry legal prose I was quickly becoming accustomed to, here was the gripping description of a rescue attempt gone awry. Taut, charged, exemplary, and completely unexpected. Grateful, I said a silent thank you to Justice Cardozo, there in the library reading room, and at various times and places since.
Continuing my ride north on Saint Paul’s Mississippi River Boulevard, a few hundred yards past the imposing Cardozo house I come to a worn but familiar railroad bridge across the Mississippi between Saint Paul and Minneapolis. On the Minneapolis side, the bridge is just 100 yards or so from an old two bedroom house I lived in for two years immediately after law school. My housemate Leigh, a dental student/entrepreneur, affectionately called it “D.S. Arnie’s house”, Arnie being the landlord and D.S. being an off-color reference to Arnie’s intellect, or lack of one. Forty years ago it was the shabbiest house along the river in south Minneapolis, and it still is today. Probably still a rental property, too, given its lack of any visible upgrades in two generations.
The first year Leigh and I lived in the house we neither saw nor heard a train pass by, either on the bridge itself or on either of the dual tracks leading up to it. We concluded the bridge was abandoned, so every once in a while in the evening we would walk out to the middle of it with a couple beers, just to shoot the breeze and enjoy the view.
Then one evening, returning from a grocery run, we saw and heard two trains crossing the bridge at the same time in opposite directions. Dumbstruck, we both nervously laughed. There were no more nocturnal strolls to the middle of that bridge.
Several miles north of the old railroad bridge are the East Bank and West Bank campuses of the University of Minnesota, together comprising one of the largest university campuses by enrollment in the country.
I have a deep family connection with the University of Minnesota. My father was a student there in the 1930s, while a brother, a sister, and I all attended it in the 1970s. I get a good feeling every time I bicycle through either campus, but I’m especially fond of the older East Bank campus, whose core was in place when my father was a student. Majestic Northrup Mall, with its nearly identical broad and narrow sets of Renaissance Roman-style academic buildings facing off with each other across a broad sweep of lawn and trees, proudly proclaims itself the center of campus. Then and now, I never miss a chance to ride or stroll down it.
Fraser Hall, the law school building when I was a student, sits off to one side of Northrup Mall, physically apart from the center of campus as professional schools often are. Replaced as the law school building in 1978 by a new and much larger building on the West Bank campus, Fraser Hall now serves as the main student services building, housing the offices of the Registrar and student financial aid within an imposing facade still boldly proclaiming LAW in engraved letters several feet high immediately above the front entrance.
Fraser Hall first opened for law school classes in 1928, six years before my father began his studies at the University of Minnesota. He had spent the school years of 1932-33 and 1933-34 at Saint Mary’s College in Winona, Minnesota, before transferring to Minnesota in the fall of 1934. Growing up, my siblings and I knew little about his college years, particularly his time at the University of Minnesota.
When I began my law school studies at Minnesota, my younger brother Chuck was a senior there in the College of Liberal Arts. Out of curiosity, we decided one day to go to the Office of the Registrar to look up our father’s academic record.
To our surprise, it was still there. We were able to get a copy of his transcript listing courses, credits, and grades. When we examined it for the first time, I started reading off the courses: contracts, constitutional law, criminal law, torts. Startled, I looked at Chuck and said what we were both thinking—Dad was in law school!
All our father ever said to us about his two years at the University of Minnesota was that he wanted to be a lawyer, but gave that idea up during his second year there when his own father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Dad then left school and started working at the large Wilson & Co. meatpacking plant in Albert Lea, Minnesota, his hometown and ours. Only many years later did we learn from other family members that Dad disliked law school and never regretted leaving.
Like Chris Cardozo, my law school classmate, my father instead forged his own path. From his start on the packinghouse floor during the deep depression years he moved into the plant’s office, where his good judgment and skill with numbers led to steady advances. All the years I knew him, until his untimely death from cancer at age 54 when I was just 16 years old, he was in meatpacking plant front offices, including his final position as general manager at the Wilson & Co. plant in Cherokee, Iowa.
In the end, I forged my own path, too. Unsure whether a traditional legal career would suit me, and knowing from the experiences of my father and classmates like Chris Cardozo that other opportunities were available to those with legal training, I tried a variety of things. I worked briefly as a law clerk at a small Minneapolis law firm, was involved with a startup business for a year while also attending graduate school at the University of Minnesota, and then started a satisfying career as an attorney editor with Saint Paul’s West Publishing Company, the country’s largest publisher and distributor of print and online legal information. There I found my niche, working for West and its successor, Thomson Reuters, for nearly 37 years.
Drenched in nostalgia, as I always am following visits to the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus and environs, I say a silent farewell astride my bicycle, then cross the Mississippi at the Franklin Avenue Bridge and start my return ride to Lilydale along Minneapolis’ West River Road, more park-like and rustic than Saint Paul’s grand Mississippi River Boulevard but every bit as interesting to me. I never tire of riding by D.S. Arnie’s place, the still-shabby rental home I shared for two years with Leigh, my dental student friend and startup business partner. I enjoy seeing the familiar schools and neighborhoods along the way, including the whimsical Anderson Addition, a 40-acre site developed in the late 1950s as faculty housing for the University of Minnesota with two endearing characteristics: curving, criss-crossed streets named for past presidents of the University of Minnesota and architecturally unique mid-century homes, many designed by faculty members at the University’s School of Architecture.
The last stretch of my ride takes me through Minnehaha Park and past thundering Minnehaha Falls to Fort Snelling State Park, then across the Mendota Bridge to the tiny town of Mendota, just a mile upstream from my home in equally tiny Lilydale and a place deeply ingrained in the history of the Ojibwe, the Dakota Sioux, and other local indigenous tribes.
This day I stopped in Mendota and reflected on several things.
First, the power and depth of the elegiac final line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated novel, The Great Gatsby: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Does anything better explain the introspection my rides generate?
Then I reached into my bicycle seat pack and pulled out the source of a second reflection: the March 13, 2021, newspaper obituary of Chris Cardozo, my law school classmate and champion of Edward Curtis, America’s greatest photographer of indigenous peoples. Chris died peacefully on February 21, 2021, several years after a debilitating stroke, read the obituary [https://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/0000384585/]. My thoughts went out to Chris and the Cardozo family. I gazed up at Pilot Knob, just south and west of Mendota and so important to this area’s indigenous peoples, who were in turn so important to Chris, and marveled at the connections in our lives. I mounted my bicycle and rode the short distance to my home.
When I arrived at my apartment building, my neighbor Doris and her friends had just finished a card game in the commons room.
“Same old ride?” Doris inquired.
“Same old ride,” I cheerfully responded. “Why change what works?”
Doris smiled and shook her head. I cleaned up and put my bicycle away until next time.
Mark Bergen is a retired lawyer and editor living and writing in St. Paul, Minnesota. His nonfiction and short fiction work has appeared in Dogwood Tales Magazine, Split Rock Review, The Saturday Evening Post's New Fiction Friday online series, and Good Old Days Magazine.