On a spring day in 1952, 6-year-old Nick Castillo was watching his mother bake a cake when they heard a crash in the basement of their home on the West Side Flats.
Castillo started downstairs to find out what made the noise. He saw the swollen Mississippi River, pouring through their windows.
“It came fast,” a 70-year-old Castillo told the Pioneer Press in 2016. “We were at home that morning, and by 7 or 8 o’clock that night, we were in a shelter.”
Castillo, who died in 2017, would spend the next two weeks with his family in that Dayton’s Bluff Red Cross shelter, along with dozens of other flood victims.
The flood of 1952 was the most destructive St. Paul has ever faced, displacing 5,000 people and causing millions of dollars in damage. It reshaped the city in ways that are still felt today.
St. Paulites have always lived under the threat of flooding. Their city’s placement just downstream from the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers means runoff from the two watersheds converges on the city when the winter snow melts each spring.
A handful of notable floods menaced the city’s earliest settlers, drowning their crops and swamping their cellars. But it wasn’t until 1881 that St. Paulites discovered just how vulnerable they were.
That year’s flood damaged several homes and businesses on the city’s low-lying West Side and a handful of Lowertown warehouses. One house, belonging to a man named French Joe, was torn from its foundation and carried downriver, according to a report in the Pioneer Press.
Several smaller floods followed, but the 1881 flood was the benchmark by which they were measured. Its 19.7-foot crest would stand as the city’s record until 1952.
TURNING POINT
The impact of the 1952 flood would be felt most acutely in two of the city’s tight-knit immigrant communities — the West Side Flats and Little Italy.
The Flats were directly across from downtown, while Little Italy was on the river’s east bank, in the shadow of the High Bridge. Real estate in these flood-prone neighborhoods was cheap, and they attracted many low-income families.
Their residents had plenty of experience with floods — the flood of 1951 had come within inches of the 1881 record — but nothing compared to what they would see in the spring of 1952.
Just four days after reaching flood stage — 14 feet at the Robert Street Bridge — the river rose to 20 feet, breaking the record set by the 1881 deluge. And the worst was yet to come.
Floodwaters pushed at least 14 blocks into the West Side Flats, and breached the sandbag dike that protected Little Italy.
It wasn’t just homes that were damaged. Flood-idled factories and packing plants tallied millions of dollars in lost production and were forced to lay off workers. The state reported that 2,500 St. Paulites filed for flood-related unemployment assistance by the time the water crested at 22 feet on April 16.
The flood caused $7 million in damage to St. Paul and South St. Paul — nearly $63 million in today’s dollars. It was also blamed for two deaths.
Castillo’s home was among 1,135 damaged by the flood that year. Like many others, his family returned to repair and clean their house when the water subsided.
But they wouldn’t be allowed to stay for long.
In the early 1960s, the St. Paul Port Authority bought out the homeowners in the West Side Flats and Little Italy, and demolished their houses.
The Flats would be turned into an industrial park; Little Italy would become a scrap yard. Many former residents are still bitter about the forced relocation.
“We didn’t want to move,” Castillo said. “That was our home.”
THE WALL
Work on a three-mile flood wall protecting the new West Side industrial park began in summer 1961.
This further antagonized former residents, who felt betrayed by the timing of the project, says flood survivor Gilbert de la O, who lived near Castillo.
“They built the flood wall after we moved out,” de la O said. “Why didn’t they build it while we lived there?”
The $3.75 million project was completed in 1963 and was designed to protect the Flats from flooding up to six feet higher than the 1952 level.
The city didn’t have to wait long to try out its new defenses.
The 1965 flood crested at 26 feet, and remains the highest flood in the city’s history. The high water mark is painted on the downtown-facing side of the flood wall and can still be seen today.
Despite this unprecedented deluge, damage was largely limited to businesses along Shepard Road and in Lowertown. Only 45 St. Paul families registered for Red Cross Flood assistance by the time the water began to recede.
Another massive flood followed in 1969, cresting at 25 feet, with similar results.
The past few decades have been relatively quiet, but a handful of notable floods have prompted the city to further improve its flood defenses. A $20 million project in the early 1990s raised and extended the existing flood wall.
After a 23.5-foot flood in 2001 that temporarily shut down the city’s Holman Field airport, a controversial $25 million flood wall was erected to protect it.
But hydrologists speculate that these man-made flood defenses are driving floods higher by preventing the swollen river from spreading out in its natural floodplain.
This article originally appeared in the Pioneer Press’ April 2016 special section ‘River City.’
