The Wake

There is a man who lives in Elliot Park. 622 16th St. A fine house. The man’s name is Melchior Scheldrup, of Norwegian descent. The year is 1894 and he works as the local pharmacist. One day Mr. Scheldrup gets out of bed, has breakfast and heads off to work. His pharmacy is only a couple of blocks away, on East 14th Street. He can stroll there easily, as most people do, to get to work.

On one such easy stroll, Mr. Scheldrup arrives at the pharmacy, unlocks the door, flips the sign on the door to “open,” and checks to make sure the sign is telling the truth—that the pharmacy really is open. Readying himself and the store he waits for his first customers of the day. Some people arrive early to pick up their medicine, while others wait until after work. One man who needs his medicine neither early, nor after work, walks in. As he walks in, he says, “Hey there Melchior, I need a bottle of my medicine”.

Melchior, with a smile, nods and hands the man a clear glass bottle of liquid imprinted with the name and location of his pharmacy on it—just before the man finshes speaking.

“I reckon I don’t even need to tell you what medicine I want any more,” the man says, smiling.

“Yah, maybe not,” Scheldrup says in his Norwegian accent.

They’ve had the same conversation every time he comes in for about a year now. The man pays and then walks out of the store, popping the cork as he goes. Before he has even made it down the block he is already drinking from the bottle. Quickly, he feels the effects of the medicine, a wonderful mixture of alcohol and opium, true medicine. He stumbles on his way. The bottle slips from his hand into a pile of dirt and trash near a house in an alley by East 14th Street. The owner of the house sweeps the bottle into his trash pit and buries all the trash. Out of sight, out of mind. Slowly the years begin to pile on top of the bottle. Melchior moves in and out of his home and in and out of days.

20 years earlier, the streetcars arrive and with them Minneapolis begins rippling out from its center at St. Anthony Falls. Human development rolls over the landscape in waves as the times change. The mostly middle-class housing of Melchior’s day is slowly converted into duplexes, apartments and boardinghouses as more city workers can now live further from the city center.

The bottle is buried a little deeper.

A few decades pass. Melcior dies in the early 1920’s and the pharmacy follows suit a few years later. The house just off East 14th Street, where the bottle rests, waiting, is demolished in 1927.

A little diner called the Band Box goes up in 1939 where the pharmacy fell. Charles Schulz is born out of a ripple of apartments only a few blocks away. New businesses constitute the next wave out from the falls and in 1951 a dry cleaner’s goes up where the houses used to be. You can see the waves in the form of rises and falls along the terrain; places where the land rolled over, covering the past with pavement and stuccoed buildings; places where land was scraped away by demolition and laid bare older eras; places where young apartments stand next to old houses. And the bottle is covered by layers of change, again further from the light of day.

In 1967, Interstates 94 and 35 slice through the city and Elliot Park becomes bound by trenches on two sides; the south and the east. Her face is pocked and marked by decrepit buildings—signs of her youthful growth. The dry cleaner’s closes and the building is demolished. Other local businesses begin to fold as well. The bottle rests darker and deeper as Elliot Park becomes a bit of an urban backwater for a while…

There is a man who lives in Elliot Park. He lives at 622 16th St. A fine house, now divided into several apartments. His name is Kent Bakken. One day he gets out of bed, has his breakfast of coffee and cigarettes and heads off to work. Well sort of. Today, August 11th 2007, Kent strolls easily a few blocks away to an empty lot behind e.p. atelier between S.10th St. and E. 14th Street. There are several square holes cut into the earth there. Windows looking in; windows looking back. They are exactly a meter long and a meter wide and have perfectly straight walls going down to their varying depths. Interspersed throughout the empty lot and adjacent patches of grass, they are barely noticeable.

Kent checks the working area, making sure that when he said the dig would start at 8 o’clock every morning he wasn’t lying. This is the Elliot Park Neighborhood Archaeology Project. A few local archaeologists and interested people from the community make up the planning group and for the past four years they have put together a dig that takes place towards the end of the summer. There will be a dig next summer as well. The project is part of a revival of sorts that has been taking place in Elliot Park just within the past decade. Old buildings have been renovated and small businesses have been opening. As the warehouse district downtown is being renovated into new homes, the wave rolls out and the same thing happens in Elliot Park.

On this day people slowly trickle in. Anyone from archaeology students to the middle aged women who have found objects, such as American Indian artifacts or artifacts from the early days of the Twin Cities in their gardens are there. A years worth of planning goes into these five days of digging, which ultimately relies on how many people show up to get their hands dirty. Today is Saturday and a good number of people have shown up. Some have been there every day of the dig for each of the four years. For others, this is there first day.

A local waiter shovels some wet gravel and mud out of one hole. The gardeners follow around a young archaeologist volunteering his Saturday to do what he does all week. A young boy around the age of 15 looks as though he is having the time of his life. A college student looks tired.

The coffee bought from e.p atelier, a relatively new business to the area, puts more than a few satisfied looks on people’s faces. A few of the cups blow away in the wind, perhaps fodder for future archaeologists.

In one of the holes, you can practically see in the layers of earth, the waves of change where they fell across Elliot Park. Eras are exposed with every inch of earth removed. Although the dry cleaner is gone, the sudden bubbling of soap in the bottom of one hole reminds us that it was once there. The families that lived in the houses that stood there before the dry cleaner may be gone, but they left us some reminders. In a square hole dug today, a piece of glass lets its presence be known as the old bottle meets new rays of light, new rays of time. Kent takes the whole bottle, which is a rare find, to examine and clean. He realizes it is a medicinal bottle and looks up the pharmacy and address molded on the bottle. The bottle is in his hand as he searches through old directories and maps. There he finds the name on the bottle—the name Melchior Scheldrup. Address: 622 16th St. And for a second, two men meet across a century and the grave…

Elliot Park is a smaller neighborhood in East Minneapolis near the Metrodome. The people, places, and history in this story are real. Much of the information comes thanks to the archaeology done there and information provided by Kent Bakken. The Elliot Park Neighborhood Archaeology Project has recently won the 2007 Community Effort Award from the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota and the neighborhood is a model of growth and restoration with many new businesses and residences sprouting up. If you would like to participate in any digs there are a number of volunteer archaeology projects in Minneapolis. Information can be found about the Elliot Park dig on their website: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~bakk0029/epna/ or at e.p. atelier or in the latest issue of The Minnesota Archaeologist which contains information about the dig and is written by Kent Bakken. There are also volunteer archaeology opportunities at the Mill City Museum in the summer time. Information is available on their website http://www.millcitymuseum.org/ or at the museum. A Google search is all you really need to do. So if you want to get involved, get off your ass and do it.