Odds and Ends

Horse and Buggy Public Safety

  Born in Austria , John Bloberger came to Robbinsdale when he went to work for the railroad in 1894. In the early days of the village, Bloberger served as Village Constable, Street Commissioner, Village … Read more

The Crystal Theater

In 1916 William J. Muller opened his first drug store in a little wooden building next door to Gus Urban’s Meat Market. Ten years later, he built a new brick front drug store and the … Read more

The Security State Bank

On January 1916, The Security State Bank, incorporated December 16th, 1918, opened for business in old Robbinsdale State Bank Building. The previous bank, incorporated in 1906, failed at least twice, was lampooned by the local … Read more

Robbinsdale’s Most Important Industry

  “Robbinsdale’s brick sky scraper, where three million readers all over the United States look to find their jokes, love stories and blood curdling adventure yarns in the three magazines published here- Whiz Bang, True … Read more

A Typical Home?

“Typical Hone- Home owning is Robbinsdale’s major “industry”. Many beautiful homes such as this one owned by Reuben Katz adorn residential avenues.” The photo at the top of the post is from a Sunday Minneapolis … Read more

Villas Avenue?

About 1925 the names of the streets were changed to eliminate duplication and to bring about a unified system between the villages of Crystal, Golden Valley, and Robbinsdale. Villas Avenue became Noble Avenue. Legend has … Read more

A Deer in the Drug Store

On May 23rd, 1945 a 160 pound, four point buck bounded into the open basement door of Morris W. Henney’s Robbinsdale Pharmacy at 4139 West Broadway. Game Warden, Ben Cohen and Robbinsdale Policemen, Matt Spurzem and Adrian Mattson, came to the rescue, but not before the deer had done more than $600 dollars worth of damage by crashing into medical cabinets. After Cohen and Mattson dragged it outside and trussed it up, the deer was taken to Sheriff Earle Brown’s farm for doctoring and then to a game refuge.

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Streetcar comes to Robbinsdale–On a Truck!

  In 1954 Father Nolan purchased an old trolley for the playground at Sacred Heart School. These photos come from Father Nolan’s streetcar movie in the Minnesota Streetcar Museum collection. Moving the trolley was quite … Read more

Souvenir Robbinsdale

cover

It can be conservatively predicted that within a few years the village of Robbinsdale, located just north of the city limits of Minneapolis will be noted as the choicest of its suburban beauty spots, remarkable for splendid residences, situated amid picturesque surroundings of woodland and lake.

Already the certainty that Minneapolis is destined to become a great metropolis has enhanced the values of land adjacent to the chain of lakes within its limits. Calhoun, Harriet, Lake of the Isles and Cedar to the extent that only people of considerable means feel they can afford home in their vicinity. Soon it will be only the rich whose mansions will mark the sites of the present pretty bungalows and the modest dwellings.
Today the conviction is being forced upon those who desire to enjoy the delightful combination of city and rual life, made possible by electric roads and the automobile, that location of their homes to insure permanency, must be in a new direction and where too, there will be more exclusiveness than along the boulevards and driveways which constitute the playground of the city.
The village of Robbinsdale, which nestles between two gem-like lakes, with dells and groves just off its main street, possesses just this ideal location, coupled with the same charm of natural scenery which is now beguiling to the Calhoun and Harriet district. In time Robbinsdale too will become the home of millionaires, but this period is farther remote. This is certainly foreordained as it is that the business district of Minneapolis is to be doubled, tripled and quadrupled in area.
It requires no stretch of imagination to prophesy this. The present rate of growth of Minneapolis and the natural distribution of its population will bring these changes about. The man is not infrequently met who can tell when he could have bought business sites now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hundreds; who recollects when there were frame dwelling houses where now are sky scrapers, mammoth department stores and splendid office buildings. Most of these changes have come within ten years, with in which time too, whole districts of suburban property have been built up from farms and pasture lands…what then of the future…the next ten years or even five?

-Robbinsdale Souvenir, Suburban Minneapolis
1911