Raspberry Island was once home to curling rinks, a Navy training center, even an R.E.M. concert

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St. Paul’s Raspberry Island has been reinvented again and again.

In the 1890s, it was a popular spot to take a dip in the Mississippi River in summer and home to curling rinks in winter.

Later, it was the site of a U.S. Navy training base. Its historic boat club housed a series of nightclubs with colorful names: Tugboat Annie’s, Golden Garter, River Serpent.

It became an outdoor concert venue, hosting bands like R.E.M. and Aerosmith before spending a sad stretch of years as a parking lot.

Today, the tiny 2-acre island underneath the Wabasha Street Bridge is a park, planted with ornamental grasses and small oak trees.

On a recent morning, it was filled with visitors snapping photos with their phones. They were there to see an exhibit of fantastical Mexican folk art sculptures called alebrijes. (The giant creatures are staying through Oct. 26.)

That year, the Mississippi rose and flooded the little island. When Thompson’s family visited after the river had subsided, Thompson spied the old Navy buildings through a chain-link fence.

“Even as a 10-year-old, I wondered about those buildings,” said Thompson, who grew up in St. Paul and now lives in Big Lake. “Later the seeming incongruity of a naval facility on the Mississippi intrigued me.”

He wrote to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, to ask: “Why was downtown St. Paul once home to U.S. Navy facilities? What was the purpose? And when was it active?”

The short answer: From 1949 to 1965, the little island housed an active training facility for Navy reservists. It was full of top-of-the-line equipment so that the “bluejackets,” as newspapers described them at the time, could get a feel for Navy life at sea.

But by the time it was renamed Navy Island, the little spit of land had already seen a lot.

“It’s fascinating, the changes that have happened” around the little island, said Anna Olson, research associate at Ramsey County Historical Society.

An 1857 map of St. Paul shows the island with the city’s first bridge to span the Mississippi, the Wabasha Street Bridge (then under construction), rising above it.

“The lower end of Raspberry Island is nightly the scene of the aquatic sports of scores of bathers,” the Saint Paul Weekly Minnesotian wrote that July.

Soon, rowers with the Minnesota Boat Club, incorporated in 1873, chose Raspberry Island as their base. They built a clubhouse and held races in front of the island, drawing crowds who watched from the bridge above. (The club is still around today — but the current building on the island dates back to 1910.)

In 1890, the St. Paul Curling Club bought land on the island and built a structure big enough to house five natural ice rinks.

The curling club on Raspberry Island closed in 1904, but made a comeback — with a new clubhouse on Selby Avenue — less than a decade later, according to the club’s website.

In 1949, the Navy first leased part of the island for $1 a year from the city, building what the Minneapolis Tribune called a “drill ship.”

It was a $1 million training center and meeting place for a unit called the St. Paul Organized Surface Naval Reserve, which had more than 1,100 men and officers at the time. The unit had been meeting in the naval air station that was housed at Wold-Chamberlain Field, the precursor to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

“The magnitude and power of electronic equipment which the new center is to house will surpass that of a modern navy destroyer,” the newspaper wrote. It had equipment to train the men on everything from radio communication to anti-aircraft guns.

“Raspberry Island will be called Navy Island by the bluejackets,” the paper added.

The facility was still in operation that April when floodwaters completely surrounded it. Everyone evacuated, filling boats with records and equipment.

On the little island’s west side, however, the owner of the Golden Garter saloon inside the boat club refused to close. “We’ll be open until the power shuts off,” Jim Drake told the Minneapolis Star.

A band crawled out onto the rooftop to play a set, while a worker painted “Open as usual” on the roof.

In 1968, the Navy’s lease ended, and they tore down the training building.

In later decades, the island’s open acres became a popular spot for concerts. The biggest concert series, Rockin’ the River, kicked off in May 1983 with R.E.M. as headliners and local bands the Suburbs and the Replacements.

In 1995, the St. Paul City Council moved to change the island’s name back to Raspberry, and in 2002, the Schubert Club commissioned a fanciful bandstand for the park, designed by architect and glass artist James Carpenter.

A few years later, the city invested $5 million in a major redesign of the little island’s parkland, giving it the feel it has today.

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