Capt. William D.
Bowell, owner of the Padelford Packet Boat Company.
Ask Capt. William D. Bowell about the good old days on the Mississippi River and he'll likely tell you they're just around the next bend.
The river, for years viewed by some as little more than a fast-running cesspool, is suddenly being treated like a life-giving natural spring. No one, it seems, can get enough of it.
The St. Paul riverfront is being considered as a site for a new baseball stadium, a National Park Service interpretive center, and a new home for the Science Museum of Minnesota. A new public dock is under construction and a renovated tugboat now serves as a floating restaurant and bed and breakfast on Harriet Island.
For the past 25 years, Capt. Bowell and his Padelford Packet Boat Co. on the West Side's Harriet Island across from downtown St. Paul has been the city's riverfront development - a fact he says city officials and neighbors often forget. It must be remembered that Bowell's tiny office has a sign stating "Captain Bligh's Quarters" affixed to it.
This irascible but soft-hearted Old Man River, who once ordered his crew to search a dumpster for a lost Sterling silver wedding knife and admonished his deckhands to not "get my garbage dirty," says he's glad others have come to appreciate what has always been his first love.
"I'm thrilled," he says of all the attention the river has received as of late. "I've been a lone voice on the river for so many years and then all of a sudden . . . they're paying more attention to our operation down here and empathizing with our needs. For many years we were just down here. Nobody paid attention to the fact we were bringing 100- to 130,000 people to the waterfront every year."
And not only are people talking about the river, they're actually doing something about it as well.
This summer, Bowell moved his fleet of boats up river about 100 yards from his old docking spot after the city of St. Paul arranged to have the riverfront parking lot expanded as part of the Harriet Island/Lilydale Regional Park improvements.
"We are thrilled to death that we finally got a parking space," he said. "It looks good. It gives a good front for the St. Paul riverfront. It's one of the biggest improvements they have made in the last 25 years I've been here. I might even say 44 years that I've been on the river."
The parking lot, the surrounding hoopla, and recent "Greening of the Great River" environmental efforts have really piqued interest in the Mississippi, he says. "The number of people just walking by, the traffic is great."
"The stigma that the Mississippi had all those years [of being dirty] is really abating. The river going back to 1951, there's been a substantial change. It's much, much cleaner. The fact of the matter is, the chloroform count here is lower than on the St. Croix [River] a couple of years ago."
Bowell's tenure on the river and Harriet Island dates to 1932, when
his father bought a popcorn wagon which they would operate wherever the crowds were, including Harriet Island.
Many years later in 1951, Bowell acquired the Toka, a 16-passenger excursion boat in which he ferried people from Lambert Landing at the foot of Sibley Street to Tugboat Annie's across the river on Raspberry Island, formerly known as Navy Island.
Business was great until the saloon was raided and shut down, he says. But his small operation proved even then that there was a continuing interest in the Mississippi --- despite the absence of a functional waterfront.
"Every city that I know of --- Red Wing, Dubuque, Winona, LaCrosse, Davenport, Moline, St. Louis --- has a nice waterfront right down by the edge [of the river]," he says. "Most of them have a pier or dock walkway the length of the downtown area. . . St. Paul has a position on the river that absolutely engenders development, yet we're slow to do it."
Although Bowell says he was at first puzzled by the lack of a good waterfront in St. Paul, he adds that there has always been tension between the business district downtown, which Bowell refers to as "uptown," and the one just across the river.
"One of the reasons is that the people uptown have really fought any development on the west side of the river because it did not help them, and I can empathize with their problems," he says. "There's a lot of empty buildings up there."
In the not-too-distant past, he said it was common for the city or some other agency to plan a large event on Harriet Island without ever notifying him, which would "throw us into chaos." The result was that passengers who had scheduled trips on one of his excursion vessels had a lot of trouble even getting to the dock.
One of the more recent examples of the city's past attitude toward Bowell's river operation was in 1993 when "the captain," as he is known on the waterfront, and the St. Paul Fire Department got into a tiff over safety after the floods of that year subsided.
Bowell publicly announced that the Mississippi was once again safe for trips aboard the Jonathan Padelford and Josiah Snelling, noting that he had previously piloted on the even faster-moving Missouri River during high waters.
But the Saint Paul Fire Department thought the announcement was premature, provoking a brief standoff. The department later backed down after Bowell safely ferried media and elected officals aboard a special charter trip on the swollen river, while he entertained them with historic tales of the Mississippi and a few verbal barbs aimed at land-lubbering bureaucrats.
It must be remembered that Bowell's tiny office, which has a sign stating "Captain Bligh's Quarters" affixed to it, has been floating on a Mississsippi River barge for the past quarter century. Bowell likes to point out his previous piloting experience on the fast-moving Missouri River. So who is more qualified to judge whether the river is safe?
Although Bowell has kind words for former Mayor George Latimer, and he says he's thrilled with current Mayor Norm Coleman and his focus on the river. "Coleman, I think, is really going to do a job for us. I'm very much behind him in all his effort."
In addition to government help on the local level, the riverfront also is finally seeing some tangible benefits from the U.S. Congress' designation of a 72-mile stretch of the river between Hastings and Dayton as the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area.
Like the odd bits of sculpted driftwood that regularly collect in the eddies nearby Harriet Island, the pieces to re-establish St. Paul as a first-class river town --- in the same league with Winona and the others --- are falling into place.
"I think the future is going to be great. . . The Minneapolis-St. Paul area is a wonderful section of the river. When you go on the Padelford trip and you go up two or three miles on the river, you can't believe you're in the middle of a metropolitan area of a couple million people. The buildings are out of sight and it's all wild. We still have the deer swimming across the river and the blue herons. . . You name it, we've got it."