It was on a walk across the Washington Avenue Bridge during her first days as a University of Minnesota student that Mary Relindes Ellis (B.A. ’86) saw a mysterious sight: 79 wooden steps leading from Washington Avenue down the face of the bluff to the riverbank. It was the former approach to the long-gone village of Bohemian Flats.

Her curiosity and her imagination were piqued. “I was entranced by that history,” she says. “I just thought how extraordinary that nobody really knows that this incredible village was across from the University underneath the Washington Avenue Bridge.”

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