ST. PETER, MINN. — No man is an island. Neither was this southern Minnesota sports bar, until the floods came tumbling in.
Neisen’s Riverside Sports Bar in this college town now stands surrounded by water from the swollen Minnesota River.
“Riverside was apparently a good name,” said Katie Straub, the bar’s general manager. “Last I saw the place was Monday.”
St. Peter has known flooding before. Locals recall a deluge in the early 1990s that prompted many property owners on the east of the river to sell their land.
Straub said the bar’s previous owner — back when the joint was called Whiskey River — decided to rebuild higher atop the peninsula, hoping to withstand any conceivable flood.
The current floods in south central Minnesota keep stacking up casualties: a 100-year-old dam upstream from Mankato on the Blue Earth River; farm fields; homes and lakeside cottages in Waterville.
Downtown St. Peter, lined with coffee shops, grocery stores and shops offering Scandinavian goods, remains dry. But water has engulfed large portions of land in the community’s Riverside Park. On Friday morning, gray skies and threats of more rain hung over St. Peter. Local resident Patty Nourie had come to take photos, standing behind the orange road barriers that prevent passage across the truss bridge that’s nearly a century old.
“I’ve been down in Louisiana,” Nourie said. “They’re going [to] have all this water in about two weeks.”
