Minnesota Up-Towns Basketball Club
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota
Home Court: Mechanics Arts Gymnasium
Sponsor: Up-Town Sanitary Shop
Nickname: “Minnesota Up-Towns”
Manager: John Davis
Formed: 1922
During the early 1920s, one of the most active and successful African American basketball teams in Minnesota competed under the sponsorship of the Up-Town Sanitary Shop of West St. Paul, a Black-owned and operated company located at 339 Wabasha Street in downtown St. Paul. With its slogan, “The Home Of Service,” the shop did cleaning, repairing and pressing of suits, shoes, and hats as well as shoe shining, shoe repairing, and dry-cleaning.
Its proprietor, an African American businessman and community leader named Owen Howell, had opened the business in 1901 and it was described as “modern,” “efficient,” and “well equipped.”
Known as the “Minnesota Up-Towns,” the team organized in 1922 and were soon described as “the strongest colored quintet in the Northwest.”
The Up-Town lineup had Otis Woodard, “a speed artist,” at forward. Harry Davis, the team’s captain, also played forward and was praised for having “an eye for finding the hoop.” The squad’s defense was built around Clifford Bush, a “husky boy from Montana,” along with Lonzo Few, also a guard. Walter Chestnutt was “a double threat, being a guard with a nice shooting eye.” The pivot position was handled by John White, described as “another Montana star.” Joe Carr also played at center, and John Davis served as the team’s manager.
The team practiced and played its home games at Mechanics Arts Gymnasium in St. Paul.
A summary published in April 1922 under the headline “Uptown Basketeers Complete Good Season” reported that the Up-Towns had played fifteen games and “lost only four” while competing against “some of the strongest quintets in the Twin Cities.” They had made “a very good showing in the state amateur contest for the championship” as “the only colored team entered” and were regarded as “a dark horse.”
Meanwhile, the Up-Town Sanitary Shop also sponsored a team in local bowling league and later, a baseball team, both of the same name.
The thriving enterprise was located prominently at 339 Wabasha Street, at the corner of Fifth Street, in the same intersection as the former site of the U.S. Custom House and City Hall, squarely within St. Paul’s civic and commercial center. It served and was also a part of the adjacent historic Rondo neighborhood, an area that by the 1950s was home to approximately 85 percent of the city’s African American population and was a major center of Black business, culture, and community life.
The Up Town Sanitary Shop charged $1.75 to $2.25 to dry clean a suit or dress, an amount that could equal 12 to 22 percent of a typical weekly wage of about $10 to $14 in the early 1920s and translates to roughly $32 to $43 in today’s dollars, indicating a clientele that included relatively affluent households and reflecting the economic depth of the surrounding Black community that made team sponsorship possible.
It is especially fitting that dry cleaning itself originated with Thomas L. Jennings, a New Yorker who in 1821 became the first African American to receive a U.S. patent, underscoring a long tradition of Black innovation and enterprise embodied by the Minnesota Up-Towns and their sponsor.
Much of the neighborhood was destroyed and more than 600 African American families were displaced by the construction of Interstate 94. Today, the area boasts a vibrant cultural scene that includes nearby shops, restaurants, and cafes such as the Afro Deli & Grill, the Pimento Jamaican Kitchen, and Hepcat Coffee. A commemorative annual Rondo Days event celebrates the history of the community.
Flourishing for decades, Up-Town Sanitary functioned as a community hub for game notices, practice announcements, ticket sales, and information exchange as an inspiring symbol of Black business leadership and civic pride.
It’s founder and proprietor, Owen Howell, was president of the St. Paul chapter of the National Negro Business League, a founding partner in the Northwest Bulletin and a founder of the Twin City Herald, both local African American newspapers. The Up-Town Sanitary Shop closed in 1950, and Howell passed away in 1955.
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