Tour de Force

The $69.99 per person tour fee includes Mill City Museum admission, a discount at the Pracna on Main restaurant, and downloadable pictures on the company Web site. The firm will add a St. Paul tour this summer.

Neuenschwander says convention visitors can join regularly scheduled tours, which run from April to November. He can also arrange private tours, as well as indoor rides during the colder months. He can accommodate about 30 to 35 people per tour.

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St. Paul Gangster Tour

The quiet Catholic city of St. Paul played host to a rogues’ gallery of criminals during the 1920s and 1930s, says Molly Skjei, tour manager for St. Paul’s Down in History Tours. The city’s police even left the gangsters alone, as long as they paid bribes—“we call it a donation to the police fund,” Skjei says—and didn’t commit crimes inside city limits.

It was a cushy deal, and it attracted the likes of Ma Barker and her infamous sons, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Edna “the Kissing Bandit” Murray, Babyface Nelson, John Dillinger (along with his sidekick Homer van Meter and girlfriend Evelyn “Billie” Frechette), and Dapper Danny Hogan, owner of the Green Lantern Saloon, which stood at Wabasha and Exchange in downtown St. Paul.

 Costumed guides lead the two-hour tours, impersonating individual gangsters and showing visitors scenes from the lives of these characters and their associates. “So many of the places are still standing—it really gives people a sense of immediacy,” Skjei says. “And St. Paul is so famous for its charm and small-town attitude, so I think people are really surprised to hear that this happened here.”

Participants might see the Barker-Karpis gang’s West St. Paul hideout, or the South St. Paul post office, which the gang robbed. The Lincoln Court apartments, where John Dillinger had a shootout with police, is part of the tour, as is Swede Hollow Park, where the Barker-Karpis gang kidnapped William Hamm, a Minnesota brewer and millionaire. The tour also visits the spot just off Summit Avenue where the same criminals kidnapped banker Edward Bremer, Jr.