ST. PAUL, Minn. -- The Bible tells of a wedding where Jesus turned water into wine. As an evangelist at Bible Way Baptist Church, Phyllis Gilliam is a believer in divine transformations - like the one that's taken place just up the street.
"No adult book stores or strip clubs or nothing," she proudly observes at the intersection of University Avenue and Dale Street.
Gilliam isn't the only one who remembers when 'church' was the furthest thing from anyone's mind at the busy intersection.
Pornography merchants began arriving in the 1970s. Before long they filled buildings on three corners with adult bookstores, the Belmont strip club and the Flick and the Faust adult theaters.
"It was just like a cancer," says Nathaniel Khaliq, a community activist who went on to become president of the St. Paul Chapter of the NAACP. The adult-themed businesses were soon attracting drug dealers and prostitutes, "then moved into the residential areas," according to Khaliq. "It demoralized the neighborhood. Many of our young ladies were being accosted, solicited, insulted."
A few doors down at Western Bank, then bank president Bill Sands remembers the johns lining up for prostitutes and police decoys. "Cars were three deep. There would be one car parked, there would be another car parked, and then there would be another car slowing down."
Sands says the intersection developed a reputation even "among people who never, ever were here," driving legitimate businesses away.
And into it all moved a single divorced mother of 12, "This beautiful, wonderful lady," smiles Gilliam as she reaches for a black and white photo of Sara Hunter, her mother.
Hunter had moved her family from Kansas City to escape a troubled neighborhood. She found respite for a time in a big house on St. Anthony Avenue, separated by several blocks from University and Dale. "It seemed so peaceful and a loving place to be," said Gilliam about the family's early impressions of St. Paul.
But the troubled corner was about to pay the new arrivals a visit.
Gilliam still remembers the morning. She and her brothers and sisters awoke to crime scene tape and a body in a car. It was a john. He'd been stabbed. His car sat a few feet from their front door.
"That changed everything," said Gilliam. Soon her mother was among the first people in the neighborhood to begin picketing in front of the adult businesses - with particular attention paid to the infamous Faust Theater. The protests would go on for years.
"I was very slow to understand what the problem was," admits George Latimer, at the time St. Paul's mayor. Latimer believed the businesses had a right to exist under the protections of the first amendment. No one was forced to go inside, afterall.
But he remembers being swayed by an elderly woman at a community meeting who pointed out that residents on Summit Avenue "'don't have to walk by that kind of activity every day, but I do.' That really got me," says Latimer.
In 1989 the City of St. Paul purchased the Faust Theater for $1.8 million, with the understanding the owner would not relocate in the city. Latimer was part of a ceremonial funeral, complete with a pine box, to bury the ghost of pornography.
Sara Hunter didn't live to see the demolition of the Faust or the closings of the Flick, the Belmont and all the book stores. She passed away of Leukemia in 1987 at the age of 50.
Hunter also missed the opportunity to celebrate the developments that took their places. At the corner where the Faust once stood, children now check out books and navigate computers at the Rondo Community Outreach Library.
Just across the intersection at the former site of the Belmont stands the brand new Frogtown Square, a collection of shops beneath a stately-designed senior housing complex.
Khaliq says it's a tribute to neighbors like Hunter who picketed the adult businesses at the intersection. "A lot of those folks that were involved have gone on to the Promised Land and I know they're looking down on us and smiling."
Count among them Sara Hunter - the mother of the owner of the neighborhood's newest boutique: Sunday's Best. In a sweet bit of irony, Phyllis Gilliam now sells church clothes on the same corner where her mother protested the merchants of pornography.
"I think it's predestined, preordained for me to be here," says Gilliam.
In the story told in the Bible, turning water into wine took but a moment. But at the intersection of University and Dale, Phyllis Gilliam has been tracking her miracle for 35 years.
(Copyright 2011 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)