Page 2 • Albert Lea Tribune • Sunday, February 24, 2013 • PROGRESS 2013
89-year-old
5 to Albert Lea tours 5 changes
through the years By Tim Engstrom Andy Dyrdal has witnessed the changes in Albert Lea through the years. He turns 90 in April. He was born south of Lerdal and moved to the city at age 14. He recalls those cherished pre-World War II days when the downtown had three hotels, three ice cream shops and a dance hall called The Casino. There have been many changes since then, and Dyrdal took me to five places he wished to share with Tribune readers.
City Beach
Dyrdal lived in a house overlooking City Beach for 40 years. The house, 715 North Shore Drive, now is owned by Tom Dyrdal, one of his two sons. Andrew Dyrdal, a widower, resides at Village Cooperate and enjoys boasting about how good it is there,
Tim Engstrom
Andy Dyrdal stands in front of the home near City Beach that he resided in for 40 years. He now lives at Village Cooperative, 2201 Stevens St.
calling it Lazy Man’s Living. The elder Dyrdal, whose career was as a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service, bought the house in 1967, he said, after living for 13 years in a house on Fourth Street. Day in and day out, he and his family saw activities at the beach.
The biggest change is the tennis courts are now a skate park. He said he and other players would stop between games and take a quick swim to cool off, then resume play. Wind off the lake made games unpredictable some days. People parked on what now is beach because houses
Dyrdal stands at the corner of College Street and Broadway in front of the Broadway Theater. He said lines for blockbuster movies would reach down College Street toward what is now the Aragon Bar, which in the 1940s was an auto repair garage.
existed where the current parking lot exists. In the 1940s, people at City Beach would look across Fountain Lake and see what’s going on at The Casino, a dance hall built on wooden piles keeping it above the water. It had boat rentals, too. People swam at Shore-
College Street at Broadway He recalls lines of people outside the Broadway Theater and snaking down the College Street side the building, on the northwest corner. People tended to call the movies “shows” back in those days. (People nowadays relate “shows” to television these days.) Shows were at 7 and 9 p.m. and Sunday nights were big. Thursday nights were bank nights, when the theater staff drew names to give away cash. The building, 340 S. Broadway, still exists. Across the street, on the northeast corner, was the five-story Hotel Albert, torn down in the mid-1970s to make room for the new location of Freeborn National Bank. The location is now US Bank. Dyrdal was a bellhop at the Hotel Albert in the summer of 1941. He said the place touted itself as the largest hotel in the country for the size of city in which it was located. Yet in 1941 it managed to be filled three nights a week. Dyrdal left to go work for Lockheed Martin in California. On the southwest corner was the
land Beach, too, which was near the Shoreland Heights residential development. Back then, only a few of the older homes existed. And people swam at College Dock, which was down the hill along Abbott Street, near where Lakeview Elementary School exists today.
Albert Lea Tribune. Carriers went downstairs from the outside to get their papers. Routes were so much in demand that people had to inherit them, and Dyrdal substituted for a friend, usually on Fridays, which took longer because it was the collection day. One building down from the Trib was Western Union. Its workers would take bicycles to deliver messages. College Street also had Stieler’s Cafe and Burnsmoor Dairy, and across Washington Avenue was the Methodist Church, where an apartment building now exists. Of course, on the southeast corner then as now was the Freeborn County Courthouse, which back then had a bell tower with a clock and stood without the eastern addition, built in 2003 and 2004. The jail existed where the parking lot is now. America hadn’t entered World War II; obviously, where the Freeborn County Veterans Memorial is today was just courthouse lawn. A brick in the memorial has Dyrdal’s name. He served in the Air Force during World War II.
Paying top dollar for war relics, especially German Lugers, Walther, P38’s, PPKs, PP Polish Radoms, US Arm, 45 Pistols and uniforms of all nations, etc. Buying old US: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, halfs, paper money and some foreign and Canadian coins
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18322 US Highway 69, Albert Lea, MN • (507) 377-0201
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