I used to live in West St. Paul, which, as everyone knows, is due south of St. Paul. North St. Paul is mostly NE of St. Paul. And of course Harriet Island isn't an island. "Midway" is actually geographically accurate. You know you're a townie when you can find Kaposia at 2AM with six beers in your gut.
On the other hand I was well into adulthood before I drove to the int'l airport from St. Paul and discovered that it was right next to Ft Snelling. I thought they were about 20 miles apart.

Wasn't St. Paul designed by drunk Irishmen? Governor Ventura said it, so it must be true.

I grew up in New Hope. At the time I graduated from high school I had been to St. Louis more times than St. Paul. My business partner grew up in St. Paul 6 blocks from the Lake St bridge and didn't go to Mpls until sometime in Jr. High.
Having now lived in both I consider myself "bi-riverbank"... just in time to move to Northfield.
The average Mpls resident knowing his way around St. Paul is the definitionn of cats and dogs living together.

I'm fairly certain that St. Paul was not built by drunken Irishmen, but rather madmen who planned to create a city based on non-Euclidean geometries that would summon Cthulhu from the Mississippi River...

Sadly, that plan never came to fruition because the diabolical dark priest got caught in a bunch of Iowans backing up 35E for miles and miles while trying to all shove down the Kellogg exit and missed the conjunction of the right stars...

I grew up in south Mpls and St. Paul was a bit of a mystery to me until I went to college and got a job as a delivery driver. I don't remember the details exactly but on the first delivery to St. Paul I learned that the "100" block rules that were so rigid in Mpls did not apply there. Ditto for streets and avenues. I figured it out pretty quickly after a few WTFs and looks at the Hudson's book, but I still remember that initial profound incomprehension. I'm sure the look on my face was priceless.

Don't worry, Mitch, there still might be a decent side-business, because there are still those of us who are 90% clueless about finding things in St. Paul. I can get to the Fitzgerald theater (sort of), the Xcel Center (and therefore the Science Museum), Northern Brewer (on Grand) and, well, nowhere else east of Midway without heavy map usage.

The only thing more clueless than someone from Minneapolis in St. Paul is someone from St. Paul just about anywhere else. I used to work with a guy from St. Paul who had never been west of HWY 100 in his entire life. He was in his early twenties. I also have some relatives from St. Paul who got lost in Ames, IA because they could not find 35E to take them home. True story.

There was a writeup about how the St. Paul city grid came to be following Governor Greedy's "drunken Irishmen" comment on Letterman.

Its because of free enterprise, you had all these land developers laying streets out any way they wanted to.

Speaking of priceless faces; I wish I'd had a camera the first time I took a friend of mine - a fellow NoDak who had lived for almost a year in Minneapolis without spending much time in StPaul - downtown.

I still can see the look of dazed, perplexed confusion as he stood, Minneapolis preconceptions dissolving before his eyes, at the corner of Seventh Street and Fifth Street.

I can get from steaks at Mancini's to a seat in the Xcel to a barstool at McGovern's. Beyond that, I always end up going the wrong way down a dead-end one-way.

I know how to get around downtown St. Paul, but I can't even begin to tell someone else how to do it. It may be because I grew up in Indiana, where South Bend is in the north and Westport is in the East. Oh, and French Lick isn't what you' expect, either.

We don't have too much trouble in St Paul (and we're from the far northern sticks), but somehow trying to get to the Keys on Roberts (is that where it is?) is far more difficult than it should be...also, trying to manuever onto Grand or Summit from around the Cathedral...we're always doing something goofy there...or maybe it isn't us. Anyway, the only way to go is by landmarks...forget street names!

for the first time in my life, i live in a city with nicely alphabetized streets. and every-single-time i leave the house, i mix up Louisiana Avenue and Minnetonka Blvd. ::sigh::

i miss St. Paul.