The Houses · H-07
River House
Ramsey County, Minnesota · Established 1997 · Open to visitors
River House does most of its work in other people's front rooms, and most of that work in winter.
- Region
- North America
- Residential places
- 20
- Residence
- Twenty places, in periods of three to twelve days.
- Recurring form
- The house keeps the Open Table, and a meal is provided at it.
- Fabric
- Step-free throughout, with a lift to the first floor installed in 2019.
This is a register entry. No address, telephone line, or arrangement to visit is published here, and none can be taken up through this website.
The house
The house was established in 1997 in a former parish school, at a point when the city's resettlement agencies were placing more households than they could follow up. The house's original undertaking was modest and has not changed: to be the second visit rather than the first.
Winter mutual aid began in the cold of 2000, when the house started keeping a list of households without a working furnace and a second list of members who owned a truck. Both lists are still kept, on paper, and are reviewed each October.
The oral history collection now runs to two hundred and thirty interviews in eleven languages. Interviewees hold the right to withdraw a recording at any time and eleven have.
The work
- Resettlement support alongside the agencies that carry it: interpretation, school enrolment, tenancy questions, and the long unglamorous middle of a resettlement.
- Winter mutual aid: furnace repair, fuel assistance, snow clearance, and the October review of both lists.
- Oral history recording and transcription, with copies given to the speaker first.
Observance kept here
One place left
At the formal meal, one place is laid and left unoccupied. Residents are told that this is the house's practice and are not told anything further.
The shared forms, here
- The Quiet Twelve
- The silence is kept for the same twelve minutes, but the house keeps a longer silence of its own from midnight to noon on 22 May, which is separate and older.
Kept in use
The kitchen bell
Timekeeping. It is rung for the meal, and at most houses to mark the end of the twelve minutes.
The house, day to day
Enormous. River House cooks for its Open Table, its winter aid round, and its arrivals, and it has never once cooked the right amount. It cooks too much. It has cooked too much for twenty years, has been written to about cooking too much, and cooks too much.
A former parish school of 1924, brick, flat-roofed over the annexe, with a winter that runs from November to April and a heating bill to match. Fully levelled in 2016. The annexe roof is the house's standing problem and everybody knows it.
- Rooms
- The long room, The back kitchen, The front hall, and the usual others (10 in all).
- In the kitchen
- The Thursday pot. Rice, lentils, whatever is in, and enough for forty when twenty-two are expected. The kitchen card gives quantities for thirty and is ignored.
- Outstanding
- Annexe flat roof — Patched four times. Full replacement is costed at more than the fabric budget and is on the ten-year plan for 2029. Heating, main range — Serviced twice yearly, in September and January, because a February failure here is not an inconvenience. Cold-water tank insulation — Complete. Mentioned because it was the year nothing froze.
- Said here
- “Cook for the door.” — Assume more people than have said they are coming.
- Local custom
- Cooking for the door. River House cooks for more people than have said they are coming, has been asked in writing to stop, and has not stopped.
Local participation
- The warm room in winter, opened by two members each evening it is cold.
- Shelving the archive returns, fortnightly.
- Separation
- Notice to the steward. Members in separation remain on the winter list unless they ask not to be.
- Succession
- The warm-room rota is written a season at a time so that no single person is depended on for the whole winter. The work is reassigned; the person is not replaced.
A life in the practice
The term a steward holds, and its limits
The steward
Abdirahman Yusuf
Social worker · steward since 2020
Resettled here as a child in 1994; qualified in 2008. Keeps the October review and argues each year for a larger fuel fund.
Records
Other houses
- North House — Penobscot County, Maine
- Briar House — Albemarle County, Virginia
Elsewhere in the catalogue
Related records
- Recorded account: G. Idris (ORA/1996/01)
The reel is held here; a copy is at North House.
Entry H-07 · reviewed 6 March 2026