Down And Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis’s Skid Row

by Edwin C. Hirschoff, Joseph Hart (Contributor)

Minneapolis's skid row, known as the Gateway district, was a lively area consisting of dozens of bars, flophouses, pawnshops, burlesque houses, charity missions, and office buildings that had aged past their prime. Encompassing some twenty-five blocks centering on the intersection of Hennepin, Washington, and Nicollet Avenues, the neighborhood was demolished between 1959 and 1963 as part of the first federally funded urban renewal project in America. Gathered here for the first time, Edwin C. Hirschoff's stark and moving images of the Gateway district's final days -- its streets, buildings, and parks, the rubble, smoke, and heavy equipment of its destruction -- eloquently capture its demise. Down and Out provides a unique historical perspective and the most extensive photographic record available of the Gateway demolition project.Joseph Hart's engaging and comprehensive essay complements Hirschoff's photographs by detailing the district's social and economic evolution and the political decision making that led to its destruction. Hart presents a popular history of Minneapolis's skid row and the people who lived there, migrant workers who learned that changes in the local economy could quickly degrade their status from valued laborer to societal menace (vagrant, tramp, or bum). By capturing the texture of life on skid row, Hart reveals the lost American culture of a bygone community.

Genres: Nonfiction, American History

116 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2002

Reviews

[Icknay Abbecray · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quick but enjoyable read. The first half is mostly a background on the neighborhood and the timeline leading up to its destruction, and the latter portion is photographs taken during the neighborhoods teardown. It addresses a lot of the residents as sort of a dying breed: single men who worked temporary jobs on the railroad or as lumberjacks who spent months off of work living in flophouses and making the most of their lack of responsibility, or being a social burden depending on who you asked.

Overall, I dont get the impression that removing this section of town did anything to address the issue of a transient lifestyle. If anything, it just dispersed the population and removed resources like low-rent hotels.

[Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hirschoff's documentation of colossal error that was the colossal destruction of the Gateway is vital, although it also has the sense of having come too late, after the men who gave life to the district had mostly been cleared. This is confirmed by the equally vital history by Joseph Hart, who deserves much respect for pulling no punches despite using interviews by several of the parties to blame. Anyone who's been downtown knows that it was a mistake to take down the Metropolitan building, since HRA director Jorvig's claim that it was necessary to attract development is proven false by the obvious lack of development in the district, still feeling barren 60 years later. Hart's contribution comes from sentences like this, after explaining how the City Council forced the HRA to remove the public housing element from the Gateway plan: "It is safe to say that the chief contribution and enduring legacy of the council and mayor when it comes to Gateway redevelopment was to leave its most vulnerable citizens without any protection." If anyone doubts the moral failure of postwar America, please give them this book.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This explains the strange topography of the gateway district. Such hopes of building utopias on the ashes of "the blight".