![Wrapping up the topic of foreign language Wikipedia accounts of our city, the French Wikipedia has this very nice Minneapolis population chart; much nicer than the all-text table that appears in the English-language entry. It’s better because it better tells the mysterious and troubling history of Minneapolis’ midcentury decline. Look at that population drop off in the 1950s! It’s red because it’s very alarming.
The Minneapolis of the ’60s and ’70s, when it was hemorrhaging (mostly white) people into the suburbs, was a kind of terrible place to live, from what I can gather. And I say this as someone who is on the whole suspiciously uncritical of that period. Maybe not “terrible,” but kind of shitty, at least. Maybe most American cities were sort of a shitty place to live in the 1960s and ’70s.
But Minneapolis seems particularly troubled. Look at the events of those two decades: Forty percent of downtown leveled to build parking lots. The street car system destroyed almost overnight, replaced with buses bought and paid for by the automotive industry. Law-and-order autocrats like Charlie Stenvig running the local government. South Minneapolis shredded to ribbons putting the interstates in. I have guide books to the city from this time, and you should see the restaurants. Page after page of the worst-sounding food you’ve ever heard of. “Like so many other restaurants,” notes my 1970 edition of Jean and John Ervin’s The Twin Cities Explored, “[Name of still-extant downtown restaurant redacted] will never surprise you… From the number of meals we have eaten here over a decade, we can say the service is usually reliable, usually courteous, and the food generally acceptable.” And that’s one of the raves! (Another rave: “an exceptionally clean and well-run restaurant, and making no claim to anything else.”)
Anyway, I’ve read a fair amount of firsthand accounts from that era, and there is a uniform sense of real grimness. The dying Minneapolis spoken about in those accounts and nicely illustrated by the French chart above seems like kind of a repressive, high modernist hellhole of endless parking lots, bland food, and Lutheran paternalism.
Maybe if you’re reading this and lived here during those times, you experienced it differently. I just read Jim Walsh’s entertaining oral history of the Replacements, All Over But the Shouting, and his account of the rollicking Catholic enclaves of South Minneapolis in the ’70s made it sound like a very exciting, energetic place to be a kid.
I know that artists did OK. The Kilbride-Bradley Gallery was epicenter of a wildly smart, hardworking group of artists. Twin Citian magazine wouldn’t ever be mistaken for Clay Felker-era New York, but reading back issues of it paints a portrait of an enjoyable, easygoing quasi-cosmopolitan frontier town. And this is the Minneapolis of Mary Tyler Moore, I guess. Maybe the decay and repression made for an unusually vibrant decade to follow. This was also the Minneapolis that gestated the Suicide Commandos, Rifle Sport Gallery, No Name, the Replacements, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, Prince, Scott Seekins and other things people still hold up as paragons of local excellence.
But you look at that drop-off, illustrated so well above, and you think, Shit, there used to be 500,000 people here. There were more people living here in 1920 than right now, and they all took streetcars everywhere. What the hell happened?
I don’t have a good answer for you. I asked my friend Brad Zellar once what he thought. “I think the people that made the decisions during that time are so ashamed of what they did to this city,” he told me, “that they just disappeared.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmujoeO6JG1qzr7dwo1_1280.png)
Wrapping up the topic of foreign language Wikipedia accounts of our city, the French Wikipedia has this very nice Minneapolis population chart; much nicer than the all-text table that appears in the English-language entry. It’s better because it better tells the mysterious and troubling history of Minneapolis’ midcentury decline. Look at that population drop off in the 1950s! It’s red because it’s very alarming.
The Minneapolis of the ’60s and ’70s, when it was hemorrhaging (mostly white) people into the suburbs, was a kind of terrible place to live, from what I can gather. And I say this as someone who is on the whole suspiciously uncritical of that period. Maybe not “terrible,” but kind of shitty, at least. Maybe most American cities were sort of a shitty place to live in the 1960s and ’70s.
But Minneapolis seems particularly troubled. Look at the events of those two decades: Forty percent of downtown leveled to build parking lots. The street car system destroyed almost overnight, replaced with buses bought and paid for by the automotive industry. Law-and-order autocrats like Charlie Stenvig running the local government. South Minneapolis shredded to ribbons putting the interstates in. I have guide books to the city from this time, and you should see the restaurants. Page after page of the worst-sounding food you’ve ever heard of. “Like so many other restaurants,” notes my 1970 edition of Jean and John Ervin’s The Twin Cities Explored, “[Name of still-extant downtown restaurant redacted] will never surprise you… From the number of meals we have eaten here over a decade, we can say the service is usually reliable, usually courteous, and the food generally acceptable.” And that’s one of the raves! (Another rave: “an exceptionally clean and well-run restaurant, and making no claim to anything else.”)
Anyway, I’ve read a fair amount of firsthand accounts from that era, and there is a uniform sense of real grimness. The dying Minneapolis spoken about in those accounts and nicely illustrated by the French chart above seems like kind of a repressive, high modernist hellhole of endless parking lots, bland food, and Lutheran paternalism.
Maybe if you’re reading this and lived here during those times, you experienced it differently. I just read Jim Walsh’s entertaining oral history of the Replacements, All Over But the Shouting, and his account of the rollicking Catholic enclaves of South Minneapolis in the ’70s made it sound like a very exciting, energetic place to be a kid.
I know that artists did OK. The Kilbride-Bradley Gallery was epicenter of a wildly smart, hardworking group of artists. Twin Citian magazine wouldn’t ever be mistaken for Clay Felker-era New York, but reading back issues of it paints a portrait of an enjoyable, easygoing quasi-cosmopolitan frontier town. And this is the Minneapolis of Mary Tyler Moore, I guess. Maybe the decay and repression made for an unusually vibrant decade to follow. This was also the Minneapolis that gestated the Suicide Commandos, Rifle Sport Gallery, No Name, the Replacements, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, Prince, Scott Seekins and other things people still hold up as paragons of local excellence.
But you look at that drop-off, illustrated so well above, and you think, Shit, there used to be 500,000 people here. There were more people living here in 1920 than right now, and they all took streetcars everywhere. What the hell happened?
I don’t have a good answer for you. I asked my friend Brad Zellar once what he thought. “I think the people that made the decisions during that time are so ashamed of what they did to this city,” he told me, “that they just disappeared.”
