usefulnoise asked: I would definitely buy your book! Since that's not (yet) possible, though, are there any existing histories of postwar Mpls/St.Paul that you'd recommend?
Oh, of course! Buckle up, you nerds, because I am going into this with both hands.
As far as I know, there’s not a huge number of postwar local histories out there, but there are some good ones. Most of my favorites books about Minneapolis and the surrounding environs are about the pre-war era or before — Charles Rumford Walker’s American City, from 1937, and both of Mary Lethert Wingerd’s two books, Claiming the City, about the formation of St. Paul’s (very distinct) civic identity in the 19th Century, and North Country, which covers the history of Minnesota prior to 1862.
One popular overview is Iric Nathanson’s recent Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City. My socialist pal Alex, an urban planning enthusiast, describes it thusly:
In a city that has seen no wars, little crime, not a coup, revolt, bombing, or scandal, what do you write about in a book of its history? The answer, to my delight, is: nerd stuff! Iric Nathanson starts off with a raging chapter on the municipal charter and rips through 150 pages of urban renewal, housing policy, departmental consolidation, and transportation policy! Ka-blamo!
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as Alex did (and let it never be said I am not a great supporter of all kinds of “nerd stuff”). Nathanson is a good writer, but he’s not as lively as I’d have hoped. His book does cover the basics, but it doesn’t impart a clear sense any kind of a sense of what it was actually like to live in Minneapolis. Which is not the author’s fault, necessarily; that may not have been his intention. It’s what you might call a “top down” history, as opposed to a “bottom up” history. It’s heavy on facts, but doesn’t convey much information about the people behind the facts.
Dave Kenney’s Twin Cities Album: A Visual History is another good overview. As the title suggests, it’s primarily historic photographs. I bought it when I moved here, actually, and used it as a guidebook for learning the basics of the city’s infrastructure and history. It’s a good start.
Down & Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis’s Skid Row is a great account of one of the more colorful urban planning fiascos in the city’s history, the 1960 demolition of the Gateway District, a downtown neighborhood of bars and flophouses where bums, transients and underemployed lumberjacks drank themselves into oblivion for most of the 20th Century. It’s made up mostly of photographs by one Edwin Hirschoff, a photographer who realized the historic import of the “urban renewal” project the city was undertaking and got it all on film before and during the area’s demolition. It’s a pretty painful read.
I also like Brad Zellar’s Suburban World a lot, though it’s about Bloomington and not Minneapolis proper. It’s a collection of work by amateur photographer Irwin Norling from the 1950s and ’60s, and does impart a sense for the day-to-day life of some of the sorts of people that were moving out of the city proper into the suburbs. The essays by Zellar and Alec Soth are great, too. On that note, Soth’s recent Walker Arts Center monograph, Alec Soth’s America, has some relevant portions about life in contemporary Minneapolis.
Terry Castle’s The Professor is a nonfiction book with a long account of the author’s affair with an older professor while attending the University of Minnesota and working in a series of radical lesbian co-ops in the 1970s. Better than almost any nonfiction I’ve read about that time, it paints a really vivid portrait of life in academic and radical circles in the city during that period. Another book that does a great job painting a portrait of neighborhood life in the 1970s is the aforementioned Replacements oral history by Jim Walsh, All Over But the Shouting. It’s funny and odd to think Castle’s militant university coterie and Walsh’s rock-crazed Catholic teens are living a half-mile apart in the same tree-lined southside neighborhoods, but there they are.
Predating this era a little bit, Cyn Collins’ West Bank Boogie is an entertaining look at the slackers, musicians, hippies, poets, post-beatniks and proto-burnouts that hung around the neighborhoods near the University in the ’60s, and gives a good sense for how a Swedish and Norwegian working class neighborhood became the epicenter of music and art in Minneapolis for much of the ’60s and ’70s. There’s even a good foreword by old Garrison K. himself, where he drops the prairie schtick for a few sentences and writes almost convincingly about what it was like to be a youth culture-type person living there.
Another perennial favorite of mine is future Senator Amy Klobuchar’s 1986 Uncovering the Dome, which she wrote for her Masters thesis at Yale. It’s engaging, well-written look into the hornet’s nest of civic planning that brought us the Metrodome. The neatest trick is manages, in fact, is after reading, you actually see why city planners really, earnestly thought the idea of a domed downtown stadium seemed like an if-not-brilliant, than at least palatable solution to a whole host of problems. The book goes beyond that, though — it’s a perfect summation of they way this city was run for decades. Committees, task forces, blue-ribbon panels, all convened in the interest of serving the elusive chimera that is “the public good.”
My personal favorite though, is one of the most perfect documents of what it was like to be a smart-ass artist in Minneapolis in the midst of the squarer half of the 1960s: The Potboiler Quiz: How to Draw Stuff, Sex, Filth, Expose, Orgies, Games, or, How I Made $1,786.00 in the Fine Arts in Only 16 Years!, by Robert Kilbride, published in 1970. Ostensibly it’s a book of the dazzling, difficult word games he created to fill the newsletter he published monthly for his gallery (I have mentioned The Potboiler and the Kilbride-Bradley Gallery here before, and will continue to do so, because the subtitle of South 12th is Things Andy Sturdevant Is Obsessed With This Month And Won’t Shut His God-Damned Mouth About No Matter How Many Terrible Cocktails You Pour Into It). But it’s also full of little scribblings, short stories and funny, grumpy asides. He introduces one game this way: “All my clever friends were out of town, so the good drawings are by me and the crude, dumb ones are by my wife’s used car salesman family who all have six fingers on each hand.” I’m not sure how widely available The Potboiler Quiz is; I bought a used copy for a few bucks on Amazon this year, and there’s a few copies available for under ten dollars. But if you like really difficult word games and wonder what it was like to be an arty wiseguy in what Kilbride half-sarcastically, half-lovingly called “the corn belt” in the midst of Minneapolis’ rapid postwar decline years, this is a good resource.
This is just an overview. There are libraries full of books waiting to be written about the specific neighborhood experiences of people living on the Northside, in Northeast, in the communities within the southside, in the exploding first-ring suburbs, and of course the entirety of St. Paul and all of its many neighborhoods. Reading the books listed here, though, you start to get a loose sense for some of the people that shared the city of Minneapolis in the years between World War II and Purple Rain — the Catholic kids, the bureaucrats, the Skid Row inhabitants, the hippies, the students, the radicals, the artists.
