Max "Bunny" Sparber

NOWADAYS, MINNEAPOLIS is a city that looks like it was designed by IKEA, as Outside Magazine notoriously declared in August of 2007. But it wasn't always that way; the city didn't always consist of clear blue glass and modern Scandinavian furniture. No, in fact, downtown Minneapolis, and particularly the now-trendy North Loop, was a typically filthy and crowded skid row right up until the late 1950s. At that time, Minneapolis decided to remake itself, from a lumber and mill town into a city of banking, insurance, and industry, and they began by tearing down 40 percent of the downtown area. That's right: 40 percent. There is little left of pre-1950s Minneapolis if you go downtown. The Foshay Tower. Several blocks of Victorian brownstones in Elliot Park. A dozen or so warehouses, most of which have been gutted and turned into office buildings or condos.

You won't find any traces of the thriving skid row that was once there. Well, there is a flagpole, situated at the corner of Hennepin and First St., whose base was once the epicenter of a community of hardscrabble alcoholics. But that's about it. Gone are the chicken wire and plywood "cage hotels," which housed 3,500 men. Gone are the bottle gangs, who pooled their meager income to buy cheap, sweet wine, and then left their empty bottles smashed in the street, where it piled up, at points deep enough to sink down to your ankles into, if you weren't careful. Gone are the trucks that once pulled up, looking for day laborers, who would pile onto the flatbeds and ride to backbreaking jobs stripping timber or laying roads. Gone are the missions that traded soup for salvation, or tried to. Instead, we have a city of mostly empty condo projects, massive and ultramodern libraries that are closed most of the time, and our very own Hooters.

The Skid Row might be gone, but it is not entirely forgotten, thanks to the efforts of an amateur photographer named Edwin C. Hirschoff, who worked in downtown Minneapolis and often took his free time to wander the skid row and snap pictures of it, even as it was being torn down, collected in a 2002 book called Down and Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis's Skid Row. In sobering black and white, Hirschoff caught the public life of a sea of desperate humanity breaking on the rocks of hard times. These were an aging and increasingly unskilled labor pool, men whose resume showed years working on jobs that no loner existed, phased out of existence by a march of progress. These were men who were raised in a hard-drinking world, and whose drinking had grown chronic, rendering them thick of speech and thought, wrapped in filthy garments, desperate to find enough money for the cheapest wine they could buy. Years of alcoholism and malnutrition had scarred and damaged their livers to the point where a thimbleful of liquor would get them high, and so sharing a bottle was common. There was a queer camaraderie in this march toward cirrhosis; Hirschoff's photos show men enjoying the boon companionship of their fellow men. They sit close to each other and sometimes throw an arm around their neighbor.

It's gone now, the buildings knocked to rubble and rebuilt into glass towers. The men are gone too, and to where? Who knows? They weren't relocated. They were simply kicked out. Perhaps they wandered to another town that still had a skid row. Perhaps some finally found religion and tried to walk the straight and narrow. Many probably simply transformed from chronic alcoholics to chronic homeless, and became the sort of bedraggled figures you still see in the city, unconscious under bridges or panhandling money on street corners. Almost all are certainly dead by now, with nobody left to remember them; they'd be forgotten altogether, but for the fact that a hobbyist happened to have a camera and some time to wander downtown. There they are still, in Hirschoff, seated next to each other under a flagpole at First St. and Hennepin.

More of the Sparber Guide to the Twin Cities!