Beneath the Façade of Minneapolis
" The Vendome Hotel, Minneapolis, MN"
On a mild December day in 1959, a group of Minneapolis officials gathered beneath the ornamented façade of the Hotel Vedome, at the edge of the city's skid row. They were to celebrate hotel's destruction - and to inaugurate a complete remaking of the city's downtown. The Vendome had been landmark enough in 1917 to merit its own page in the Golden Jubilee fifth anniversary history of the city, where it was hailed as "the center of commercial activities of Minneapolis." This illustrious past had been all but forgotten by the late 1950s, however. The Vendome's architectural flourishes - its richly decorated, faux French façade; its columns and carved filigree; its stone crown with the likeness of Lady Liberty carved into it - offended postwar tastes. The Vendome, shabby and unfashionable, had become a worn-out reminder of a past not worth preserving, a relic of the city's olden days.
During the next four years, the rest of skid row followed the Vendome into oblivion. Known commonly as the Gateway district, or Lower Loop, this neighborhood comprised nearly twenty-five blocks centering on the intersection of Hennepin, Washington, and Nicollet Avenues. Like Vendome, the entire district had fallen on hard times. It was a neighborhood of bars, flophouses, pawnshops, and second-hand stores; charity missions and social service agencies; small-time wholesalers and manufacturers; and office buildings that had aged past their prime.
The old men who lived on skid row had served an important role in the region's industrial history. They accounted for the majority of the city's public drunken reality back then. Like the buildings of skid row, they were relics. But by the 1950s, the city planning office commissioned the "Beautiful Entrance to a Beautiful City", in which the slum was ordered to be cleared at the Gateway area. Nevertheless, like the city planning department's earlier plan, the Housing and Redevelopment Authority's included a public component. The relocation committee proposed a special housing project north of Hennepin that would re-create the single-occupancy rooms the men had lived in on skid row. It ws designed to be a safer, cleaner version of skid row, without bars and missions. By April 1961, nearly hlf of the cage hotels and flophouses had been obliterated, accompanied bu an exodus from the Gateway. Some fifteen hundred men collected their scant belongings and left skid row during the first year of demolition. Most of them found housing in nearby downtown neighborhood. By 1962, with 80 percent of the Gateway buildings demolished, the population had shrunk to almost nothing.
While material housing conditions improved for those displaced by the land clearance, relocation officials found that in many cases, the men missed their old life. One man, who had lived in a cage hotel for ten years, complained that although he enjoyed the windows and closets of his new apartment, he couldn't find roast park and applesauce like he'd had on skid row. Indeed, skid row had grown and developed quite specifically to fulfill the needs of this culture. But the workingmen, pensioners, drunkards, and thieves of skid row - their lifestyles and livelihood were inextricably tied to skid row.
"We disturbed their way of life. We were destroying whatever culture existed there: the ability of people to make do."
"There's a part of me that's very sympathetic to drinking too much and pissing on walls"
"Skid row residents look on as their homes and haunts gradually disappear before the wrecking crew."