Stories – Page 3

TC Pride: Remembering the Battle of the Bookstores

Published June 27, 2014 by Kevin Ehrman-Solberg Today’s blogger is Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, Historyapolis intern. This weekend, Twin Cities Pride will celebrate the myriad aspects of GLBT life in Minneapolis, which revels in its designation as the “gayest city” in the United States. Pride began as a subdued picnic in Loring Park in 1972 and most…

“Spend Where You Are Welcome”

Published June 26, 2014 by Kevin Ehrman-Solberg It’s Pride Week in Minneapolis, and this offers an appropriate opportunity for a visual tour of the city’s historic gay and lesbian press. The images in the above box-slider were digitized by Historyapolis student researcher Kevin Ehrman-Solberg. All images are from 1980’s advertisements that appeared in Equal Time,…

YesterQueer

Published June 25, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard Just in time for TC Pride, Minneapolis has a cutting edge digital guide to local LGBTQ history. YesterQueer shows local queer history sites on a contemporary map. But its creators see this content as only the beginning. Please download the app. And then share additional memories and images…

“A Practical Guide for the Unpracticed Homosexual”

Published June 23, 2014 by Kevin Ehrman-Solberg It’s Map Monday. Today we have a series of maps created by Historyapolis student researcher Kevin Ehrman-Solberg. On August 21, 1970, Hundred Flowers, a radical newspaper from the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, devoted an entire issue to the burgeoning gay rights movement. “1969 was the year of the New Homosexual,”…

June on the Mississippi River

Published June 20, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard View across the Mississippi River, June 22, 1926. Photo from the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall.

Historyapolis on air

Published June 19, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard On Wednesday, Historyapolis had the chance to visit the kind folks at KFAI for conversation on the Morning Blend show. Check out my interview here.

Baseball and Municipal Graft

Published June 18, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard Take me out to the ballpark. This photo–taken in 1900– shows the Minneapolis Police Department baseball team. It’s charming until you know a little more about when and why it was taken. This portrait was created right before “Doc” Ames won his fourth term as mayor of Minneapolis…

Tell us what you know

Published June 17, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard The Historyapolis Project seeks to connect as well as inform. And one of my favorite things about doing this work has been meeting and communicating with all of you. I’m amazed by all of the wonderful, creative work being done on various aspects of Minneapolis history. In the…

“It would hardly be an open shelf book”

Published June 16, 2014 by JaneAnne Murray Today’s guest blogger is JaneAnne Murray, a solo criminal defense lawyer based in Minneapolis and also Practitioner in Residence at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she teaches classes in criminal law and procedure. Tonight, she is presenting a Bloomsday Celebration in New York City for the…

Bridge over the Mississippi, c. 1920s

Published June 13, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard Construction of bridge over the Mississippi River c. 1920s. Glass plate negative from the public works collection, tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall. Thanks for citizen researchers Eric Christenson, Dan Wilhelmsen and Chad Davis for digitizing these amazing images.

Help us build community

Published June 12, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard The Historyapolis Project seeks to connect as well as inform. And one of my favorite things about doing this work has been meeting and communicating with all of you. I’m amazed by all of the wonderful, creative work being done on various aspects of Minneapolis history. In the…

Homewood: Improved and Restricted

Published June 11, 2014 by Penny Petersen Today’s guest blogger is Penny Petersen, the author of Minneapolis Madams and a researcher for a Minneapolis-based historical consulting firm. The Homewood neighborhood adjacent to Theodore Wirth Park has been called one of the “best-kept secrets” of Minneapolis. Yet more often, the subdivision of impressive homes constructed in…

The “headquarters of a gang of thieves”

Published June 10, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard This photo shows the view from Bromley’s Cave, which was under the Washington Avenue bridge on the Mississippi River. According to Greg Brick, author of Subterranean Twin Cities, this cave had been dug out of the sandstone in the 1880s. Over the years the cave grew; eventually it…

Share your knowledge

Published June 5, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard The Historyapolis Project seeks to connect as well as inform. And one of my favorite things about doing this work has been meeting and communicating with all of you. I’m amazed by all of the wonderful, creative work being done on various aspects of Minneapolis history. In the…

Summer in the City: Hennepin Avenue, 1970

Published June 4, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard and Kevin Ehrman-Solberg In the early summer of 1970, an employee of Minneapolis city government did a photographic survey of Hennepin Avenue downtown. The goal was to document six blocks of the city’s most famous avenue, on the border of the newly demolished skid row, where its…

Minneapolis Underground

Published June 3, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard From aerial view to underground, we provide all perspectives on Minneapolis. The public works department created this glass plate negative to document their construction of the city’s network of sewer tunnels. This shows an undisclosed location underground. Note the train tracks. Trains were used to haul debris out…

Minneapolis from the air, 1938

Published June 2, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard It’s map Monday. Each week we try to find a map to share with you, my dear readers. This week I’m cheating, a little. This image is from the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota but it’s not a map. Instead, what we have here is…

Elliot Park and Cleveland’s Vision for Minneapolis

Published May 27, 2014 by Stewart Van Cleve Today’s blogger is Stewart Van Cleve, a graduate student in the program for Library and Information Science at St. Catherine University. The author of Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota, Stewart discovered the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall when he was researching the…

Memorial Day, 1935: The March Against “War and Fascism”

Published May 26, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard Memorial Day Parade, 1935. The Minneapolis Times reported that “University Coeds, housewives, war veterans, ‘young workers’ and children” were organized by the Hennepin County Youth Congress to march against “war and fascism” on May 31st, 1935. This photo from the uncatalogued morgue newspaper files at the Hennepin County…

The twilight moments of the Gateway district

Published May 23, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard Lobby of the Pioneer Hotel, Gateway district, 1960. This is one of thousands of images created by the city of Minneapolis to document “blight” in this district before it was demolished. The city demolished 40 percent of the downtown in its effort to “renew” the historic heart of…

Civil War in Minneapolis: Battle of Deputies Run

Published May 22, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard “The Battle of Deputies Run” was fought 80 years ago in downtown Minneapolis, in the heart of what is now the fashionable North Loop. One of the bloodiest clashes in the history of the city, this armed skirmish grew out of the protracted Truckers’ Strike, which consumed Minneapolis…

Visions of Grandeur: A Civic Center for Minneapolis

Published May 21, 2014 by Stewart van Cleve Today’s blogger is Stewart Van Cleve, a graduate student in the program for Library and Information Science at St. Catherine University. The author of Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota, Stewart discovered the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall when he was researching the…

The imagined world of Gateway Center, c. 1960

Published May 20, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard The imagined new world of Gateway Center, c. 1960. From the uncatalogued photo collection, Hennepin County Special Collections. Thanks to Rita Yeada for digitizing this image.

A cancer at the heart of the city

Published May 19, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard It’s map Monday. This week we’re going to return to the Gateway District, the heart of the historic city. Questions about its fate–formulated in conversation with collaborator James Eli Shiffer –were responsible for launching the Historyapolis Project three years ago. This map delineates the 25 block section of…

A world under the bridge

Published May 16, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard This photo was take sometime in the early twentieth century to show the foundation of one of the many bridges spanning the Mississippi River. No offense to the bridge historians out there–it’s interesting to me at this point because it shows a few members of the community that…

Liquor returns to Minneapolis

Published May 15, 2014 by Heidi Heller Today’s blogger is Heidi Heller. She is a senior history major at Augsburg College and an intern with the Historyapolis Project. As we continue to hear debate in the current Minnesota Legislature over Sunday liquor sales, it’s easy to forget that just over 80 years ago Minnesotans were…

Harry Hayward: “Pull her tight. I’ll stand pat!”

Published May 13, 2014 by Tamatha Perlman Today’s guest blogger is Tamatha Perlman, a writer and museum professional, who is working on a book about murder, madness and unrequited love in 19th century Minneapolis. Tam has joined forces with Historyapolis to illuminate the holdings of the tower archives at City Hall. Here she spotlights one…

“Is there no surety for those who inhabit the cities of the dead?”

Published May 12, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard It’s map Monday. And today we have a map that shows the burial plots in Soldiers and Pioneers’ Cemetery, another item from the tower archives at City Hall. Over the last several weeks, our team has been working to illuminate the holdings of this forgotten repository. This map…

Seals in Minnehaha Creek

Published May 9, 2014 by Kim simmonds Today’s guest blogger is Kim Simmonds, alumna of the Augsburg College history program. A public historian currently working in a haunted historic house in Deadwood, South Dakota, Kim became fascinated with “Fish” Jones and began recording her findings on the Robert Fremont “Fish” Jones Facebook page while working…

Lions, Camels and the Eccentric Fish Jones

Published May 9, 2014 by Kim simmonds Today’s guest blogger is Kim Simmonds, alumna of the Augsburg College history program. A public historian currently working in a haunted historic house in Deadwood, South Dakota, Kim became fascinated with “Fish” Jones and began recording her findings on the Robert Fremont “Fish” Jones Facebook page while working…

A World Underground

Published May 6, 2014 by Kevin Ehrman-Solberg Today’s blogger is Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, a senior history major at Augsburg and an intern with the Historyapolis Project. This haunting image shows a terrain few Minneapolitans ever see. It’s a view of the Minnehaha sewer tunnel in South Minneapolis–part of the vast subterranean complex constructed between the 1880s…

Why sewers are great

Published May 5, 2014 by Kevin Ehrman-Solberg Today’s blogger is Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, a senior history major at Augsburg and an intern with the Historyapolis Project. It’s map Monday. This 1889 maps shows the sewer system of Minneapolis. Today Minneapolitans take safe drinking water and flushing toilets for granted. During the Gilded Age, however, city-dwellers were…

“An army of women determined to have the ballot”

Published May 2, 2014 by Anna Romskog Today’s blogger is Anna Romskog, a junior history major at Augsburg College and an intern with the Historyapolis Project. Exactly 100 years ago today, “Minneapolis learned by practical demonstration that those who ask the ballot for women are distinctly not a bevy of hopeless spinsters, unhappily married women…

“Let X-ray say okay”

Published April 28, 2014 by Heidi Heller Today’s blogger is Heidi Heller, a senior history major at Augsburg College. One of the interns with the Historyapolis Project, she will be a regular presence here in 2014. It’s map Monday. Today we’re highlighting another item from the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall. At the dawn…

The measurements of Kid Cann

Published April 24, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard On June 11, 1920, a “Roumanian carnival man” by the name of Isadore Blumenfeld was arrested by Minneapolis police. The young man had been brought into custody for “working crowds at a Norwegian church gathering at the Armory.” Blumenfeld was a pickpocket, according to this record. And had…

The Bertillon System: Science and Crime in the Global Information Age

Published April 23, 2014 by Stewart Van Cleve Today’s blogger is Stewart Van Cleve, a graduate student in the program for Library and Information Science at St. Catherine University. The author of Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota, Stewart discovered the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall when he was researching the…

Crime and Technology

Published April 22, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard The police in Gilded Age Minneapolis were overwhelmed. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the population of the infant city exploded from 13,000 to 200,000. Newcomers landed in the city every day, traveling from all corners of the globe in search of new opportunities. Honest strivers…

Map Monday from the Tower Archives

Published April 21, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard It’s map Monday. Today we’re featuring another item from the Minneapolis City Archives, the hidden historical repository housed in the narrow tower at City Hall. Historyapolis is working to illuminate the importance of this archive’s holdings, which are known only to a handful of the most dedicated and…

“A troublesome element of humanity”

Published April 18, 2014 by Tamatha Perlman Today’s guest blogger is Tamatha Perlman, a writer and museum professional, who is working on a book about murder, madness and unrequited love in 19th century Minneapolis. Here she introduces readers to a young Irish girl named Kate Noonan, who became a servant for a prominent Minneapolis family…

Demolition of Oak Lake Park

Published April 17, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard The forgotten neighborhood of Oak Lake Park, 1936. More photos digitized by Rita Yeada when we visited the tower archives at City Hall on Tuesday. In these images, demolition of the once-grand Victorians is in process. Oral histories of the North Side recount how nothing was wasted or…