Stuff about Minneapolis

Downtown skyline, Minneapolis (1938) via Minnesota Historical Society

Casablanca Cafe & Bar, 408 Hennepin, Minneapolis. (1945) via Minnesota Historical Society

The CC Club: An oral history

The CC Club has long been a drinkers’ haven in south Minneapolis, a dim intersection of different scenes and people from across the city. Few establishments in the Twin Cities have seen more glasses emptied, cigarettes smoked, or strangers find each other.

But the neighborhood is changing. In a part of the city once defined by its independence, expensive condos crowd the streets and corporate chains have pushed out local businesses. Earlier this year, the owners of neighboring restaurant French Meadow bought the CC, and will officially take ownership on May 1. The new managers say they plan to keep the bar the same, but some CC regulars are skeptical — perhaps because the French Meadow is an organic bistro, and the CC is a seedy dive bar. Or maybe it just seems inevitable that a place like the CC Club can’t last forever.

click pic for great article by City Pages

Prince Appears On The Cover Of Rolling Stone For The First Time 30 Years Ago Today

The first notes of the Minneapolis sound were heard in a big brick house in North Minneapolis, an aging, primarily black section of town that draws outsiders only to the Terrace Theater, a movie house designed to look like a suburban backyard patio, and the Riverview Supper Club, the nightspot a black act turns to after it has polished its performance on the local chitlin circuit. North Minneapolis is a poor area by local standards, but a family with not too much money can still afford the rent on a whole house. It was there that Bernadette Anderson, who was already raising six kids of her own by herself, decided to take in a doe-eyed kid named Prince, a pal of her youngest son, André.

click pic for full article

yonialter:

Shapes of Minneapolis. Accurate to scale.
Wells Fargo Center, Rand Tower, Capella Tower, Campbell Mithun Tower, Hennepin Avenue Bridge, Foshay Tower (W Minneapolis).

mplscollective:

MPLSzine, a submissions-based collaborative digital publication, is looking for submissions (details below) for our 15th issue, the DOWNTOWN issue.

Submissions are due by Sunday, May 5. Join the Facebook event here.

Submit here: submit@mplszine.com.
More details + guidelines here: http://mplszine.com/submit

We’re looking for interviews, reviews, reported articles, essays, humor pieces, lists, infographics, comics, photos, and illustrations related to DOWNTOWN. For now, we are not accepting fiction or poetry submissions.

We want you to explore overlooked places and subcultures; make new connections and observations; share your heartbreaking, guffaw-worthy, and inspirational personal stories; and champion the people who make Minneapolis what it is. But we can’t do that without creative types sending us their stuff!

Here’s a post I did in 2009 about getting punched in the face in downtown Minneapolis. http://stuffaboutminneapolis.tumblr.com/post/133517694/hey-did-i-ever-tell-you-guys-the-story-of-the

hclib:

Minneapolis Madams by Penny Petersen
Longtime Special Collections researcher Penny Petersen’s book on the era of tolerated prostitution in Minneapolis drops this summer. It is coming out on University of Minnesota Press. We will have a program on the book later in the year.
As she describes in the Treasures Collected, Treasures Shared documentary on Special Collections (3:10), the above permit card piqued her interest in the turn of the century Minneapolis red light districts. The card for 212 11th Avenue spells out that the building is a “House of Ill Fame” and “Sporting House.”
The building at 212 11th Avenue South featured in an earlier post, it was a after hours club after it was a bordello.

hclib:

Minneapolis Madams by Penny Petersen

Longtime Special Collections researcher Penny Petersen’s book on the era of tolerated prostitution in Minneapolis drops this summer. It is coming out on University of Minnesota Press. We will have a program on the book later in the year.

As she describes in the Treasures Collected, Treasures Shared documentary on Special Collections (3:10), the above permit card piqued her interest in the turn of the century Minneapolis red light districts. The card for 212 11th Avenue spells out that the building is a “House of Ill Fame” and “Sporting House.”

The building at 212 11th Avenue South featured in an earlier post, it was a after hours club after it was a bordello.

Lowry Avenue Bridge by Saibal K. Ghosh

Spring Blizzard, Sculpture Garden by Tom Miller

Minneapolis-St. Paul Area Residents Most Likely to Feel Safe

Eighty percent of those living in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area say they feel safe walking alone at night in the area where they live, the highest percentage among the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. Minneapolis is followed closely by Denver, Raleigh, Boston, Salt Lake City, and Austin.

Minneapolis-St. Paul area residents have the highest sense of personal security among Americans living in the nation’s top metro areas, at least in terms of feeling safe walking alone at night in their local area. While the rank order of the top 50 on this measure may differ somewhat from other rankings of city safety, it nevertheless offers an important perspective on one aspect of how crime affects people’s lives.

Article via Gallup, photo via Thirteen of Clubs.