Andy Sturdevant is a writer, artist and arts administrator based in Minneapolis. For several years he wrote a MinnPost column called The Stroll.
Moby Dick’s was a bar “that folks visited just to say they’d been there.” An excerpt from the forthcoming book, “Closing Time: Saloons, Taverns, Dives, and Watering Holes of the Twin Cities,” by Bill Lindeke and Andy Sturdevant.
Bingo cards specially created to reflect this year’s T-shirt trends at the fair.
Many of the city’s mayors were born in the city, and many were born elsewhere. We’ve put it all in a table for your perusal.
It’s a new year, and that means new T-shirts.
This week’s column will be the final Stroll I write for MinnPost. For the last five years, nearly anything I’d look at would prompt a light bulb, an idle thought of “What’s interesting here?”
By the mid-1970s, the north side was home to a burgeoning, homegrown music scene that most famously produced Prince, but also turned out numerous other luminaries, including Jimmy Jam.
I wonder if it’s not one of the most underappreciated buildings in downtown Minneapolis, particularly in light of so many mediocre high rises that followed.
Newspaper boxes, lined up in a row with others on a street corner or by a bus stop, have formed an establishing shot for scenes of urban life for 70 years.
This ghostly water feature is marked “Bassett Creek” on Google Maps. Switch to satellite mode, though — or better yet, visit in person — and you’ll see it’s not there.
On a winter afternoon, of course, buried under inches of snow, it all looks as still and ancient and ageless as a Bruegel painting.
“In design and structure, the work must be of our time,” architect Percival Goodman wrote in 1949.
To walk through the vanished landscape of the Twin Cities telephone hotline of the ’80s and ’90s is to get a sense of the sorts of relationships people had with current technology.
A chunk of limestone marks the height of the flood’s water with a wavy line, about waist-deep on a full-grown adult.
The Merle Harris Bridge, named after a 20th-century business and neighborhood leader, lifts Selby Avenue over the bizarre pseudo-highway that is Ayd Mill Road.
The Lock and Dam No. 1 is the best place in the Twin Cities to see, up close, how commerce and industry has shaped the river physically.
In the event of Soviet bombers flying over the North Pole to destroy the United States, these missiles were meant to serve as a last defense of American cities.
Had the middle prong’s flying columns reached Minneapolis, some targets would have been obvious.
Jack T. Chick’s message wasn’t a particularly peaceful, redemptive brand of Christianity. The tracts are sensational, and pretty grisly.
They’re little advertisements that have to accomplish the task of not looking too tacky or flashy, but also being visible enough to register with the viewer.
In Mays’ very brief time in Minneapolis, he lived in a rented room on Fourth Avenue South, right behind the Hosmer Library. It was just over a mile from Nicollet Park.
