My Back Pages - The Lyndale Diner

Today’s excursion into North Minneapolis in the 1970s is this image of The Lyndale Diner/Lounge.

Now defunct (and I can’t remember its exact location) but it appears to be around Lyndale and Lowry.

A nice concept: a greasy spoon on the left and a low-life bar on the right, with a pool hall in between. Its clientele was working-class and blue collar, no doubt the watering hole for a few dedicated drinkers too, although this may have been a 3.2 tavern, due to quirks in Minneapolis zoning, bars in certain wards of the city only had low-alcohol beer.

The lad in the foreground might be on his way back from a candy store—life prep for his future as a lounge lizard. Oral gratification is only a drink or a bite away.

Most of these places on North Lyndale closed after the freeway went through a couple of blocks east. Lyndale was a major route (Highway 169) in town for many years, part of the West River Road and leading to all points North of the city, after the freeway opened in 1984 the amount of its through-traffic dwindled.

“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing