Ghost Neighborhood

A North Fifth Street Story

This little section of Near-North Minneapolis, pictured here in about 1960, was my home turf from 1971 to 1991.

I stitched together the above panorama (click to embiggen) of three images from the Minnesota Historical Society archives. Many of the buildings had already been demolished by the time I moved in and, by the time the City redeveloped the area in the 1990s, all of the properties shown here had been razed, replaced by freeways, light industry and bus garages.

Pictures of places where you lived before you lived there are a curious form of history. A ghost world of sorts, this had once been the fabric of a vibrant community but by the time I moved in it had already started to fray.

Those of us who lived there in its final days cherished it; now it is we who are the ghosts.