Moving Out

Twenty Years Ago on FITK

1146 North Fifth Street, Minneapolis

After a protracted adolescence, it was time for me to move out from my childhood home. A neighborhood friend had stopped in and hearing my complaints, said  “Why don't you look in the want ads?” There, in the houses for rent unfurnished section, was an ad that read: 2 bedroom house, $80 a month + utilities. Not very much money for a place, even in 1971.

It was not much of a house either, as it was situated only a block away from a couple of of run-down bars. A few blocks away was the street where several businesses had been burned down in a riot four years earlier. Still, it was something. Tiny rooms, an odd concrete structure, but a place of my own. That house, and eventually the one next door (pictured above), and then more on the nearby blocks, would become a de facto center for various cultural activities: a dozen or more musicians, a writer, a potter, a weaver and other artists would all emerge: living, loving, starting families. We knew that it couldn’t last forever, it had been scheduled for redevelopment, and twenty years later it was finally torn down by the city for some ill-defined project.

No one who ever lived there would want to return to that existence, yet it is hard to imagine a more vital time—a Bloomsbury in Minneapolis, a Café Society without the café.

There are zoning laws against this kind of thing now.



A North Fifth Street Story