Reconstructing a Minneapolis neighborhood online

Kirsten Delegard — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 22:32:39 +0000

I’m super excited to experience a THAT camp.

Here’s what I would like to explore. I have started a new public history initiative in Minneapolis, the Historyapolis Project, which seeks to make the history of the city as accessible as possible, in order to spark discussions about some of the most challenging aspects of the city’s past. One of the ultimate goals of this project is to produce a traditional book. But I want to work my way to the book by doing projects that engage a broader audience.

To launch the Historyapolis Project, I would like to reconstruct online the historic heart of the city, which was demolished by an ambitious urban renewal project from 1958 to 1963. The Gateway district of Minneapolis became synonymous with dispossession during the Great Depression, when o000000">ne-time lumberjacks, gandy dancers and farm hands found themselves marooned in the city, left high and dry in the Gateway by agricultural mechanization, the contraction of the railroad industry and the environmental devastation wrought by clear-cutting. This economic seachange solidified the Gateway’s identity as the region’s largest skid row, a refuge for the unemployed and the desperate. Migrant workers became permanent residents, their perambulations circumscribed by changing economics and advancing age. Subsisting on pensions and fixed incomes, the largely male population of the Gateway circulated within a tight circle of bars, liquor stores, flop houses and missions. The community became a magnet for political radicals and evangelicals hoping to win the hearts and minds of the dispossessed. It drew journalists, academics and WPA photographers who sought to document the human and political drama of the economic crisis. City leaders hated this area. In the 1950s they managed to secure federal funding to undertake the largest urban redevelopment project in the nation’s history. The city flattened 40 percent of its downtown–25 blocks, total. The downtown has never really recovered from this trauma. The center of the city still has a hole, which is covered by surface parking lots.

In order to secure federal redevelopment funding, the city had to document the “blight” of this district. On the eve of the neighborhood’s demise, commercial photographers carefully documented every building and business to be demolished. The result is an astonishing photographic record of a place foreign to most Minneapolitans. The photographs show bars, diners, liquor stores, missions, flophouses, secondhand stores and myriad other businesses that enjoyed cheap rent in this deteriorating part of town. These photographs–about 2,000 in all–have been buried in the city archives, moldering and uncatalogued in chaotic cardboard boxes. I have spent the winter digitizing these photos and want to use them to reconstruct the Gateway in some kind of online project. I culled through the boxes and only chose to digitize about 850 of the most interesting items. I would say that 100 of them are spectacular photo documents of this lost world. For a sample, see the FB page I have started: www.facebook.com/TheHistoryapolisProject

I have some ideas about how to approach such a project. But I would love some advice on what is involved in such a project and some of the best ways to approach making accessible such a large visual record, which could be supplemented by lots of additional material–sound records, home movies, newspaper articles, all kinds of goodies.

Thanks for any help that you can provide. Looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa.

Kirsten Delegard – THATCamp National Council on Public History 2013

Reconstructing a Minneapolis neighborhood online