‘History’ Archives
Heart of the Beast Not Limited To a Place
By HARVEY WINJE Heart of the Beast in the community. Photo Courtesy:HOBT HOBT has occupied four locations that served as indoor workshops, classrooms, performance stages, and offices while always doing production, teaching, and performing at other indoor and outdoor places. These spaces included parks, schools, theaters, community centers, and streets throughout the Twin Cities area and suburbs. Other traveling adventures took HOBT to Washington, D.C.; New Orleans, LA; Brookings and Mitchell, SD; Itasca, MN and to the Gulf of Mexico on a Mississippi river towns tour with ”Circle of Water Circus” (currently exhibited at the Hennepin History Museum). In 2000, HOBT performed at the DMZ–Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. HOBT has been a place that welcomes everyone no matter where it’s taught, performed, or at any one of its four studio/workshop/stage locations:1973-1985: Walker Community Church 3104 16th Avenue So; demolished after May 27, 2012 fire [...]
Cedar-Riverside: A Sketch of Displacement and Resistance
By JESSIE MERRIAM, Public History student working on a mobile museum for Our Streets Minneapolis. Originally published in local punk-adjacent newsletter zine, Restless Legs Inquirer. Re-printed with permission. Cartoon of the forces shaping Cedar Riverside, for community listening sessions in May 2022. By Jessie Merriam. The wavy-crusted pie slice that is now called Cedar Riverside was once a continuous neighborhood with Seward and Phillips. Also known over the years as Riverside, Seven Corners, Bohemian Flats, Snoose Boulevard (Snus = Swedish snuff), “The Haight Ashbury of the Midwest,” and “Little Mogadishu,” Cedar Riverside has always been a place of intersections. “There were no neighborhoods before Urban Renewal–we lived in South Minneapolis! They needed clever labels. Our speech had nothing to do with neighborhoods,” reported a Seward neighborhood elder historian over coffee this January. “Block groups! That’s the basic foundation–come on now! [...]
Life at Southtown: Railroad Shop Kinks
By JOHN ANDERSON Kinks are not just twisted things, or the name of a British Invasion rock group from the 1960s. Over a century ago in the railcar maintenance world, a kink was workshop slang for an ingenious solution to a difficult problem, a hack, if you will.The former Milwaukee Road Southtown Yards, a giant, state-of-the-art train maintenance center that was located just east of Hiawatha Avenue and north of E Lake Street, likely implemented some of the best kinks of the time. Interior of an early 20th Century machine shop. Photo Credit: J. Fred Williamson Ltd. Among other facilities, Southtown Yards had a large machine shop. Steampunk fans might easily imagine how it looked at the turn of the 20th century. Machines were driven by a system of line shafts, belts, and pulleys. A line shaft was a rod that spun through power from a motor located in the powerhouse. Line shafts running from the powerhouse were buried underground enroute to the shop; inside, they were hung from [...]
