‘History’ Archives
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 [...]
