Mention the Gateway District to anyone in Minneapolis who has even a passing knowledge of urban history and you're likely to hear a sigh of regret over a lost urban world.
Although many sections of Minneapolis were remade in the decades after World War II, it's the loss of the Gateway — a colorful, skid-row district wiped out in the early 1960s — that still seems to haunt our civic memory.
At least a half-dozen books have already been written about the Gateway and I'll be adding one of my own next year in the form of a history of the late, great Metropolitan Building. The Met was the most infamous casualty of the Gateway Center Urban Renewal project, which resulted in the demolition of nearly 200 historic buildings spread across all or parts of 22 downtown blocks.
It's easy now to criticize the project, which in effect destroyed the city's "old town" and replaced it with a collection of modern buildings, the bulk of which could hardly be described as architectural marvels.
But as I delved into the history of the area while researching my book, it became clear that it would have been very difficult, within the context of the times, to have saved the Gateway. (The same, I might add, is not true of the Metropolitan Building, which could have been — and should have been — preserved.)
The proximate cause of the historic Gateway's demise was quite simple: A huge pot of federal urban renewal money became available in the early 1950s. Cities could tap those funds for clearing away what was commonly called urban blight.
Minneapolis eagerly pursued those federal dollars because its civic leaders and its powerful downtown business community had long viewed the Gateway — with its jumble of bars, flophouses, missions and pawnshops — as a municipal embarrassment.
Other factors, including intense concern over the growing suburbs and their threat to downtown's hegemony as a commercial center, further fueled the desire to wipe away the Gateway's well-aged stock of mostly 19th-century buildings and replace them with (supposedly) more attractive modern structures.