(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the friends of Minnesota Experience.

(bright music) - [James] When I moved to Minneapolis, started working downtown and I was struck by the fact that, what should have been the oldest part of town close to the river was kind of a dead zone.

Full of like buildings from the 1950s and 60s, soulless blocks, I mentioned it to a friend.

He and I shared a love of dive bars.

He said, "oh, you gotta see this video."

It was of TPTs down on Skid Row and I was just stunned.

It was this city that I didn't recognize.

This is such a different place than I have encountered, what happened to this place?

(instrumental music) (melodious music) - [Narrator] At one time, almost every major American city had an area called Skid Row.

In Minneapolis, it was over 20 square blocks of bars, flop houses and missions, centered around Gateway Park and Washington Avenue.

- [James] In 1952, the city counted 62 liquor stores, bars, beer parlors, within this 20 block area.

Most major cities had a Skid Row, and they tended to be around the railroad stations and they tended to be the oldest part of town, cheapest real estate, cheapest lodging houses.

These were the places where there was a transient labor market, Milwaukee Depot and the Great Northern Depot were kind of bracketed the old Gateway District.

It was also called Lower Loop.

The oldest part of Minneapolis, built in the 19th century.

By the 1950s, it was really kind of seedy.

You would see a kind of a crumbling city center, a lot of second hand shops, bars, liquor stores, but probably your eye would be immediately drawn to just the clamor on the sidewalks.

Older men jostling, drinking, sleeping, fighting, whistling at you, begging, panhandling.

It was notorious, everybody knew.

And they would say this was a place where their parents would take them downtown, drive through down Washington Avenue with the hordes of guys causing trouble or laying about on the sidewalk.

If you don't stay in school, this is where you're gonna end up.

This is the nature of human existence, if you don't behave yourself and study hard, this is your future.

- You had to be brave you had to be to go under those kinds of spaces.

These men and these women relied on secrecy, on that kind of general aura of disreputableness that the Gateway had, that Skid Row had.

If you were there, you were either changing streetcar lines because of course they were still all interchanging there.

So, there was some respectable reason to be there, at least until the streetcars were discontinued.

But in general, if you were down there, you were probably up to no good.

And the general understanding was, We're gonna let them be up to no good, but we're only going to let them do it there.

- [Narrator] From 1955 to 1961, John Bacich filmed life on the streets outside his Washington Avenue bar documenting the last years down on Skid Row.

- [John] It was a different way of life for different people, people live in the diner, people live in South Minneapolis.

They don't know what's going on Skid Row.

Well, maybe they see how some other people live.

You know, like once in a while you'll see the rich and the famous, maybe out to see the poor and the alcoholics.

- John Bacich, his last name was so difficult to pronounce for a lot of people on Skid Row that they called him Johnny Rex, because he was the King of Skid Row.

His family had operated a nightclub and restaurant, Supper Club in Northern Wisconsin.

And so, he kind of went into the family business in a way and opened a liquor store and eventually a bar in the Gateway District.

He felt compelled whenever he saw something happening on the streets outside his bars, or liquor stores or his flophouse, to run out there with his camera and shoot some footage of it, he's a very good photographer.

Really had an eye, an extraordinary eye.

Also extraordinary narrator as he did the voiceover for his film years after he actually shot it.

- [John] And make no different to them when they were decided to sleep, they sleep in it.

- I think anyone who watches it is a little disturbed by the content because it is about a kind of marginal community life, Skid Row, what comes through to me watching this documentary with him as a narrator, that you have to regard him as unreliable.

Even if he offers some truths about his life or the people that he's around.

- [John] Got kicked out of his room and... - I'm a historian, I guess I've been trained to think about unreliable narrators because when I go into archives to try to write Indian history and to tell native perspectives of the past, I have to read and filter through so many documents written by missionaries, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the head of government boarding schools, other people who were trying to kind of press their agenda.

- [John] What do we do in the morning?

People would be sick or something.

So, I'd give them all a drink for a nickel.

- You could see him as a protector of these men.

He gave them shelter, he gave them jobs.

He treated them as human beings.

He thought of them individually.

He was fascinated with them as people.

He told me that when someone wanted to get clean he would help them get clean especially if they were a veteran like him.

And a lot of them were, but he was also serving them 5 cent eye-opener beers in the morning to cure the DTs.

And they would die sometimes in his flop house.

In the view of a lot of people, he was a parasite himself, he was a predator.

- [John] I didn't do it just because I needed to business.

But when a man is sick in the morning he has to have one little drink to straighten them out.

But eventually he gets pretty sick and nothing helps them.

- He was not nostalgic about it per say.

He clearly loved these guys, he clearly loved being the King of Skid Row, but he also recognized, and anyone who sees his film, it's known as Talia trip.

It's often very difficult to watch.

The degradation, the violence, and just the hopelessness and the scourge of alcoholism.

At the time when the decisions were being made to bulldoze Skid Row, these people were described as parasites and deviant.

And I think he was always trying to lend some humanity to them.

- [John] My name is John Bacich, and I took this film on Skid Row down on Washington Avenue in Minneapolis so that people could see what it was all about in the late fifties, this film now is 26 years old unrehearsed, I'm sure you're gonna enjoy it.

These were the flophouses along Washington Avenue, one after another above the bars were flophouses.

They were made of nothing but plywood on the sides and then chicken wire at the top so that somebody that was living there couldn't crawl up to the other guys.

The little Roman steal his property.

And you see everybody there drank wine because they had nothing else to do.

They just had a cot and a little table and their stuff there, I remember one fella had about 20 coats and when I looked at him and he had these cheap watches, he must have had a hundred of them.

I don't think added together they were worth 3 dollars, but and he'd get these coats.

I don't know where he got them, but he had about a hundred.

These fellows were usually railroad workers that came up from the South and worked on a railroad all summer long.

And then in the winter all they would do was draw unemployment which would equal whatever they made in the summer.

And so, all they do is sit up there and drink and wait until spring came.

Now, some of these fellows, like you see looking out the window where old timers.

One fellow there was a Finnish fellow that Minneapolis owned about 3 houses.

And he lived down there 'cause he loved to just sit among his cronies.

He will buy them a bottle of beer and they listened to, a bottle of wine, they listened to anything he had to say.

These buildings were some of the oldest buildings in Minneapolis along there, the version of Skid Row, is people think it's men on the downgrade going down, skidding down to the end of them, their life.

But it isn't that, it's from the skids when they used to send big logs from the forest down.

And if you look at these picture, you'll see as Nicollet Avenue where the big bank is and big high rises.

This is on the corner of Marquette.

Is in regardless, these fellas treated a lady like a lady down there.

In fact of all the ganny's, I had as many 16 in my hotel, when my wife would come along, I never heard one of them swear.

So, gentlemen, this is Nicollet, panning now going down to Second Street.

And he knows all he could see there this is nothing but liquor stores and beer parlors and upstairs was these flophouses and little cafe in between, this fellow here, he'd go around and look for empty bottles and find maybe a little drop here or there.

It's all he did all day long, just picking up, very fond of bottles he is, talking about germs, I don't think that guy anything would kill him.

He'd get together, you know and, throw the money together to count that their fiscal pool then when he got enough money by about, or they would when they got drunk they just lay down asleep where ever they were, this guy, I dunno his face was quiet characteristics of Skid Row.

As fellow here, he would drink a full court and I didn't believe it, so now this wasn't rehearse because I said to him I'll give you a 5 dollar bill.

If you drink that and he drank twice.

And once in a while, the boy I'd I'd feel kind of generous and I'd take a whole case.

Of half pints there and set it out.

And the guy who would run and get it regardless of who got what they would sit there any one thing they would do they'd share that's curly in the middle, I'll tell you a story about him.

This one going right by there.

He said, it's out now, see none.

They go in, they only started drinking.

The police kept a pretty good handle on these fellows down there and I think it had a heck of a lot less trouble down there during Skid Row than you do in someone parts of Minneapolis.

Now, that's what they do, they just pass it around they'd share and put some money here.

This guy was a farmer, the one in the plaid shirt or they could consume that stuff too.

And the reason they drank wine especially Muscatel was their favorite.

And then Port and Muscatel, they call it does it for name to call will Nachi bourbon or Polish popper different names for it is because it was sweetened, killed their appetites until they got the DTS.

And this couple of Indians they were cousins and they would sit there and they would just see who was the best, and I, mean they would really fight.

And I, boy, I hurt every time i seen him hitting him.

And here's oh Nick he'd get up there.

And this was his way of getting his kicks.

He'd get up on top of the building and pretend that he was the king of the mountains.

He'd crawl up that fire escape and go up there everyday whether he was drunk or sober, I don't know what it was but he just loved to go up on the roofs.

But if I saw him drinking, I wouldn't let him go after it but he couldn't very well stop them.

Cause I couldn't be there 24 hours a day.

This is one of the hotels that I owned called the Rex.

Funny part at one time some girls wrote down and wanted to go to basketball tournament and asked me if they could get eight rooms.

And I wrote back and I said if you did, you wouldn't be the same, this is a flophouse on Skid Row.

And I don't know where they stayed but they're going to basketball tournament.

This is Wydie he'd sleep anyplace.

He was from Detroit and this fellow would sleep in abandoned buildings and then a winter, he would just go and own boxcar and have a bunch of cardboard.

And you put someone on top some of the bottom and sleep between the cardboard.

He's a strong character he'd worked make just enough to feed himself and drink any kurt.

He was really a character, I mean he, yes, he had a real pleasing personality, could see his no there from when they naturally want to get drunk to get into a fight and here's the park where they used to sleep in during the day nobody had bothered them, He'd sit out there and get in bottoms and fall asleep in this park here in between Nicollet and Hennepin Avenue and Washington and Second Street.

And this was just a little story about a dog that got this pigeon in his mouth and these fellows where we had a big argument about what they should do with the pigeon and someone to take it away and the other said, leave it alone, so I took it away from the dog.

It wasn't hurt that bad and we're pending Washington Avenue.

See, there's a Tavern there's a loan shop.

Another Tavern, drug store, there's another bar.

And here's mine the Sourdough, which is, you can see I got catch can because my brother-in-law had a Sourdough bar and catch cans, so I named it after him.

He's a transportation commissioner in Alaska now.

And this is some more in panning as a cafe in between here's Nick and Aimol and they pull each other's nose all year round.

They'd get a few drinks and they sometimes they weren't even drunk and they'd just be pushing each other.

And then they grab each other's nose.

They just got a big kick out of that.

It was something to watch them do.

And they were real good buddies.

They're both from Indiana, they were railroad workers like the rest of them, in fact, everybody I had in my Skid Row hotel, railroad workers.

This is in front of my bar, (John laughing) so they'd get lit her up, but they never got really mad.

They'd wrestle themselves on the floor and everything.

And bang down ,here is snow rain slate here.

They are at it again and we just amazing.

They just grab for each other's nose.

Nobody else paid much attention to it figured a little bit wacky anyhow but they probably were, but they were nice boys.

Those days the hotel rates were about 50 cents a day.

One of the fellas owns a bunch of them flaphouses, lived in California, one of the richest men down there.

I think you own about 12 flophouses here, in his own name.

When he'd go around and dress up.

Some days he'd come and just his shorts and then he put on a gunnysack and he was just a comic.

You know, it's once in a while some of the fellows are turned around and won't let you take your picture.

I imagine they were connected with some crime sometime.

This was the old professor, he knew everything.

This is just some of the boys wanting to get their pictures in, this is Collins.

He was a fighter, he and his brother got in a fight and this is what happened to him.

So we're waiting for the Patty wagon.

It seemed if he were a fighter would just like any old Western days, everybody was out to try to best yet, but they'd wait until you were so drunk.

Some of these boys and then they'd really give it to him.

It was pitiful, this is old wild bill wildling doctor, policemen just went by now.

They're taking Collin into the police car to the police station like King Tut.

He was another one that I used to feed him every day because he'd get in a fight.

And it was just unbelievable.

- The Minneapolis Police Department at that time sort of had a special unit that would patrol the Gateway.

And from the other officers in the force they kind of let them do their thing.

You know, John described as a business owner having to pay off the police with liquor and money.

And there was just an expectation that they would leave you alone.

But the police were constant presence.

- There was almost like this cottage industry in the police department where these men would get you drunk.

They would get into fights, the cops would show up, they'd put him in the Patty wagon.

They'd take them down to what they called the bullpen.

They let him sober up and then they'd let them go.

And it was like just over and over and over and over again.

So some of these men probably went to jail, you know dozens and dozens and dozens of times.

- So we're standing at the corner of Second Street and Nicollet Avenue, except they're not here anymore.

They're gone, this is the old block 10, which was the heart of the Gateway District and the heart of Skid Row.

This would have been Rex Liquors on the corner John Bacich Liquor store, where you know, you buy a pint of liquor for 25 cents or 50 cents.

All of his institutions are on this block.

He had the Victor Hotel, which was right down in mid-block on the other side on Washington Avenue was a Sourdough Bar which served residents of his flophouse and was supplied by liquor from his liquor store.

So he really had sort of the trifecta here.

This block had about eight bars and three liquor stores and a number of flophouses.

And it was everything, the city was trying to get rid of.

- 44% of crime in 1957 took place in Skid Row.

So when you have that much crime going on, the police aren't asking questions as to why it's happening?

You know, they assume it's drunkenness, they assume it's the 3000 homeless men who were living there.

- The city had been concerned about this neighborhood for 50 plus years, even when it was in its heyday it was a seedy neighborhood, you know, late 19th century the already got concerned about it.

So over the decades there had been various attempts to do something about it by building institutions like the big post office and Gateway Park, right in the middle of it and they would clear some of the buildings away with the hope that if they built a park, well, good people will come.

And the people we don't want well go away.

Well none of it really worked.

- [John] I remember one time when I saw a guy laying there he was bleeding and everything else and I got excited and called the police, they said, just leave him alone.

He'll be all right, he'll take care of himself eventually.

I guess I'd get too excited, when I first got down there.

I hear it was the old Black Mariah and a Patty wagon.

They'd put them in there some days.

It wouldn't be something they had no placement area was from the old school, and he put the guy's head at the bottom step and rolled them up and just hit him and he'd roll up like a ball in there.

It was interesting to do it, This is a scene in human relations and it shows this fella he was kicked out of his room.

And as he's walking down the street his suitcase opened up and stuff spilled all over.

And he was saying, if you're going to take my picture I want a couple of bucks and he got up, you know And then as he got up the old vulchers come in and they started picking up just like chicken going.

When you throw some feed to him this guy picked up the blade razor.

The other guy picked up the soap by the time you got through rag and there was nothing left and even if they didn't use for it, they'd pick it up, anyhow.

This is kind of a picture I took of a Moat Lego.

You can him back there selling wine on Sunday he'd sell about 10, 20 cases in the morning.

One after another, just go in out, go in and out.

And somebody told him I was taking his picture.

You can see him now just to the sign that says soft drinks in there, buck a throw.

He was getting for that wine custom about 40 cents.

He'd sell by 10, 20 drinks.

And he got excited and he came out.

He figured out was, can do something.

He got in his car, this, him walking to his car.

He had about 10, 12 different cars, so that he thought that the police didn't know anything about it but they knew who he was.

They'd knock them off every once in a while.

But Tim Bootlegg, like bootleggers were pretty mercenary.

They made a lot of money but they never would help out anybody.

This is the fellow I told you about.

He was booked in Montana and he just said he didn't want to be, go to jail.

So he jumped out the window, but it was a second floor.

And he landed on a concrete below and ruptured his spleen a little bit in the shoulder and went to the hospital.

And they had a big article about it.

I have at home and he wouldn't let them interview him unless he give him 10 bucks.

This fellow was with Lawrence Welcons he was a piano player.

He'd come in, all dressed up like this.

After you've been working on an farm or someplace.

And then in about a month later, he was, looked like the rest of them, but he could play the piano because we had a piano and he was really a good piano player and he was really a nice dress gentlemen when he'd come in but after about two or three weeks of drinking, boy what a change.

Here's wydie, again, some big buddies, somebody hit him over the head with a pipe.

This is old doc he was a diehard Republican.

He knew everything was going on to another philosopher your doc he was wanting to gays.

In fact, he was the old man on the gays, there he was quite a character.

- Watching down on Skid Row, suddenly there's this older guy and he's, you know in this suit.

And he does this funny, kind of weird little dance.

And you know, Bacich says that's old doc, one of the gays.

In fact, he was the old man of the gays.

He was quite a character and then it moves on.

That's what you get and that's one of those moments where I saw that and I thought there has to be more, there has to be more to this, this very difficult to find those stories.

People intentionally kept hidden and they were good at it.

They had to be, when we talk about those bars at that time that served gay and bisexual men, as well as women.

They weren't gay bars the way that we think of them now.

So there's no club music, there's no go-go boys.

There's no dancing, it is a place that is often owned by straight people, it's entirely possible that folks who went to the Sourdough, folks who went to the Dugout the Trocadero, most of the people who were there didn't know that it was also well-known as a popular spot for gay men and bisexual men.

They would often kind of congregate in the back and almost always at night.

So this is not a daytime type of thing.

This is only under the cover of darkness.

At that time, there were no gay newspapers no television, no radio, no nothing.

So you had to rely off of these informal networks of communication locally, I know that the men's restrooms and bus stations and train stations, if you were the place to go if you needed to know where to go, from there you would then learn that you go to the Onyx.

Or later on you go to the Dugout or the Trocadero or the Persian Palms, depending on the night all that was written in graffiti on these restrooms stalls or as you got to know people, you would learn more because there wasn't a large national idea of what being gay meant or being bisexual meant.

There was oddly more freedom for men to have sexual experiences with other men, it was just kind of recreational, they didn't talk about it.

They do it down on Skid Row and then they go home.

There were lots of hourly rate hotels nearby.

There were lots of new semi-public areas alleyways bathrooms, bath houses were still in operation.

At this time, there was one of the Lumber Exchange that was quite popular, I read 1400 arrest records not once as the word homosexual appear.

I think that the police just didn't want to go there.

They wouldn't know what to do.

Technically sodomy was illegal in Minnesota at the time.

But the important thing to note about that is it meant something different back then.

Sodomy was just any form of non procreative sexual activity.

It was used as kind of a trump charge to add onto the potential number of charges.

You could give somebody, so sex workers were often charged with sodomy thinking about down on Skid Row, thinking about Bacich and how he talks about these men.

You get a sense that so many people just overlooked them.

You know that this was kind of like human garbage.

You get a sense that he at once appreciates their humanity.

He does see them as people, he knows them.

He sees himself as taking care of them at the same time, he's profiting off of them.

And I wonder if the police were the same way, you know that they were benefiting off of them that they were taking advantage of them.

It's entirely possible that men who got caught in compromising circumstances with other men were kind of roughed up by the police or are charged by the police.

If they did, they certainly wouldn't have complained about it because who are they going to tell?

They would have to risk outing themselves in order to say this happened.

And then their lives would be over.

- [John] This is a line, it would go down to the brothers had a free lunch place on Nicollet Island.

So they line up like this and wait until they opened up for lunch, one of these guys was barging and he says, I don't have to eat here.

This free meal at Two Brothers, I got plenty of money.

And when some, again, he says, when he got through eating he would just as broke as a restroom.

They relieved him his money while he was eating.

I imagined the lines now are even bigger than they were then.

And a lot of them would have money but they'd go in there because they get a free meal.

What we do in the morning people would be sick or something.

So I'd give them all a drink for a nickel.

And by the time I opened up 10 minutes later the bar would be just filled to capacity.

And I didn't do it just because I need the business.

But when a man is sick in the morning he has to have one little drink to straighten him out.

But eventually he gets pretty sick and nothing helps them, there's Wydie again.

See the sign says Johnny Rex is going out That was my nickname because my attorney gave me that name.

He said, you're the King of Skid Row.

So they call me Johnny Rex, that's the only name they know me by, and this is Johnny Rex was going because they're going to tear it down.

And the last day we're open and we're really at a party.

And I gave everybody free drinks till we closed up.

And that's Mabel, she was a Houston's daughter and he's got her daughters are there too.

You can see them sitting up at the bar, quite a conglomeration of people, bootleggers, muggers, jack rollers.

They you ever had any money there.

You'd be able to better keep quiet because in about 10 minutes, it'd be gone.

One farmer there was loaded and I told him, you better go and give it to the police for keep it secure and he didn't, they relieved him.

of his money and he come crying.

He said, what should I do?

I says, I suppose you better go home and get some more pigs.

So I don't know what else you can do.

We told you to take it and give it to the police.

And they'd give you a receipt, that's, Reno, one of Mabel's daughters.

She doesn't look like that now, but she was a pretty little girl.

I had doctors used to come in and talk to me that burner on Skid Row and lawyers, everything, a lot of Indians as you can see on the alleys, they come down from the reservation, just get drunk and then go back up there, when they got, when they were broke - About the time that this film was made the Federal Government decided that they sort of wanted to get out of the Indian business.

They didn't want to abide by all these promises made in treaties in the 19th century for health, for education and these other things that native had negotiated for very seriously, so the Federal Government saying, ah, you Indian people this is so expensive.

We've certainly paid out debt to you by now.

We want to get out, We want to get out of the Indian business and we're going to withdraw services from your reservation communities So that was one policy, but the twin policy was relocation.

And the idea and the idea of relocation was that the Federal Government would assist native people moving into the urban cities.

- [Narrator] Single girls are often helped to move into supervised girls clubs - So that there were a lot of people who came to Minneapolis during the relocation years.

For a lot of reasons that any of us might gravitate to urban areas.

People thought there would be a chance for opportunity for jobs, for the kids to go to good schools.

But the problem became that when American Indians came to Minneapolis and St. Paul in the 1950s or in, even in the 1960s they didn't find open arms, they were discriminated against tremendously, in housing and then in terms of jobs it was difficult for native people to kind of get a foot hold here.

I think sometimes people don't understand these issues of poverty in the United States.

As you know, if you're poor living in your rural reservation or your small town why don't you just move someplace else, right?

Where there's jobs and opportunity, well what if you have no money to go there?

These young women leaving Red Lake and the security of home and family.

They didn't have enough money to even get to Minneapolis.

They had to stop and do farm labor.

If you don't have the resources, if you don't have an uncle or parents or someone to kind of get you set up in the city it's very hard to navigate and do those things on your own, native people are vulnerable to alcoholism and substance abuse like other people.

It was historically an issue, because often the American leaders brought in a lot of alcohol at times of negotiation.

So alcohol has been sort of used against native people.

So we have a very strange and conflicted relationship.

I think with the history of alcohol.

- [John] I would sell at that bar, five barrels of beer alone a day besides wine liquor.

I had one bartender, he worked during, after one day he slipped a note under my office, he says "my God, my life is in jeopardy all day long" he says "send me the check", he says "I can't it " That girl had just took the gentleman hat in the middle of the bar, her parents left her a fortune Montana whole square block of most important property in the town.

And she come in and buy everybody drink, and they had a big brass bell there in the bar and if you wanted to buy everybody a drink you had to ring the bell.

Now this Fellow here I didn't like him because he tried to pick up the women.

And I think he was a saddest of some kind.

I didn't like him at all and I don't think very many other people liked him.

This is, one of the bartenders worked for me and I told him, never grab a bottle out of somebody's hand when they're drinking even though they weren't supposed to be in my bar.

And this fellow was drinking in a men's restroom a pint of wine and he went in there and he just grabbed it out of his hand real quick.

And before he could say uncle, he had an (indistinct) now he's pretty well healed up.

He had 180 stitches putting all through his whole body from the neck, all the way down to his knees.

This is a guy we called Santa Claus.

And he kept telling everybody he was original Santa Claus, but he wasn't pulled for nothing.

I had to give him a couple bucks.

"I am the original Santa Claus", he's saying.

Now, if you see him like that, a beard he wouldn't even pay no attention to him.

This was a fellow who was running my hotel.

We didn't have any trends, everybody we had would stay there by the month because it was Moon Face.

She was one of the nicest gal there.

No, I had a personality, created a she'd come in at eight o'clock and wouldn't leave till one in the morning.

And you'd be surprised of her boyfriend that would pick her up, I mean, well-dressed very, very important, gentlemen.

I won't mention names, but some are quite notable in the city and I couldn't believe it.

- There's a huge problem of missing and murdered indigenous women.

(crowed chanting) We haven't, as a society acknowledged the violence toward native women that exists.

And when native women or people from Skid Row historically have gone missing, I think what happened to them because you know that they are more vulnerable population than some of the men.

I wonder if this is a problem that isn't just up the last couple of decades and our conversations now about sexual trafficking and so forth, they have the roots of that are in these marginal spaces in urban areas like Skid Row by it just read Louise Erdrich new novel called The Nightwatchman, which is about a really important era in American Indian history.

And in the book, she has a character who comes to Minneapolis, who is a young woman, that many people kind of take advantage of in the city.

And I thought she had really wonderful descriptions of Skid Row and what it was like to be in a flophouse or what the environment like, or how women might be exploited in that context.

Very vivid descriptions that also come from maybe a female point of view.

That would be interesting to pair with the documentary.

- There were women in the Gateway District vastly outnumbered by men like 25 to one.

There were sex workers, absolutely.

You know, John talks about that in his movie.

- For women who wanted relationships with other women you had to navigate a lot because you might've been assumed to be a sex worker.

There was a bizarre city ordinance in Minneapolis that banned two women from entering a bar together unescorted by a man.

The idea was that if you had two women go into this place they were probably sex workers who would leave with the man.

- For some of the issues that we raised murdered and missing women, what was going on?

At a time when American society rejected a lot of people right?

Your sexuality, your ethnicity.

And so I think that steadying spaces like this in urban areas has value, but they're very complicated, and we have to bring a lot of understanding to what we're seeing.

- [John] Here's our buddy, again, drinking another court of wine just look at it and not a drop is spilled it's a full court wine no fakes, I used to give a gallon a couple of gallons free from the liquor store.

I had liquor store there too in the morning when I first opened up and we'd make him come at the end of the line because if he started, he would probably drink a whole gallon.

This fella on the right, was real rough a little bit.

Here's Nick and him, but 10 bull own going at it.

(John laughing) Here's little fella, his going to go get a bottle and he's cool enough, That's Second and Nicollet there, this guy was really something, a lot of personality.

Here's your own Kelly the clown.

Now notice he's walking barefoot in the winter time.

You'd think they'd get sick but I don't know why none of them ever got a cold or anything.

I don't know why they did this.

I guess they just, because they got their kicks in it.

I said, didn't, aren't your feet cold?

He said, "nah" he tried to shoot a fellow one time and with a 25 caliber pistol, but he said, the reason he didn't shoot him was because he didn't.

He had his 22 shell in the gun.

So he said, I know how to do it now.

He says, I'd taken, put thread around the shell.

And he says, when I put it in and it'll fit in a chamber and he says, I can get them this time.

And he's now Chicago, he works, he quit drinking.

And he's a janitor, Kelly the clown.

He's got a face, just like old Kelly.

Some of them fellows have short fuses him and old Wydie had gotten a pretty good Pats, his real name again, a pretty good argument there.

Cause he wanted to drink Pat didn't wanna give him one.

Now this is what the fellows are doing when not much to do, not much to play around with they'd sit in a hotel, and they'd like I say, like a San Francisco pool they'd throw in whatever change you had just a fellow used to play a piano.

Now you can see him and then they would get enough money and they would buy, if they had enough to buy a gallon you buy a gallon of that enough to buy half gallon.

Here they got a half a gallon and they grab that bottle.

And they will take turns going around from one to another.

A lot of these fellows were veterans to.

One fellow, I asked him he was one of the best tinsmiths I've ever seen, he could make knives out of tin.

He could make anything, he said, John, "I had two jobs in Chicago and there wasn't enough to satisfy my wife.

Finally, one day I said to hell with it".

He says, "I got drunk, I went up to flophouse in Chicago.

I got drunk, I found out about the railroad workers.

I went to work there" and he said, " I've never been back since" now that fellows lived right over here from 26 to 26 Minneapolis and he says "my relations fight over my mother and dad's house and that was just too much".

And he says, "I walked across the street and discussed and I talked to some of the railroad workers.

They were working in the big shipyards there and told me that they go out every once in a while.

And then they go down to Skid Row and have a good time".

He says, "I joined them" until the day he died.

He never went back to his home.

Although he was living down in Washington Avenue but he was at the veteran's hospital.

And I finally got a hold of his relation when he didn't want to have nothing to do with them.

How these fellas, I know you feel sorry for the wrong people say, yeah, they lived a miserable life but they said, what we don't want is responsibility.

And down here, we can do what we want.

We don't have to worry about paying bills, raising kids paying payments on cars or houses and this and that.

That was their choosings of all them that I know down there.

I don't think there was one or maybe even two that ever, never really sobered up, most of them died at early age in their forties, this was an Indian boy that had got in a fight with one of his buddies.

And he crawled in under there.

Now it was about, oh, I'd say about 10 above.

And it tar pitched roast siron you can imagine he was hot and warm when he laid down and he fell asleep and this is what happened, it embedded right into the cuts and outta his face.

It was pitiful and he couldn't feel anything because his whole face was numb.

And he got out cut up because his friend had a knife and he I guess he worked them over pretty good.

So I took them down to general hospital and he must had some job trying to clean him up get that tar out of his cuts and that Skid Row was quite inexperienced but I never want to go through it again.

And they stacked for fighting.

This guy here took a swing at this old guy for no reason at all, he was kind of, he must be a little tookie cause he just took a swing at him, I went up and really told him off, I said, you had hit him and I will hit you over the place.

Just leave him alone and this is a Persian Palms and this was Stockholm he's in different environments.

Stockholm during the depression used to turn the tapes, the taps of beer on and they would never turn them off.

They had that much business, this was during the depression and the, Persian Palms which is just down a few doors.

Sold more champagne than any place in the world.

There's a little scene across over there.

This fellow is deaf and dumb and his girlfriend when he'd get a few drinks, and boy he'd give her a hard time.

- By the 1950s, American cities in general were starting to get really worried about their future in Minneapolis.

In particular when General Mills which had been headquartered downtown announced it was moving to Golden Valley in the mid 1950s.

That was kind of a shot across the bow that we need to do something about the Gateway District.

They proposed, what was the most ambitious downtown redevelopment project in the nation's history and entailed the demolition of 40% of downtown Minneapolis nearly 200 buildings in a three-year period.

And with it, all of the homes for the better part of 3000 people - [James] Men of the Gateway, these were not guys who left behind memoirs, who wrote letters, who were sort of joining clubs where their names would be known.

A lot of them were alcoholics but not all of them, which is interesting, some of them just wanted to live in a more communal environment with the companionship of other men.

The Gateway was also one of the other institutions that was very common were all of these rescue missions, religious organizations that viewed the problems of these Skid Row residents as a moral one, they would offer shelter, it was not very fancy.

Often you'd be sitting on a chair sleeping right on the floor but your first has to listen to a sermon and ear beating, some of them called it.

And these missions served a really important role in the community in terms of housing, some of these guys but I don't know what their track record was in terms of salvation.

Jerome Liebling plays in really interesting role in this.

You know, he was the head of the photography department at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s sort of a pioneer in documentary film and photography.

Jerome Liebling met with John and was fascinated with the fact that he shot footage of this place.

And so the art department at the University of Minnesota got ahold of John's footage and they stitched together the movies, I think it accounts for some of the more artful editing that happened there.

I think the film is so powerful because it portrays a community that doesn't exist anymore.

It wasn't just a collection of alcoholics.

It wasn't just a social blight.

These were human beings with their own stories.

(bright music) - So right now we're standing on the North Washington Avenue 100 block.

And this was the edge of the redevelopment area where there's a whole foods market now but it was a Pontiac and then a Jaguar dealership which had been put in after the Gateway redevelopment.

But you do get some older structures here.

And these buildings here give you an idea of what might happen, if they'd left the Gateway alone.

- We often lament the loss of the historic architecture.

That's what I've seen in a lot of folks who talk about that area is it's too bad that all those beautiful buildings got demolished but the real tragedy is the loss of those options.

That place in the city, where you could let your hair down where you could be yourself and the rules of society didn't apply.

- Everyone knew this era was coming to an end but what was so strange about it was that for the rest of the city and the state, they described these men as strangers as if they didn't know where they came from, when in fact these were the people who built the Upper Midwest.

- [John] Now this is a little Poli friend of mine and they lived down there.

This was a fellow I told you about was a tinsmith.

And see they go down there when they want to sober up underneath the Third Avenue bridge it's a little jungle down there and they'd go down there.

And there's a creek where water runs from the rocks and they'd put a little old canvas whatever they could find over there.

And they'd sleep there night and day rain or anything.

They lived there at sometimes two, three weeks sometimes a couple of months and they'd fish carp out of that river, I've seen them catch carp 30 pounders easily, that was pure water too.

It's still there to spring, it comes right out of the side of the hill, this is just some more of the jungle by the Third Avenue bridge, pretty steep climbing sometime, now this jungle was West of the old Great Northern Station right along the Mississippi River.

Where they're going to put a huge bunch of condominiums and a shopping center, everything else.

And a lot of fellows were there and quite a few Indian girls and see the gunboats there where they cooked their meals and so forth.

One of these fellows is in this picture?

He went out to the West Coast and I saw him few years ago and he married a contractor's wife and he's a rich man up there.

I couldn't believe it, he pulled up in a big Cadillac and said "do you remember me, Johnny Rex"?

Well, I didn't remember him, but after a while I could recognize his face but I didn't know what his name was.

He lived there, so this was a place where they catch the trains going through Minneapolis.

They knew just about when they arrived.

There you have to really look out in the jungle.

Cause a lot of trainers come through and some of them were pretty rough, there's one old timer that was sent to a hotel and we found out that he had murdered a couple of fellows.

Now this the gunboats, which nothing but a big old can usually for coffee or some kind of a food.

And these fellows would go out to somebody to go out and wrap it up a few bucks and then he'd go and buy some pork and other fellas get some beans and a pour in some of that water.

And boy, they made soup that just wouldn't quit.

They found his fellow face down over Nicollet Island.

I think somebody murdered them.

So they'd asked me if I knew any of these fellow that would get hurt or something like that.

Cause I kept a regular photographic album of all these fellows I'd take their picture would come in.

And I knew him, I notified is next of kin backed then.

I think I know who killed him, but I wasn't positive.

But some of the fellows told me.

This what was Nicollet Island was what a change?

Here's one of the fellows, like I told you jungle going to meet the trains, train would stop there to be switched and they'd get on.

Here's our friend going back, all dress up.

Just kind of going over and showing you some of the old places again.

Now this is the beginning of the end of Skid Row.

You can see how fast he's building went down because there was no steal in them whatsoever.

Just wood and brick, now all they had to do a swing that big old bucket just barely hit it and it'd fall down.

Thank God we never had a fire there.

That whole area would have burned, it's a fire escape.

- The demolition of the Gateway had been proposed in theorized for 50 years before it actually happened.

So the city kept trying and kept trying and kept trying to get rid of all these buildings and all these people who were there.

Skid Row was a threat to development.

It was a threat to the health of the city.

South dale Mall had opened, people were starting to move out into the suburbs and so the city was getting desperate and they were getting scared, so overnight, all these places are gone and wouldn't you know it within a few years, you start to see the Happy Hour starts to pick up in business.

Later on in the seventies, you see the Brass Rail becomes a gay bar, you can see that these places tried to stay as close as humanly possible to where the Gateway was and it's almost like if you think of a pool table and you knock a ball and it just shoots off in this direction, that's what happened.

Skid Row gets demolished and folks just move out along Hennepin out towards, Uptown.

The Twin Cities Pride Parade route begins near Hennepin, Nicollet, Washington in the remnants of Skid Row.

And it moves out along Hennepin to Loring Park.

I don't know if the organizers intended to recreate this Exodus every year, but that's what it does.

You start at the place where the known world of the LGBTQ community begins when you move out as they did out towards Loring Park.

And I would argue that the Twin Cities Pride route is an echo of that loss, nobody thought of it, nobody intended it but it's almost like a record groove.

It was so deeply ingrained for so long that even after all the buildings are gone even after all of its, you know, distant memory.

Now you're still recreating that same thing.

You cannot demolish behavior, if you demolish the buildings you demolish the places where people hang out they're just going to find another spot.

- You can't just eliminate Skid Row by bulldozing part of your city, in the years, since this same tension has been exposed even before the pandemic, the homeless problem burst into view with the wall of forgotten natives in 2018, a huge tent encampment appearing forcing the state to confront the continuing problem of homelessness and drug abuse.

It's a phenomenon that you can't eliminate through rearrangement of, of bricks and mortar.

- We don't get rid of social problems by, by gentrification Minneapolis and Minnesota are such prosperous places, right?

Where people have high levels of education and kind of a great place to live in a lot of ways.

But we have social problems here that we perhaps ignore.

You know, we had that huge homeless camp in Minneapolis.

And I think it's kind of shocking when you see the prosperity of the Twin Cities and to see a homeless camp of that size shows that Skid Row is alive in a different way.

- These were people, these were human beings thousands of them who lived there and they built a world for themselves and it took decades for them to build this community.

And they did to the extent possible they took care of each other and they watched out for each other, you know Bacich himself watched out for the gay men who would go to his bar, - so where did they go?

the short answer is we don't know as callous as sometimes the rhetoric was, the city did realize that they would potentially be creating a new problem, if they just put nearly 3000 people on the street, they were proposing to build a complex for these men.

They identified a place where they were going to put it.

The neighborhood said no way, they did it again and again and again and after nine times they gave up.

And so these guys were kind of on their own in a lot of ways.

I love cities because cities always develop in ways that you can never predict.

And often the best things that happen in cities are things that planners never planned.

The Gateway was never planned to become what it was.

We lost something when we got rid of it there were some things that we could have saved - [John] Not a trace of it now for every dollar that they were paying taxes on them, Buildings back in the fifties, we are now getting about, I would say five 600 dollars because of all the new structures going up, and it was an era that I hope you never forget.

And I hope you enjoy this picture.

And I thank you very much for watching it.

It's an era that I hope were none of us, will never forget.

And I took these pictures entirely by myself so that some have used it have never seen or know what Skid Row was about.

Have an idea now, thank you very much.

My name is, as they said before, Johnny Rex, The ex King of Skid Row.

(bright music) (bright twinkling) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the friends of Minnesota Experience.