The King of Skid Row: John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis

Description

City blue laws drove the liquor trade and its customers hard-drinking lumberjacks, pensioners, farmhands, and railroad workers into the oldest quarter of Minneapolis. In the fifty-cent-a-night flophouses of the city s Gateway District, they slept in cubicles with ceilings of chicken wire. In rescue missions, preachers and nuns tried to save their s

James Eli Shiffer has been a professional journalist for twenty-five years and is currently a columnist and editor at theMinneapolis Star Tribune. In 2010 he partnered with Ewen Media to create Rubbed Out, a multimedia history of the murder of a journalist in Minneapolis in 1945.

"In its final years, Skid Row was avoided by everyone except the police, storefront Bible-thumpers, slumming sociologists, and the occasional entrepreneur such as John Bacich-'Johnny Rex' to the drunks, drifters, and down-and-outers he served as publican and hotelier. James Eli Shiffer recalls the life and times of Johnny, Polack Wally, Moon Face Mary Ann, and other late-stage denizens of that dingy corner of Old Minneapolis with insight, wit, and compassion. The King of Skid Row is terrific urban history, beautifully told."-William Swanson, author of Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper and Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson "The King of Skid Row brings to boozy life the alcohol-sodden, corruption-filled era when Minneapolis' lost Gateway District harbored flop houses, slop joints, cage hotels, brothels, and raunchy speakeasies filled with B-girls and 'gandy-dancers.' Exceptionally literate, relentlessly humane, Shiffer peels back the veil from a dark and often violent past that, until now, had been literally paved over and believed forgotten. The King of Skid Row is a deft book that stirs together memoir, mystery, and history with the heartbreaking drama of how a city treats its most despondent and destitute. Moving and fascinating."-Paul Maccabee, author of John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crook's Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul "Many interesting stories."-Razorcake "Shiffer vividly evokes the neighborhood at its violent and drunken peak in this vivid and fascinating account of a bygone era."-City Pages "The King of Skid Row makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of urban history in the Midwest." -Middle West Review