Road Trip Minnesota

Open for business or is this a free store?

These bus shelters offer a rent free opportunity to anyone bold enough to set up a business. You can find this shop at what is now “George Floyd Square”, the intersection of 38th & Chicago in Minneapolis. I don’t think Metro Transit uses these particular shelters anymore because of the round-a-bout and blockades make getting a big vehicle too difficult to get through.

Since I’ve been working the weekends driving Uber and Lyft, I haven’t been around the estate sales much and only a few yard sales throughout the summer. People don’t have yard sales here during the winter. Driving a cab, or the equivalent of a cab, these days is very different from the old taxi days when I worked downtown and ordinances kept me from picking up outside the city limits and taxis from outside the city limits were prevented from picking up fares in the city. A lot of things are nice about this, venturing around the entire metro area and sometimes beyond for one. I get to see more and learn more about the place I live in. The Minneapolis city center is all but dead anyway because after the riots those downtown apartments began to empty out as the people who moved in from the outer regions decided to move back out. The pandemic work-from-home has emptied out some of the office buildings too and now the city is talking about converting those into “affordable” housing. The bottom has been falling out of commercial real estate ever since shopping online became popular, now some people only shop online and barely venture out to shop anymore. Investors had moved out of the commercial real estate and into the private housing market and companies like RealPage uses algorithms that management companies and landlords use to set the rents and those algorithms were set high all over the nation. But high rents aren’t the only reason we’re seeing an increasing amount of homelessness, that’s more of a drug problem, a very big drug problem and mental illness. Even the old hoboes that have been homeless most if not all their lives because of alcohol and drug abuse say that this next generation is very different from their days on the streets and in the rail yards. The old school hoboes kept their camps out of site and weren’t the nuisance these ones today are. The synthetic drug abuse is much different from the old organic drug abuse is one reason and there are a lot more people affected by it too.

I don’t work in the city much anymore as most business has shifted out to the suburbs and beyond. I don’t see homeless camps in the suburbs, I don’t see people on the corners and freeway ramps holding up signs begging, and the roads are a lot smoother too.

We’re in a new era and it almost makes me feel my age. That’s a realization that can be hard to come by sometimes. Time moves on and we hardly notice the change until we find ourselves on the outside of a new generation. Though much remains the same we are very different, the world has changed and moved out of our age. It’s a generation gap. We might think we’re keeping up with the times, but really we’re not. We think different, look different, wear different clothes and most of all our memories are different. We might like the same music and even agree on many things, but that difference is there, just like our own parent’s difference was there to us when we were young.

I don’t ever remember seeing a bus shelter being used as a shop when I was young, I didn’t see homeless camps, but I have seen hobo’s camps, growing up near railroad tracks and many empty lots full of weeds. I remember black and white television and the fuzzy static when television programs ended for the night. I remember going to concerts and thinking $25 was a lot to pay for a ticket when prices rose from $15. Positively Fourth Street record shop where I bought numerous LPs at $4.99 each. They also had cool stuff, head shop stuff. Dinky Town Crazy Daze when all the shops in Dinkytown pushed their sales out onto the sidewalks and it was a big event that excited everyone. Ralph & Jerry’s convenient store where they sold T-shirts that advertised the store and encouraged everyone to “Eat and Spend Money.” I gave mine to a friend I met in New Orleans who came from Australia. Many years later when the Mall of America was close to opening, my same friend who became a journalist was sent here to do a story and I took him to Ralph & Jerry’s just so he could replace that T-Shirt with another. He bought one of the last of its kind because Ralph & Jerry’s is now gone and new owners have taken over the space.

Dinkytown has changed too. I grew up with a girl whose father owned The House of Hansen in Dinkytown, a small grocery store. The old folks in Dinkytown tried to persuade her not to sell her store to the developers but she was smart enough to see that holding out wasn’t going to do her any good and change was going to come anyway. Now a it’s a big building. So is the old high school, a huge tall building with a few shops on the bottom floors and apartments above. I’ve been on the West Bank now for many years and hardly ever cross the river to the East Bank side anymore. People who’ve lived on this side of the river for most of their lives too try to resist change, they don’t want some buildings to be torn down, they try to preserve their past, their own memories of their own lives. I try to tell them, we can’t do that, the future isn’t ours anymore, it belongs to this new generation and we’re on our way out so let them have it. Their memories are already a lot different from ours and they’re busy making new ones and changing too.

I remember the days after the old dance studio in Dinkytown caught fire and had to be torn down, people took over that space to prevent a fast food restaurant becoming a chain, “Red Barn,” from building and moving in. People back then were protesting the commercialization that we see and take for granted and even rely on today. Willie Murphy and the Bumblebees even wrote and played a song titled, “Supermarket”. The Red Owl on East Hennepin where my mom shopped for the family groceries was the biggest supermarket back then but wasn’t thought of as one, maybe because Red Owl wasn’t trying to chain their way across the country, at least they didn’t seem to that I can remember. That whole East Gate shopping center, an old strip mall basically, was torn down and replaced by one of the many gigantic buildings that we see and are still going up today, replacing the old with apartments on the floors above shops. Red Owl is long gone and has been replaced by a Lunds-Byerlys. Anyway, back to the protests. There was the Vietnam war that was still drafting boys right out of high school and protests all over the country against that war. Dinkytown was ripe for protests and the old dance studio part of that block was taken over by students and protesters of anything and everything. The vacant lot was turned into a “People’s Park” and vacant buildings were taken over by squatters and turned into a soup kitchen. Many of the squatters were not the homeless, they were political and had given up their apartments just to be there and others just refusing to pay rent to the capitalist pigs they knew as landlords. I was a freshman in high school when all this was going on, I had taken to skipping school and along with two other friends from school we would go out panhandling. We’d get a free water cup from McDonald’s or somewhere and then hit the streets with spiels like, we’re collecting to save the whales and some such. We did turn most of that money into to soup kitchen and they fed us. What little we kept was enough to splurge for a treat, like a candy bar or something from the bakery.

Well, the good old days, they come and they go and then new ones come along. Bad times do the same and right now we are in bad times.

I had recently come across this book at a sale nearby and just finished reading it. I remember the early Cold War days but my knowledge at the time was very limited. I remember my Dad would tell us kids we didn’t want the Communists to take over because if they do, they’ll just take over our house and we’ll have strangers moving in with us and we’ll be kicked out. I was too little to understand anything then and people of my generation grew up believing a lot of things they were told as kids. The Atomic bomb was going to take us out and the communists were going to be the one’s who bomb us. One day, I think I was about 5 or 6 years old, a paper factory a few blocks down the street blew up and there was a big flash of light and the whole house shook, the windows rattled and all that. One of my older sisters went into a convulsions crying that the war has started and the bomb dropped on us. I was still only curious then so I don’t remember crying. It wasn’t until I read this book did I understand that the bomb threat was really between Russia and China but we would get fallout from the winds blowing it this way. Not many people knew what to expect back then so of course could only think the worst. I question now how well were we really informed back then compared to now. I don’t keep up with much, but this is the first time I even knew about this Russian and China as enemies. Back then, those bombs couldn’t reach us anyway, but we all lived in fear as if they could. How well are we informed now?

I think of the tipping issue in the service industry when I think about what I hear on the news these days. A few years ago there was lots of talk and debate over tipping and should people tip, but not a peep about the $2.65 an hour service workers made and who relied on those tips. Kitchen staff complained they never got a cut, etc. That was and still is the minimum wage for those service workers. However, if the wages were brought up to and above the minimum wages then the price of eating out would have to go up and nobody wanted that and the servers wanted to keep their tips. Since then, the service industry has suffered because those tips have not come back to what they were before. Now, only recently, a few years after all that blabbering, there was a brief mention of this below average minimum wage service workers make, but it was only brief, no extensive talks or debates, just a blurb most people probably didn’t hear. And this was on NPR! Our trusted news station!