BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
While the future’s there for anyone to change, still you know, it seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past. –Jackson Browne, “Fountain of Sorrow”
In the summer of 2015, after many months of debate, the Minneapolis City Council voted to make an oddly-shaped area of Dinkytown, roughly comprising two or three blocks, a designated Historic District. The two sides of this debate were historic preservationists on the one side, including neighborhood activists, former residents, small business owners and others, and on the other side, property developers, many of whom apparently really believe that Dinkytown can only “survive” if it’s full of high-density, high-cost high-rise student and professionals housing. (And to be sure, some probably don’t care, but there is a lot of money to be made.) Oddly, and this is the ideal outcome from a politician’s point of view, both sides claimed victory in this case. The developers had been able to get the historic district pared down to where they believed that they pretty much had free rein to do all the future development they would need or want. And the historical preservationists were glad, after 160-plus years, to finally have it recognized that there is something there worth preserving, even if no one, including they themselves, can agree on exactly what that is.
Dinkytown is not itself a Minneapolis neighborhood, officially. It’s a major section within the neighborhood called Marcy-Holmes, which stretches from Central Avenue SE in the west to 15th Avenue SE in the east and is bounded on the north by the railway trench, which now carries the Dinkytown Greenway, and on the south by the Mississippi River and the University of Minnesota campus. Interstate 35 bisects it into east and west halves. Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association is now old hands at fighting for and winning historic districts. Dinkytown brought the total within the neighborhood to four. Dinkytown as a whole includes the area from University Avenue SE to 5th Street SE and from 10th Avenue SE to 15th Avenue SE, but the historic district is just a fraction of that, centered around the hub corner of 4th Street and 14th Avenue. Until the fairly recent explosion of mid-rise student-oriented housing, sometimes derisively called “brotels,” the area was far more important as a cultural and retail hub than a residential section. Now, in addition to gaining many transient young residents, it has lost churches, a couple of schools, and many other cultural institutions, along with scores of beloved retail, dining and drinking establishments.
It could be said that the uncertainty and lack of consensus about what matters in Dinkytown’s past has a bearing on the uncertainty and lack of consensus about its future. So even though the City Council has voted and the historic designation is a done deal, the struggle continues between the forces of pure capitalism and the forces of something that includes yet transcends capitalism—something that people can get metaphysical about, as if a place can have a soul. In the historic preservation game, the essential thing is to identify a target’s “significant period.” What in this district’s or this building’s past influenced something bigger, makes it unique, or lingers on today in something irreplaceable? Ideally, you want the building’s significant period to be at least close to when it was built. For a district, you want some buildings to be identifiable with that significant period.
Dinkytown’s problem, from a preservationist perspective, is that this is far from the case. It has had two main significant periods. The first was the late 19th and early 20th century, when the University of Minnesota was moved from St. Anthony to its present East Bank Campus. At the same time, the mills along the Mississippi were becoming mature and prosperous. It was a time of both commercial-industrial growth and rapid growth in the university and its community. Horse-drawn streetcars eventually gave way to electric ones, and horse-drawn carriages to cars. Students flocked in from all over the country. Publishing houses sprang up and modest housing for mill workers and railway workers were built, along with more elegant homes for university faculty and the beginnings of the Greek letter society houses. And then, some 50 years later, there was the period from the post-war boom years to the early 1970s, when enrollment in the U of M grew enormously, and Dinkytown was the epicenter of several cultural earthquakes, including folk music, political idealism, intellectual fervor, anti-war organizing and the rise of the youth counterculture. But few if any of the buildings in the historic district actually date from either of these time periods. Most were built in the 50 years between, and then remodeled, repurposed and recycled over and over as change swept through the always volatile area. Only one or two of the businesses that were sites of these cultural fault lines from the late 1950s through the 1970s are still in business. And some of the buildings that preservationists most prized—the Ten O’Clock Scholar coffeehouse, the old Marshall High School and the House of Hanson are examples—were already razed and replaced before the fight even started.
Soon after this pause in the struggle for historic preservation, a neighborhood activist published a book on the history of Dinkytown. The book is “Dinkytown: Four Blocks of History,” written by Bill Huntzicker, with an introduction by and based partially on earlier research by Steven Bergerson. It includes a treasure trove of historical photographs and a wealth of oral testimony, and seeks to describe, even if it cannot wholly define, just what this soul of Dinkytown is that needs preserving. On Oct. 27, at 6 p.m. at the Southeast Public Library in the center of Dinkytown, there will be a neighborhood event promoting the book and giving the public a chance to meet and talk with the author.
One of the chapters in the book is devoted to bookstores. The only bookstore left today in Dinkytown (unless you count Magus, which is not primarily a bookseller) is The Book House, a store which last year celebrated its 40th year in existence. The name of Kristen Eide-Tollefson, owner of the Book House for almost all of that time, is well known to the book trade and to people with any familiarity at all with Dinkytown’s history. In August of 2015, she began the process of transitioning the ownership of the bookstore into the hands of longtime managers Matt Hawbaker and Ryan Hinderaker.
The Book House is well worth a visit, whether you are a book collector yourself and want to be delighted and enticed, or you are not that into it and want to see what all the fuss is about. If you’re in the latter camp, just know that there are not many bookstores like this around any more, and it’s not certain that there always will be. The Book House is currently on the second floor of the building called Dinkydale, in a space that used to be the Dinkytown Antiquarian Bookseller, in the days when there were lots of booksellers in the area. Dinkydale, part of the historic designation area, came into existence in 1971, when Jerry Manes and Phil Greenberg, two local businessmen, converted the famous College Inn, actually an SRO rooming house, into retail space.
The question is, was the historic designation too little or too late, or maybe both, or will it be enough to stem the tide of brotelification? Stadium Village is another case in similar throes, but without a strong neighborhood organization to go to bat for it. It’s in the area of restaurants that the character of a commercial area can quickly be turned, for better or for worse. In Stadium Village, a high-rise apartment complex to be built shortly has led to the rapid demise of four favorites, one a very longtime superstar—the Village Wok. The other three are the Big10, Bun Mi Sandwich Shop and Espresso Expose, whose owner also owns The Purple Onion in Dinkytown.
Currently, two popular restaurants’ locations in Dinkytown just outside the tiny historic district) are threatened by the latest student housing development proposal. CPM Properties is seeking to build a 16-floor housing complex on 14th Avenue, but it is being vigorously opposed by Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association. Meanwhile, there are some good developments in the restaurant realm. The arrival of Kbop in Dinkytown marks the advent of the first Korean eatery there. And recently there opened a new branch of the popular Himalayan (Lake Street), serving casual fast food in the Nepalese/Tibetan tradition. What might now be the longest-standing Dinkytown food vendor, Al’s Breakfast, is safely within the historic district, so that’s a relief.
