It’s Map Monday. Our diagram today shows the boundaries of the “liquor patrol limits” or the area where liquor sales were legal in Minneapolis for most of the twentieth century. This restriction–which was first incorporated into the city charter in 1884–has played a central role in the city’s politics and development since it was first enacted. When Minneapolis voters go to the polls tomorrow , they will decide whether to reject the last vestiges of this nineteenth century urban planning vision.

The 1884 “patrol limits” made Minneapolis unique. Other cities had banned alcohol. But Minneapolis charted what seemed like a pragmatic middle ground between prohibition and tolerance. Mayor George A. Pillsbury–who was part of the band of New England Yankees who controlled politics and industry in Minneapolis until World War II– led efforts to concentrate liquor sales into a small part of town, limiting what he believed to be the moral contagion of saloons and placating residents inspired by the swelling temperance movement who demanded that liquor be banned from their neighborhoods.

Under Pillsbury’s leadership, the cost of liquor licenses increased fivefold and bars were limited to the areas of the city that were oldest and most dominated by immigrants. They were allowed downtown around Bridge Square, the area that later became the Gateway District or Lower Loop. They were sanctioned in Northeast Minneapolis, home to many residents of German and Slavic descent. And they were tolerated along Cedar Avenue in Seven Corners–an area known as “Snoose Boulevard” that had the highest concentration of foreign-born residents in the city.

By 1902, Washington Avenue had become saloon row. One-third of the city’s licensed drinking establishments were located along a two miles stretch of this street between the railroad depots and Seven Corners. City leaders boasted that this tight concentration of bars benefitted both public safety and the public purse. A tiny police force was able to maintain order in the growing city.

Prohibition suspended legal liquor sales. But when they resumed in 1934, Minneapolis reinstated its patrol limits, which were expanded southward to Franklin Avenue in 1959. But it was clear that these tight restrictions seemed to encourage corruption. Multiple scandals involving liquor licenses, organized crime and city officials helped to discredit this zoning scheme in the eyes of voters, who voted to repeal the liquor patrol limits in 1974.

Even after the patrol limits were lifted, however, liquor licenses remained expensive and difficult to obtain. And until very recently, it was almost impossible to get permission to sell alcohol in neighborhood restaurants.

With tomorrow’s election, the age of the liquor patrol limits may finally come to an end. City voters are being asked to vote on the city’s “70/30” rule, which seeks to curtail drinking in residential neighborhoods. Restaurant owners have called for the suspension of the rule that requires them to earn 70 percent of their revenue from food instead of alcohol. I’m wondering whether Minneapolitans will finally banish a city planning ordinance conceived at the height of the nineteenth century temperance movement?

This map–and the information for this post–come from Jim Hathaway, who wrote a 1982 dissertation on liquor controls in the Twin Cities for the geography department at the University of Minnesota. His research was distilled into an article for Hennepin History Magazine that was published in the Fall of 1985. This map is from that publication.

It’s Map Monday. Our selection today takes us back to 1885. This detail from the Hopkins plat map shows the intersection of Washington and Hennepin Avenues at the moment when this junction was the commercial heart of Minneapolis. On the right side of the image is the City Hall, located in the area known as Bridge Square. At the time this municipal building was constructed in 1873, this crossroads was the gateway to the city, the main artery for traffic across the Mississippi River from St. Anthony and St. Paul.

At the center of the frame is the Academy of Music, which was built in 1871 and was considered the “finest theater in the Northwest,” according to local historian and booster Isaac Atwater. Containing a “spacious auditorium” seen as “far in advance of the city’s needs” upon construction, it was administered by a businessman who was both optimistic and idealistic. Real estate investor Edwin W. Herrick sought to “cultivate the public taste for music and to elevate the moral standard of the drama” in the city.

The Academy faced stiff competition from a raft of “variety theaters” in the same neighborhood. These establishments, which began operating in the 1870s, blurred the lines between theater, bar and brothel. Catering to the large population of unmarried men who spent part of each year in this neighborhood by the Mississippi River, businesses like the Theater Louvre and Theater Comique helped seasonal workers pass the time–and spend their accumulated savings–between jobs in the lumber or railroad camps.

Located off this map on First Avenue South, Theater Comique was the leading purveyor of this type of entertainment. It prospered through a time-tested formula that paired bawdy stage shows with rivers of liquor and mountains of tobacco. “Vice is rampant at the notorious Theater Comique,” the Penny Press fulminated in 1894, decrying the theater as “a constant menace to the community from a moral and sanitary point of view.” Twenty years after its establishment, the thriving theater was more troubling than ever, according to this editorialist. “The dive, always bad and degrading, has been sinking steadily year by year, until now it is the vilest place in the whole city, and the orgies carried on would make even the most depraved and hardened inmate of the lowest bagnio [brothel] blush.”

The Academy of Music made city leaders proud. But in contrast to the Theater Comique, it failed to make money. Perhaps coincidentally, the Academy burned in a spectacular fire on Christmas Day, 1884, when firefighters were preoccupied with their holiday dinners. The next year, Herrick refurbished the Academy block not as a fine arts theater but as an office building, a use that proved far more profitable for its owner.

All images–including the Hopkins plat map– are from the Hennepin County Library Special Collections. Material for the text was taken from Lawrence J. Hill, Dives and Diversions: The Variety Theaters of Early Minneapolis, Hennepin Lawrence James Hill, “Dives and Diversions: The Variety Theaters of Early Minneapolis,” Hennepin History Magazine, Fall, 1987. Isaac Atwater, History of Minneapolis, Minnesota. New York: Munsell & Company, Publishers, 1893.

It’s Map Monday. And it’s Indigenous Peoples Day in Minneapolis, which has adopted this new celebration to replace the long-controversial commemoration of Columbus Day.

With one of the largest urban communities of Native Americans in North America, Minneapolis has been a long-time center for indigenous activism. And it was these activists who convinced the City Council earlier this year to scrap Columbus Day, which has been under attack for years as racist tribune to the brutal colonization and dispossession of the Native peoples of North America.

Indigenous Peoples Day seeks to recognize the history of American Indians in the city. Ojibwe people began migrating to Minneapolis in large numbers during World War II, when war industries offered the prospect of steady employment for impoverished rural dwellers. These migrants made the city’s Phillips neighborhood–with its commercial corridor along Franklin Avenue– a national center for Indian life.

These new Minneapolitans built community through a network of institutions designed to help newcomers find jobs, housing, healthcare, education and social support in a city that was often hostile to Indians. Notable among these early groups was the Upper Midwest American Indian Center, which in 1961 became a center for these mutual aid efforts. In 1975, the Minneapolis American Indian Center opened on Franklin Avenue, the physical epicenter of the urban Indian community.

Most famously, in 1968 the city became the birthplace of the American Indian Movement, which mounted a frontal assault on institutionalized racism. According to founder Dennis Banks, AIM sought to challenge the city’s law enforcement and civil authorities which used the “prisons, courts, police, treaties” to create a brutal environment of oppression for Native Americans.

From its beginnings in south Minneapolis, AIM quickly grew into a national organization and is credited with fundamentally reshaping popular understandings of indigenous peoples. Its avowedly revolutionary agenda–and its repudiation of non-violence–also made it one of the most feared organizations of its time. This militancy prompted intensified surveillance of Native Americans, especially those in Minneapolis. Activists responded to harassment from local and federal authorities by printing this bumper sticker:

This political artifact came to me from the personal collection of Native American scholar and activist David Beaulieu, who explained that “No! I’m Not Dennis Banks” was meant to be a humorous rejoinder to police harassment. In pursuit of AIM leaders, police worked from the assumption that all Native Americans looked alike and that all Indians in the city were part of a violent revolutionary conspiracy. The bumper sticker was meant to protest the police practice of stopping all Native American motorists.

While the 1970s was a dramatic period for Native Americans in the city, this history stretches much further into the past. Long before this urban Indian community took shape, “long before the white man ever dream of our existence, the Dakota roamed this land,” Wanbdi Wakiya has written. The Dakota hunted and fished; collected maple sugar and harvested wild rice on the land that became Minneapolis for centuries before the United States established its military outpost at Fort Snelling in 1819.

In the 1830s, a small band of Dakota led by Cloud Man established an innovative new settlement that sought to integrate American agricultural practices into Dakota lifeways. Drawn by Indian agent Lawrence Taliferro, this map featured above shows this settlement–the village of Heyate Otunwe, “the village at the side” that was located on the east side of Lake Calhoun. Taliaferro’s hand labeled it as “Eatonville Agricultural Estab. 1828.”  It was at this village that the Dakota language was first systematically recorded on paper by missionaries Samuel and Gideon Pond, who sought to translate the Bible into Dakota. Though this agricultural experiment was successful in many ways, the village was abandoned in 1839. Hostilities between the Ojibwe and Dakota had flared and inhabitants feared that the location made them too vulnerable to attack.

The rich story of Indians in Minneapolis has recently become the focus of a new initiative undertaken by Migizi Communications and Laura Waterman Wittstock, who is researching both government policies and material conditions that shaped the experience of Native American migrants to the cities in the period after World War II. Check out this group’s Facebook page, which shares tidbits from their research each week. And check out the celebration at the Minneapolis American Indian Center later today. The event will feature food, poetry, dance performances and speeches. Speakers will include former vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke, Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges, U.S. Senator Al Franken and U.S. Representative Keith Ellison.

Sources for this post include Brenda J. Child, Holding our World Together; Julie L. Davis, Survival Schools; Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota, Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, eds. The bumper stickers is from the private collection of David Beaulieu. The quote from Wanbdi Wakiya is from Mni Sota Makoce. The map–originally drawn by Lawrence Taliaferro and in the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society– was reproduced here from the essay by Katherine Beane in Mni Sota Makoce.

Today’s blogger is Heidi Heller, a senior history major at Augsburg College and an intern with the Historyapolis Project.

As part of our continuing homage to Oktoberfest, today we continue the saga of beer brewing we began on Monday. For a map and early history click here.

Brewing in Minneapolis peaked between the 1870s to the 1890s, when beer manufacturies multiplied. Entrepreneurs were eager to profit from the growing demand for beer from in the growing city, as saloons, hotels and gaming halls proliferated. Yet few of them could actually figure out how to profit from what seemed to be a golden opportunity. The smaller enterprises could not compete with larger operations. And these larger companies found themselves facing new threats from international brewing syndicates, which saw the profits they could make in the American market.

In the interest of survival, larger brewers sought to pool their resources. The biggest merger occurred in July 1890 when four breweries – John Orth Brewing Company, Heinrich Brewing Association, F.D. Noerenberg and Germania Brewing Association–became one. The new company was known as the Minneapolis Brewing Company and in 1897 consolidated all its operations into a new brewery located near the Orth Brewery on Marshall St NE. In the years after the merger, Grain Belt Beer would become the flagship brand for the company. In 1967,  the company would change its name to Grain Belt Breweries, Inc. This image, from the Hennepin County Library Special Collections, shows the brewery in 1941.

 

Even the biggest breweries soon found themselves under siege from an increasingly powerful temperance movement, which was determined to ban alcohol. When Prohibition became law in 1920, beer was outlawed, along with all other alcohol. The photo at the top of this page shows Hennepin County Sheriff Earle Brown smashing an illegal still. Despite this show of government force, illicit producers benefited from Prohibition. But the city’s history brewing industry was brought to its knees.

The few remaining small breweries closed. And the brewing behemoths–namely the Minneapolis Brewing Company and Gluek–were forced to shift their operations to the production of near beer and soft drinks.But these new products did not generate enough profits. Gluek stayed afloat thanks to its owners’ diverse business ventures. After changing its name to the Golden Juice Company, the Minneapolis Brewing Company shuttered its doors in 1929.

When prohibition finally ended in 1933, both Gluek and the Minneapolis Brewing Company immediately resumed production of beer. But in the depths of the Great Depression, no other brewing entrepreneurs materialized. The Minneapolis brewing industry was just a shadow of its former self.

By the 1960s and 1970s, this skeletal brewing industry was further weakened by national competition. Local brewers found they were unable to keep up with technological advances and production costs. Gluek Brewery was sold to G. Heileman Brewing in Wisconsin and closed in 1964 after 107 years and Minneapolis’ oldest continuously operated business. The Gluek Brewery was demolished in 1966 to make way for the Northwestern Corrugated Box Company. The Grain Belt Brewing Company also was sold to G. Heileman Brewing and closed its northeast Minneapolis plant in 1975.

The building still remains a landmark in northeast and has been converted to offices and other modern uses.  Grain Belt brand returned to Minnesota in 2002 when the August Schell Brewing Company of New Ulm purchased the recipe and label.

Between 1986 and 2005, the James Page Brewing Company operated and laid the foundation for the boom in craft beer industry that emerged in the early 2000s. Today Minneapolis is once again home to a thriving brewing industry with fourteen breweries and brew pubs throughout the city.

Images and Sources: Images are from the Minneapolis photo collection at the Hennepin County Library Special Collections, Michael R. Worcester, “From the Land of the Golden Grain: The Origins and Early Years of the Minneapolis Brewing Company,” Hennepin History Magazine, Fall 1992, Michael Worcester, “John Orth: Hennepin County’s Pioneer Brewer,” Hennepin History Magazine, Spring 2006, Roland C. Amundson, “Listen to the Bottle Say “Gluek, Gluek, Gluek,” Hennepin History Magazine, Winter 1988-1989. Doug Hoverson, Land of Amber Waters: The History of Brewing in Minnesota, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. “Ale, yeah! Minnesota named the No. 10 craft beer state,” http://www.twincities.com/ci_23694801/ale-yeah-minnesota-becomes-no-10-craft-beer , “The future of Minnesota’s craft beer scene,” Minnesota Public Radio, http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/05/30/daily-circuit-friday-roundtable-beer, Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild, http://www.mncraftbrew.org/brewcations.