×


 x 

Shopping cart
James Eli Shiffer - The King of Skid Row: John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis - 9780816698295 - V9780816698295
Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.

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

€ 25.90
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for The King of Skid Row: John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis Hardback. Num Pages: 200 pages, illustrations. BIC Classification: 1KBBN; HBJK. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 203 x 152 x 23. Weight in Grams: 363.

The story of a much different Minneapolis, through the words and photographs of one of its most colorful characters—now in paperback
 

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 souls. Sociology researchers posing as vagrants studied them. And in their midst John Bacich, aka Johnny Rex, who owned a bar, a liquor store, and a cage ... Read more

 

The King of Skid Row follows Johnny Rex into this vanished world that once thrived in the heart of Minneapolis. Drawing on hours of interviews conducted in the three years before Bacich’s death in 2012, James Eli Shiffer brings to life the eccentric characters and strange events of an American skid row. Supplemented with archival and newspaper research and his own photographs, Bacich’s stories recreate the violent, alcohol-soaked history of a city best known for its clean, progressive self-image. His life captures the seamy, richly colorful side of the city swept away by a massive urban renewal project in the early 1960s and gives us, in a glimpse of those bygone days, one of Minneapolis’s most intriguing figures—spinning some of its most enduring and enthralling tales.

Show Less

Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
2016
Publisher
University of Minnesota Press United States
Number of pages
200
Condition
New
Number of Pages
200
Place of Publication
Minnesota, United States
ISBN
9780816698295
SKU
V9780816698295
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About James Eli Shiffer
James Eli Shiffer has been a professional journalist for thirty years and is an editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. In 2010, he partnered with Ewen Media to create Rubbed Out, a multimedia history of the murder of a journalist in Minneapolis in 1945. He was a member of the Star Tribune team whose coverage of the killing of ... Read more

Reviews for The King of Skid Row: John Bacich and the Twilight Years of Old Minneapolis
"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 ... Read more

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


Subscribe to our newsletter

News on special offers, signed editions & more!