An elegiac look at a lost piece of Minneapolis’s past.

Minneapolis’s skid row, known as the Gateway district, was a lively area consisting of dozens of bars, flophouses, pawnshops, burlesque houses, charity missions, and office buildings that had aged past their prime. Encompassing some twenty-five blocks centering on the intersection of Hennepin, Washington, and Nicollet Avenues, the neighborhood was demolished between 1959 and 1963 as part of the first federally funded urban renewal project in America. Gathered here for the first time, Edwin C. Hirschoff’s stark and moving images of the Gateway district’s final days-its streets, buildings, and parks, the rubble, ... Read moresmoke, and heavy equipment of its destruction-eloquently capture its demise. Down and Out provides a unique historical perspective and the most extensive photographic record available of the Gateway demolition project.