For anyone who grew up out in the sticks and harbored big-city dreams fueled by pulp novels and Hollywood noir, Minneapolis’ Elliot Park neighborhood is living evidence that there are still little pockets around the Twin Cities that could give Brooklyn and Chicago’s Southside a run for their money.
Tucked away south of downtown, penned in by interstate highways and dwarfed by the city’s skyline, Elliot Park is an inner-city neighborhood in every sense of the word. Its poverty and unemployment levels are historically (and substantially) higher than those for Minneapolis in general, and its once aging population has been thinned out in recent decades, making way for the sort of dizzying sidewalk diversity that is now most commonly associated with older and larger eastern cities. It is also, in places, a model of the hardscrabble picturesque, and seems an inevitable candidate for gentrification.
The neighborhood—which includes the Hennepin County Medical Center and North Central University (founded in 1930 by the Assemblies of God church)—is one of the city’s oldest, having sprung up in the wake of the mid-nineteenth-century industrialization of the river around St. Anthony Falls. The park itself, one of the first in Minneapolis, is nudged up against South Eighth Street. Originally a farm, the land was donated to the city in 1893 by the neighborhood’s namesake, a physician.
Though the area was thought swank, however so briefly, in the late nineteenth century—evidence remains in the handsome mansions along Park Avenue—it has almost always been a working-class neighborhood.
Elliot Park’s melting-pot meeting place is the tiny Band Box Diner, since 1934 the anchor of the tangled, off-the-grid intersection of East Fourteenth Street and South Tenth Street, just west of Chicago Avenue. The Band Box, a locally designated historic landmark, is the last survivor of what was once a small regional restaurant chain. It’s an architectural gem, done in the style of streamline moderne, that’s been preserved and expanded but still retains the feel of an authentically scruffy greasy spoon. The place has a no-nonsense attitude coupled with an obvious pride in its history as a neighborhood institution. It also has terrific (and cheap) burgers and American fries that are out of this world. Walt Whitman would be right at home on one of its counter stools, as would Iceberg Slim or H. L. Mencken.
Directly across the street from the diner is a row of tidy brownstones that wouldn’t look out of place in lower Manhattan. They share a block with the Del Kingsriter Centre for Intercultural Relations, which additional signs announce is home to such apparent adjuncts of North Central University as Cross Cultural Ministries, Deaf Culture Studies, and the Deaf International Bible College.
On the opposite side of South Tenth, there’s a string of abandoned storefronts, formerly the headquarters of Gateway of Hope’s Eshkol Mission. The spaces have been completely cleared out with the exception of a window display of a painting of Jesus on black velvet, framed by a hand-lettered sign: “Sin would have fewer takers if … the consequences were immediate.”
On a recent bright autumn afternoon, a man wearing an eye patch and a worn suit with the pant legs rolled up to his knees and secured with Ace bandages was standing on the sidewalk outside the empty storefronts. He was hunched over and peering intently into the rearview mirror of a parked car as he ran an electric razor over his face.
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