twin city sidewalks: *** Sidewalk Weekend! ***

Sidewalk Rating: Pit-stained

You pass by six-storied houses, in which sixty or seventy families harbor, and swelter in the boundless contiguity of life, and ardor, and filth, defying the hygienic law that would seem to demand their immediate surrender to death. Brawling, scolding, half-clad women, breathing out threatenings and spurious Hollands, bar your way with themselves and their infants. You are obliged to tread carefully among the legs of broiling negroes, stretched at full length on cellar-doors and doorsteps, dozing off the effect of the gin, which they paid for with the proceeds of larceny or beggary.

[from the NY Times, c 1852.]

[Minneapolis as viewed from Lauderdale.]

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"One thing they'll do while they're bouncing around eating buckthorn is they'll work this seed into the ground. Otherwise it would be pretty labor-intensive to go around and rake it in."

[this.]

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