Well, this is amazing. Someone tied a customizable synthesizer to an actual live traffic camera on Los Angeles' famous CA 101 freeway. It's a miraculous coming together of jazz and traffic in a way that I never thought possible. Trains have rhythm, of course, but freeways are closer to an ambient drone.
It's called "The 101 Plays Itself"," a reference to Reyner Banham, of course. Astounding stuff! Play away, freeway.
Years ago, I was low-key conducting a project I called “Obscure Museums” where I led tours to off-off-the-beaten-path “museums”, i.e. any place where interesting collections were on display in either a formal or informal way. The 2018 tour included the Vintage Music Company, truly a magical storehouse of 78 rpm records.
(Note: I’m still hoping to put together a published guide to these places. I think my list would be great fun!)
[78 rpm records used to be wildly popular.]
Some time back, I inherited a trove of 78 records and have a (crappy) turntable that can play them, and so I have an interest in these amazing artifacts. But the real reason I wanted to bring people to Vintage Music is because it’s straight out of a urban fantasy story, the closest thing to a wizard’s shop I’ve ever encountered. (And that includes my time spent in the South Minneapolis “witch district.”)
You step inside and are immediately engulfed by musty chaos. Two men tinker behind a raised central pedestal island, tweaking turntables some of which have actual ear horn-style speakers straight out of the ancient RCA dog advertisement. (“Put a sock in it!”) Nobody helps you. If you ask an inadequate question, one of the record wizards might castigate you sarcastically as if you’re a first-year student at wizard school. (This happened to me, of course.)
The place is an idea obscure museum, and that’s why it’s sad to see its closing. Places like this, where they are obviously barely scraping rent money together, always seem doomed. But whenever I’d go past Vintage Music Company and see its building still standing, its faded sign still legible, I’d knew Minneapolis still had more than its share of magic.
Holthus, 54, has spent decades collecting, cataloging and selling this music — big band and Billie Holiday, country western and Bing Crosby — in its original form: records that spin at 78 revolutions per minute. He also collects, restores and sells the machines that play them: spring-driven phonographs with stately finishes and names like Edison, Brunswick, Victor.
His shop,Vintage Music Co., which smells of spray varnish and dust, is one of the last record stores in the country to stock solely 78s. Vinyl is popular these days, of course, in its wider LP or 45 rpm format. But Holthus, nostalgic even as a kid, has never been driven by trends.
"I'm not malleable," he said. "I should be able to bend with the times ... and I just can't do it."
Instead, he keeps alive records and players that others have given up on.
In the piece, you learn that the store had over 750,000 78 rpm records in it! That's a wild number, especially considering each of them is about 2-3 minutes of music on each side. In other words, the entire store probably didn't account for as much music as you'd find on a 20-year-old iPod.
Anyway... the real treat for me was the total characters running it.
Even on days the shop's doors are locked, Holthus is there, repairing and cataloging until dark. He's known both for happily sharing his encyclopedic musical knowledge and his persnickety spirit. He hates the word "vinyl." He disdains new, cheaply made portable players. He scoffs at reissues.
RIP, godspeed and good health to Scott, and I hope someone can do something with this fantastic obscure museum of a shop.
The Hexagon Bar was unique, a small weird oasis on the concrete streets of the Seward neighborhood. Its loss marks another minor absence for the city’s music scene, and the disappearance of small weird venues like the nearby Triple Rock and the 400 Bar.
For music, the Hexagon Bar was always cover-free. It was the kind of place you could just pop your head into as you were passing through South Minneapolis, to see who was playing, with little commitment, and whether it sucked or not. There was often a flock of hipsters, crusty punks, U students, and/or random South Minneapolis bozos hanging around outside the door. Late at night, the fenced-in patio was like a petting zoo where people fed each other American Spirit cigarettes.
At other times, the Hexagon Bar was a classic dive, if there wasn’t a show, you’d find a maybe a dozen regulars drinking out of plastic cups, staring blankly at the claw machine, passing time in a place that slowly changed around them.
The gritty wedding of dives and music is perfectly suited to another dive characteristic, the daily pattern of regulars, drunks, workers, and the late-night young. Any good dive in an urban area will have a distinct rhythm to the day, a stride and pace of alcoholic progression that mirrors its social reach and the neighborhood around it. In a way, this is like how Jane Jacobs described the “urban ballet,” the passage of a New York sidewalk through the hours, of streets through the day and night. Some dives begin their days in old age, with the retired or hopeless, weary men escaping loneliness, reading the paper, complaining. As the night wears on, years fall off the faces, a time-lapse in reverse. The old man in the olive jacket is replaced by a 30-something in plaid, then again by a black shirted groupie straight out of college. Midnight is for the young and restless and the music takes over the bar, pouring out of the adjacent room like a spilled Grain Belt, impossible to ignore. If you’re here, why would you want to?
It's also wroth pointing out that the Hexagon Bar was the last real remnant of the hub of hell, along with the Schooner Bar a few blocks away. …
The Hub of Hell, also known as Hell’s Half-Acre, was its own special place, where the Puffer-Hubbard gang (from the nearby foundry) was just as likely to police social norms as the actual Minneapolis police.
…
The Hexagon Bar sat on the seam that separated the factories and warehouses of Seward from the working-class homes to the north and east. In those days, there were a lot of industrial facilities in the area, like the Milwaukee Road rail yards, which employed hundreds of working stiffs; Minneapolis-Moline, a farm implement factory; or Flour City Ornamental Iron Works Company, a foundry that crafted large, decorative railings, gates, and doorways. The railroad tracks through the neighborhood were lined with smokestacks and the streets full of men roving around and looking for work and fun.
Heck I’ve been writing odes to the Hexagon Bar for almost ten years now. I think the second ever dive bar bike tour wound up there, back in 2013. Since then, I wrote about the Hexagon Bar in my South Minneapolis Dive guide booklet, researched it as part of work I did on the history of the Seward Neighborhood, and then again included it in my book Closing Time.
I didn’t know it when I was going to shows, but music at the Hexagon Bar was part of a long tradition. Researching the bar book, I dug into an audio history archive from the 1990s that included a colorful interview with the bar’s long-time owner, Aurelea Hupp. Her story is fascinating, but includes this description of the bar in mid-century:
It was mostly truck drivers. . . . There would be fights in the bar, because we had a hexagon-shaped bar and there only was the one room. We had the oom-pa band there in the corner, three fellas playing, and they’d be four deep at the bar on a Friday or Saturday. The fellas would be arguing, you know, and my husband, who was a friendly guy, he and Jack Reilly would have to stop these fights.
Hupp’s husband inherited the place from his stepdad, who had opened it up after prohibition in 1935. She passed it along to her kids, and apart from losing the original hexagonal shaped bar, it didn’t change all that much. (I put an extended rough transcription of the Hupp interview below.)
The bar was torched during the unrest this summer. The demolition of the ruins this week mark the end of the real Hub of Hell bars that once defined the Seward neighborhood.. Most of them were demolished intentionally through city-led projects, aimed at changing the area, reducing crime, and getting rid of the old bars. While the bowling alley and the Eagles club remain, and though I love them both, neither is really a traditional bar. It’s a bit sad to see the Hex go this way, because I think it had made it through the hardest years of the 1990s and early 2000s.
RIP Hexagon Bar. You had a good run.
[Rough Exerpts from an interview with Aurelia Ann Marie Hupp, long-time proprietor of the Hexagon from the 1950s-1990s.]
I started singing at the Tempo Bar, owned by Roy [???] at the time. Charles Mathews was one of our regular customers, [???] Eckberg was the owner, he was a very regular customer. He was in the Tempo every day in the 1940s, I started singing at the age of 2.
Somebody had coxed me to enter a contest at the Café Exceptionale. I didn’t take the [waitressing] job be a singer, so I was scared.
One night we stopped in the Tempo they got me up to sing, Roy Eckberg was there and said, I want you to come and work for me.
I was a singing waitress. All popular songs of the 40s, and everything that was popular semi-classics. There was a piano player and a violin player and my brothers made a little stage for the waitresses, and they used to be packed every night [with people] from the university. Just packed.
Night and Day, Paper Moon, Summertime, Chattanooga Choo Choo. Bernie Bane Hanson was the piano player.
The band would be on 20 minutes and the girl would be on 20 minutes, and the girl only lasted two weeks.
So he sez, You want to come down and try it?
I don’t mind, I sez. I might not last very long. What was she getting? I asked.
I was getting 40 dollars a week at the Tempo, so we went down to start it, and the fellow asked me what I expected to get.
I expect to get 60 dollars a week, I sez.
If you last more than two weeks, I’ll see that ya get it, he sez.
The third week came, I got 40 dollars. I said to him, remember me?
You got it, he sez.
I worked there about two years. It was after the Tempo, that was like in ’45, [owned by] Gus Nelson. Roy Eckberg had sold it to Gus Nelson and then there was another bar, the Minnesota Bar, I’m pretty sure it was called the Minnesota bar on Franklin. It was a beer parlor. Beer parlor, liquor and beer, 3.2 and liquor, as opposed to hard liquor.
Then I got the job downtown at the Casablanca, when it was owned by White/ Mitch from Mendota was one of the owners, [???] went to jail because of the murder that was there. And Tommy Banks. Shetsky took the rap for Tommy Banks, who was the guy that killed him at the time I was singing downtown.
I was also Rosie the riveter at the St Paul airport because I was working on a specials crew. And when the new B24s came into the St. Paul airport you had to go all over them to see where the rivets were missing.
My husband’s stepdad started the Hexagon at the end of prohibition. It was a beer bar, where you make beer, a Schlitz brewery was there, in the building. That was the building and my husband’s stepdad stared a bar right there and that was in about ’36,
It had been Schlitz before prohibition. After, it was a natural place for a bar. It had the right smell. So we started a bar there, and when he decided to retire, he gave the bar to his own son and my husband who was his stepson, he was married to my husband’s mother, turned the place over to the two boys in 1945. And they worked there. They were partners, and they added on, and they were partners until his son died. That was Riley, our name was Riley. Our telephone is still listed as William Riley he’s been dead since…
Riley married Hupp, and that was where the two boys came from. One boy in each family, that was the extent of the family.
He died when he was about 59 years old, my husband had along in about 77, my husband got Alzheimer's and he had Alzheimer's until he passed away. And my son will help him run it and when he died, I stepped in and did it. And now the boys are running it, the one boy is the manager now, and we’re on the corner.
When we were first in here it was The Magic. The bar where emerge is, and meet to us there, where you the city bought it you, it had been formally Duffys. It was Genes, and then Pearsons was always there, and Pearson Bustard his name was, he and his wife both had Cadillacs and beanies and he had a ring on his finger that was a big diamond.
And he was held up, they said give me that diamond.
I can’t, he sez. I haven’t had that off my hand in 20 years.
And [the robber] says, cut it off or I’ll cut the damn finger off.
And so it came right off. Heck, you don’t want to get too scared because that what can happen, your fingers shrink.
There are just as many [bars] now, in fact, they gave all ways was the ones that’s owned by the what’s the one a block down from Pearson’s well anyway it's Franky… name of the bar down there that…
The Eagles', I know it well, they do sell liquor there. One they gave a license to. The FOI / VFW. They gave a liquor license to the Stardust, then Henna’s became Differs, then Duffy’s became an insurance man, Foster. Then Foster became Norma Jeans, then the city took it back. Mr Nib’s was after the Magic Bar, Magic Bar then Mr. Nibs, then it was go right to Mirage called it … now its not any more.
Gone by the wayside, and Norma Jeans has gone by the wayside and Pearson’s has gone by the wayside.
[INSTRUCTIONS: PLAY BOTH VIDEOS AT THE BOTTOM SIMULTANEOUSLY AND SING ALONG]
Yeah, I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more
I got the groceries in the back Carbucks latté in my lap SUV is matte black Got the boots that's black to match Drivin' in a trench, ha You can whip your Porsche I been in the valley You stuck in trash alleys, now
Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin' Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin'
Drivin' on some potholes Lean all in my bladder Cheated on my freeway Gonna drive right past it
My speed is fairly piddly
Valley driving's groovy Heading out to Fridley Jeep Wrangler on my booty
Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin' Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin'
Yeah, I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more
The ticket price includes admission to the Somali Museum of Minnesota, a worthy endeavor is ever there was...
As always, Patreon patrons get a discounted price, so sign up there if you'd like to get advance notice of tours and events, and discounted price for ticketed tours.
There is limited space available, so get your ticket today if you'd like this private tour of the Somali Museum and two other obscure spots of Minneapolis lore.
I was first struck by this part of the city when I first came across it many years ago, around the year 2000. I remember walking into the "Market BBQ", a self-proclaimed legendary Minneapolis restaurant for 40 years...
Well, if it was so famous, how come I'd never heard of it?
Since then I've always been curious about this part of the city that seems so off-the-radar of the mainstream, so full of old remnants of the built environment, despite being a stone's throw from downtown.
With that idea in mind, I put together a tour. The Old Nicollet Walk (defined as between Grant Street and Franklin Avenue) this sprinter was a fun time for me, and more than most of the tours I put together, an exploration. I didn't quite know the story of this part of the street, and I hoped that in doing research for the walk and bringing a group of people together, I might learn about this part of the city that had always intrigued me.
Here are some themes that emerged. Thanks to everyone who came out and joined me on this exploration of a fast-vanishing and often misunderstood Minneapolis neighborhood.
Tourists and hostility
[The Convention Center is a wall around the neighborhood.]
One theme that came out of the walk was how "tourist downtown" was actively hostile to this part of the city, in both subtle passive design and active ways.
During the tour, introducing "Old Nicollet," I shared my theory why so many of the restaurants here seemed to me to be lost in time and off the radar. Eat Street, the north Loop, hell lots of other parts of south Minneapolis all seemed like places that I heard about regularly in conversation, that made lists of "places to go," but this stretch of Nicollet was never mentioned by anyone I knew. It was almost like a blind spot, Minneapolis downtown lacunae, the very essence of a marginal space crammed between the freeway and the edge of downtown.
My theory had been that it catered primarily to downtown tourists, and that's why I didn't know much about it. Thus the weird old restaurants like Pings, the (now shuttered) Japanese-Canadian place, Market BBQ, (shuttered) Jerusalem, etc.
But then one of the participants described a story they’d heard about downtown. At the big tourist hotels, the concierge explicitly tell visitors not to walk south on Nicollet Avenue, to go instead north along the “mall” area. As a result, this strange segment of Old Nicollet received relatively few downtown visitors, Jay Leno excepted.
Theory debunked.
Similarly, the massive multi-super-block Convention Center offers huge featureless blank walls along its south and western sides. All the doorways, public spaces, and activity are focused on the north, and instead of serving as an amenity for the Old Nicollet area, it detracts from the public spaces and social life of the neighborhood.
Jarring Disjunctures
[There's a massive metered parking lot here b/c of a street expansion / realignment.]
The "edge of downtown" is a strange concept, because if you go back and look at the photos and maps of the mid-century Minneapolis, there were no "edges" to downtown. Instead of hard lines, downtown slowly dissolved, transforming into a residential area as you got a few miles out. Back then, the city decreased in density gradually like a classic gradient -- often called the "urban transect." A hundred years ago, if you walked from the center of downtown into one of the residential neighborhoods around it you would find a gradual decrease in density and intensity.
Today, most of the middle ground along that spectrum has been demolished and replaced with vacant, freeway, or low-density spaces. (Stephens Square and Elliot Park are notable exceptions.) The vacant lots, apartment buildings, freeways, huge walls, and parking lots form a strange landscape within which oddities like the old Music Box Theater (formerly Loring Theater, currently a weird church from Eden Prairie) and 80s-era faded restaurants like Ping’s still cling on within the Minneapolis landscape.
[Bollards and freeways.]
Cultural Margins as Refuge
At the same time, the very isolation and marginalization of this part of the city has been, for many people over the years , a feature and not a bug. Because it is so isolated and economically neglected, what’s left of this part of the city has remained affordable and fine grained. Lots of important urban communities thrive in the margins in neighborhoods like this.
Most notably for this part of town, so close to Loring Park, Minneapolis’ crucial GBLT community has been centered here for generations. The 19 Bar, Minneapolis’ finest dingy gay bar, is a block away.
And two women who came on the tour shared a story of how they’d moved to the area in the 1970s and discovered a DIY lesbian-centered “coffee house” that began in a space in the Plymouth Congregational Church. It was a heart of the Minneapolis lesbian scene for many years, and one woman described an ongoing play about a fictional town called Toklas, Minnesota that had been performed in the coffee house for years.
[The Very Best of Fancy Ray.]
I personally recall how the massive Nicollet Village Video store served as a place for punk and queer kids to hang out all day and night, while also offering one of the two or three best selections of obscure videos anywhere in town. Similarly, the old Flame Bar and Grill, a strange country-western / R&B hybrid joint, once offered refuge for kids from all over the region.
Here’s a story about a girl from the North End who became a Flame fixture for years:
“Mr. Torp of Torp’s Music Store (also on Rice Street in St Paul) was a friend of my parents; he said country singer Ardis Wells was looking for a lead musician who could sing. I wasn’t 21, so we went over and met with her and Mr. Perkins who owned The Flame and they said ‘We don’t care if she’s not 21 as long as she doesn’t drink, we’ll take care of her, don’t worry about it’.””
Ardis was a female wrestler who rode elephants in the circus. “The floor would rise up with the push of a button and become a stage. Ardis Wells and The Rhythm Ranch Girls worked the front lounge of The Flame, our stage was up high above the bottles (see photos). Ardis would perform a trapeze act in The Flame while we sang, but the City Of Minneapolis shut that down because it was too dangerous. The Flame was the home of the $3.25 16-ounce steak. I still have their menus!”“
Similarly, the one or two old blocks of the southern stretch of Old Nicollet has some of the most diverse and eclectic restaurants anywhere int he city, including East African, West African, and Tibetan restaurants, all of them solid. (There used to be Vietnamese and African-American food here too.)
[At the Flame, they were playing and dancing ON TOP of the bar.]
Changing Quickly
[Old Nicollet vacant lot; note the old hospital in the background.]
Over the years, this part o the city has been under severe pressure from city planners, civic boosters, and entropy. The freeway, Convention Center, road re-design, big government housing projects, and parking lots have taken their toll. But in the midst of it, a stretch of the old urban fabric has remained in tact.
But it doesn’t seem like it will last long. After a half-century of benign neglect, the real estate market on the fringe of downtown has begun to overpower the past, and when the 1940s-era Market BBQ building comes down, the remaining continuity of the old city is going to erode beyond recognition. There will still be an old building or two, but I fear the idea of the old street, visible in the historic photos, will be impossible to conjure.
So tour it while you can!
[50s-era office building updated for the modern age.]
[The all-night diner with new construction in the background.]
[The elective early 20th century buildings (note the weird roof!) along Old Nicollet.]
[Construction, formerly the site of Jerusalem Restaurant.]
[Old Nicollet Village Video, now a Spanish-language daycare.]
[Old clock at Market BBQ.]
[Door handle at Market BBQ.]
[Tin ceiling at Market BBQ. The ceiling along with the massive wood bar (shipped from San Francisco) will be saved and replaced into the new building.]
[Market BBQ booth.]
[The old building, not long for this world.]
[The old and new housing stock along Old Nicollet.]
[Already shuttered, and forgettable, Ryan's Pub.]
[Subsidized affordable housing on the north end of Old Nicollet.]
There’s a reciprocal relationship between people and a place that, every once in a while, come together to create a great cultural scene. Every once in a while, the people and the place fit each other so well, it's seamless.
Both sides of the relationship are vital. You need the people: the fashion, the vibe, the crowd, the affect, the regulars, the giant bouncer that remains on his stool for a decade.
But you also need the spaces where the people can feel at home and flourish. Without the lived-in walls, the room, the booths, the bar, and the sidewalk on the corner where people smoke and stare at the dull freeway, what do you have? What is a player without a stage?
Sometimes the place and the people come together in harmony, each seems like it was made for the other, and the people and the place become almost interchangeable. That’s what the Triple Rock Social Club was like, and the loss of the Cedar Avenue bar and venue on the fringe of West Bank seems right now like it’ll displace an entire scene.
I made it over there for one last show a little while ago, to see a young rock band from L.A. called Girl Pool. The whole place was full of Radio K twenty-somethings, which is perfect, because that’s how old I was when I formed some of my favorite memories of the Triple Rock.
For example, the Triple Rock bar used to have a great juke box by the back door, the old-school kind with buttons and labels full of punk songs. I didn’t know anything about punk, but I remember really liking the scene inside the bar. So much so that I once took fifty of my precious cents over to the juke box and searched around for a song. Not knowing anything, choosing purely by the names, when I saw “The Descendents — I Like Food” I thought, that’s the one!
I hit the buttons and as the song started to play, sat down on the bar with a smile on my face and turned to my friends to listen.
The song turned out to be 15 seconds long, and was over before I could say anything. I got punked!
Speaking of food, the Triple Rock was unique in the Twin Cities for having the weirdest mix of crusty-punk-vibe yet-often-meat-laden huge-portion’d staple food. The kitchen at the place was a tiny hole in the wall by the bathroom, and I have no idea how they got so much food out of there.
The Triple Rock was famous for their po’boys, which were these mammoth vehicles for potatoes and were nothing like a New Orleans po’boy. A half order was enough for two people, and eating a full "sandwich" would literally put you on your back for 24 hours. It was the kind of food that you’d want after a week of camping. Their poutine was the same way, and their $7 happy hour burger special was an amazing deal.
The place was vegetarian friendly, and yet I remember when they had a brief foray into an “all-you-can-eat bacon night,” where if you sat down the would keep bringing you baskets of the world’s worst bacon until you cried “uncle” and screamed for it all to end. They had huge starchy breakfasts on weekends, which along with a bloody mary, would cure any possible hangover.
There was nothing like it.
[Girl Pool.]
Once you walked out of the old bar and into the back, the music space seemed like a paradise for punk, metal, and rock music. It’s as if someone gave a punk nerd permission to design their ideal world, and then the fanciful fever dream came true.
The entire room was black, and large noise-deadening cloth things hung on the wall that served to make the room great for music while also allowing unruly musicians to bounce off them without fear of injury. The bowl in front of the stage was depressed, and ringed with little ledges, and in the back the aloof could loiter by the bar and merch table. The place was perfectly designed, and there’s not another stage in town with better sight lines or acoustics.
[Not only does the Triple Rock have a vending machine for guitar strings, cords, and drumsticks, but it only takes $1 bills.]
[Cedar Avenue, 1890s and today.]
Finally, the geography of the venue was a perfect fit for the music. The Triple Rock was literally next to the freeway onramp. Before the freeway, Cedar Avenue had a contiguous row of bars and shops running from seven corners all the way to Franklin (where the railyard used to be).
But the freeways obliterated this old street, and left the remnants of the old bars and buildings in tatters. In fact, little amputated bits of Cedar like the Cabooze and the Joint are still floating around, offering refuge to bikers and other small scenes, and the Triple Rock was one of these, like a lighthouse of punk on the edge of an ocean of cars.
I’m thankful for the owners, who created such a harmonious place in which to tell the world to fuck off. Running the joint for twenty years is quite a gift to the city, and according to the articles, they just ran out of energy and (presumably) got a retirement offer they couldn’t refuse.
The building is slated to become a restaurant and banquet hall / event center. I am sure it won’t be anything like what it was, and I hate to see a perfect scene disappear. Check it out one last time before it closes for good.
[The bar scene.]
[Bathroom graffiti.]
[Soup of the day is whiskey.]
[A pre-war photo, BOTC awards, Lando Calrissian, a Colt .45 ad, and the Triple Rock's first dollar.]
The Hexagon Bar was unique, a small weird oasis on the concrete streets of the Seward neighborhood. Its loss marks another minor absence for the city’s music scene, and the disappearance of small weird venues like the nearby Triple Rock and the 400 Bar. 
It's also wroth pointing out that the Hexagon Bar was the last real remnant of the hub of hell, along with the Schooner Bar a few blocks away. …
The bar was torched during the unrest this summer. The demolition of the ruins this week mark the end of the real Hub of Hell bars that once defined the Seward neighborhood.. Most of them were demolished intentionally through city-led projects, aimed at changing the area, reducing crime, and getting rid of the old bars. While the bowling alley and the Eagles club remain, and though I love them both, neither is really a traditional bar. It’s a bit sad to see the Hex go this way, because I think it had made it through the hardest years of the 1990s and early 2000s.
I started singing at the Tempo Bar, owned by Roy [???] at the time. Charles Mathews was one of our regular customers, [???] Eckberg was the owner, he was a very regular customer. He was in the Tempo every day in the 1940s, I started singing at the age of 2. 
At the same time, the very isolation and marginalization of this part of the city has been, for many people over the years , a feature and not a bug. Because it is so isolated and economically neglected, what’s left of this part of the city has remained affordable and fine grained. Lots of important urban communities thrive in the margins in neighborhoods like this.
There’s a reciprocal relationship between people and a place that, every once in a while, come together to create a great cultural scene. Every once in a while, the people and the place fit each other so well, it's seamless.
