New Paragraph

Minneapolis houses, 1973-75

Seward was a working class neighborhood that grew up around the railroad and the manufacturing and agricultural commodities industries that depended on it. The area had long been redlined, so the housing stock, which had not been very well built to begin with, had deteriorated terribly and was slated for urban renewal. The plan was to bulldoze all the remaining housing and replace it with concrete towers designed in the manner of Corbusier, like those that the same developers had built in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood less than a mile away. That's why the rent in our tiny apartment (the upstairs half of the house in the first photo below) was so cheap: it and all the other houses around it were going to be torn down. But community pressure eventually resulted in Seward being made eligible for subsidized rehabbing instead. In order to qualify for the subsidy, you had to actually build on an existing structure. Many of the houses (and their lots) were simply too small, or the structures were so poorly built, that renovation wasn't practical. The little Victorian house we lived in was one many that did not survive. 

I was still learning to photograph at the time and had just bought a used Mamiya C3 twin lens reflex camera. Having not yet found a subject of my own, and inspired by a book of Walker Evans's photographs that I had recently bought, I began to document this neighborhood that was soon to disappear. I shot many rolls of film, but printed only a handful of those photos at that time. Fewer than half of the houses that I had photographed have survived; the rest were demolished and have been replaced by either single-family or low-density multi-family new construction. 

The final two photos are of me returning home with groceries via the garden gate, and sitting in an improbable chair amid the autumnal remains of the garden. I was about about age 25 -- more than 50 years ago.

The condition of the housing stock in Seward was not typical of the rest of south Minneapolis. Here are a few photos of houses that I shot in the same time period in another neighborhood, not far away. These, too, are modest homes, but it is evident, even in photos taken from the alley behind them, that they were better built and cared for than those in Seward.

I have done some reshooting of these houses; the final two photographs below are one example of the passage of time. The black and white photo was taken in 1974; the color photo in 2007. Same house, same tree, same photographer, all 33 years older -- and now yet another 17 years older as I write this.