Lost Twin Cities

1993 American Institute of Architects International Architecture Book Award

In Larry the adorable pooch's latest adventure, he goes on vacation with Pete and his family to Minneapolis/St. Paul. As usual, in hot pursuit of a tempting treat, he gets separated from his family and frantically tries to find them again. Along the way he discovers some of the city's most fun and interesting landmarks and cultural attractions, including: Mall of America Hiawatha Line (light rail) Metrodome Mary Tyler Moore statue Skyways Minnehaha Falls Foshay Tower Mill Ruins Park St. Anthony Falls/locks The New Guthrie Theater Walker Art Center sculpture park (Spoonbridge) Lake Harriet (St. Paul) High Bridge Rice Park (Peanuts sculptures) Mickey's Diner Summit Avenue

Twin Cities: Then and Now is an engaging, startling, and at times heartbreaking look at the dramatic evolution of landscapes in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Larry Millett, author of Lost Twin Cities, explores the changing appearances of Minneapolis and St. Paul from the vantage point of their relatively static streets. Seventy-two historic photographs taken from the 1880s to the late 1950s, are paired with Jerry Mathiason's elegant new black-and-white photographs to provide superb visual comparisons between then and now. Millett's lively and informative essays examine the often astonishing changes wrought by time and circumstance. Maps and detailed informational graphics provide orientation and identify hundreds of significant buildings and places in the photographs.

Take a tour of the lost mansions of the Twin Cities

Get ready to discover the great architectural mecca that is Minneapolis and St. Paul. The first comprehensive, illustrated handbook of its kind, AIA Guide to the Twin Cities is the ultimate source to the architectural riches of the metropolitan area. Organized by neighborhood and featuring a wealth of sites--from the highest point on the Minneapolis skyline to the modest St. Paul bungalow vibrant with historical and architectural significance--this invaluable reference has it all: -Illuminating entries for more than 3,000 buildings -Behind-the-scenes details of the structures and their architects -Lively information about local history and regional styles -Highlights of important buildings nearly lost in time -Sixty easy-to-read maps that pinpoint the location of every structure -Dozens of planned walking and driving tours -Over 1,000 photos that illustrate significant buildings and features Retired Pioneer Press architecture critic Larry Millett has spent more than two decades researching and exploring the architectural heritage of the Twin Cities. Millett's AIA Guide to the Twin Cities is your ticket to the best tour in town. Sponsored in part by the American Institute of Architects Minnesota. Larry Millett has written extensively about Twin Cities architecture. His books include Lost Twin Cities, Twin Cities Then and Now, and Strange Days, Dangerous Nights (all MHS Press), as well as a series of mystery novels featuring Sherlock Holmes.

The dread, the drama, and the hope of a break in one of the country’s oldest active missing-child investigations On a cold November afternoon in 1951, three young boys went out to play in Farview Park in north Minneapolis. The Klein brothers—Kenneth Jr., 8; David, 6; and Danny, 4—never came home. When two caps turned up on the ice of the Mississippi River, investigators concluded that the boys had drowned and closed the case. The boys’ parents were unconvinced, hoping against hope that their sons would still be found. Sixty long years would pass before two sheriff’s deputies, with new information in hand and the FBI on board, could convince the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to reopen the case. This is the story of that decades-long ordeal, one of the oldest known active missing-child investigations, told by a writer whose own research for an article in 1998 sparked new interest in the boys’ disappearance. Beginning in 2012, when deputies Jessica Miller and Lance Salls took up the Kleins’ cause, author Jack El-Hai returns to the mountain of clues amassed through the years, then follows the trail traced over time by the boys’ indefatigable parents, right back to those critical moments in 1951. Told in brisk, longform journalism style, The Lost Brothers captures the Kleins’ initial terror and confusion but also the unstinting effort, with its underlying faith, that carried them from psychics to reporters to private investigators and TV producers—and ultimately produced results that cast doubt on the drowning verdict and even suggested possible suspects in the boys’ abduction. An intimate portrait of a parent’s worst nightmare and its terrible toll on a family, the book is also a genuine mystery, spinning out suspense at every missed turn or potential lead, along with its hope for resolution in the end.

City blue laws drove the liquor trade and its customers—hard-drinking lumberjacks, pensioners, farmhands, and railroad workers—into the oldest quarter of Minneapolis. In the fifty-cent-a-night flophouses of the city’s Gateway District, they slept in cubicles with ceilings of chicken wire. In rescue missions, preachers and nuns tried to save their souls. Sociology researchers posing as vagrants studied them. And in their midst John Bacich, aka Johnny Rex, who owned a bar, a liquor store, and a cage hotel, documented the gritty neighborhood’s last days through photographs and film of his clientele. The King of Skid Row follows Johnny Rex into this vanished world that once thrived in the heart of Minneapolis. Drawing on hours of interviews conducted in the three years before Bacich’s death in 2012, James Eli Shiffer brings to life the eccentric characters and strange events of an American skid row. Supplemented with archival and newspaper research and his own photographs, Bacich’s stories re-create the violent, alcohol-soaked history of a city best known for its clean, progressive self-image. His life captures the seamy, richly colorful side of the city swept away by a massive urban renewal project in the early 1960s and gives us, in a glimpse of those bygone days, one of Minneapolis’s most intriguing figures—spinning some of its most enduring and enthralling tales.

Tells the stories behind 89 of the lost buildings and landmarks of Minnesota, from rural and small-town Minnesota, as well as from the state's metropolitan and suburban areas.