Description
Before Minneapolis’s West Bank became known as an East African enclave, it was one of the city’s wildest countercultural crossroads. In West Bank Stories, award-winning investigative journalist Bruce Rubenstein brings back the Cedar Avenue world of the 1960s and ’70s through firsthand memories, reported history, and sharply drawn characters. Musicians, artists, antiwar activists, bartenders, con men, drug dealers, addicts, and neighborhood eccentrics share the stage with figures such as Bob Dylan and Spider John Koerner. Rubenstein follows the scene from Dinkytown coffeehouses and smoky bars through rent strikes, folk and blues clubs, cocaine culture, organized crime, and the mysterious disappearance of photographer Danny Seymour. Funny, unsentimental, intimate, and sometimes dark, this is local history told from inside the room itself.
