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 recreate 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. 

To read an excerpt, click here

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James Eli Shiffer has been a professional journalist for more than 30 years. He has worked as an editor and writer at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis since 2005, and before that spent 12 years at The News & Observer in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. He has focused on the environment, cities, public records, government secrecy and investigations. In 2010, Shiffer partnered with photojournalist McKenna Ewen to create Rubbed Out, a multimedia history of the unsolved murder of a Minneapolis journalist in 1945. He was a member of the Star Tribune team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news in 2021 for coverage of George Floyd’s murder and its aftermath. He lives in south Minneapolis with his wife.

TPT documentary, “Return to Skid Row,” first broadcast May 2021

Minnesota Untold: The Unwanted - lessons from the Gateway (Fox9 interview, 2022)

City Pages Best of the Twin Cities, 2017: Best Book (Nonfiction)

Streets.mn podcast: Interview by Bill Lindeke

Podcast and web story of my interview with Tom Weber, Minnesota Public Radio

MinnPost interview with Amy Goetzman about raising "the ghosts of downtown Minneapolis"

"Minneapolis' Long Lost Skid Row": Interview with KFAI's Xan Holston

City Pages interview with Erica Rivera: "The King of Skid Row" revisits Minneapolis' seedy underside

The Matt McNeil Show, AM950

KUMD Minnesota Reads: interview with Lisa Johnson

Access Minnesota with Jim du Bois: The End of Minneapolis's Skid Row

Interview on WCCO AM 830, John Hines Show (April 6, 2016)

Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, "Six Must-Read Books for the Spring"

Stan Turner show, KLBB AM, author interview (02-27-2016)

Pioneer Press, recommended spring reads

Coffeehouse Press: In the Stacks, author interview

Skidrow

John Bacich’s “Skidrow,” a 30-minute film, remains the grittiest and most powerful record of Minneapolis’ Gateway District. It grew out of his documentary impulse, and awareness that this place would soon be gone. He shot the film in the late 1950s and early 1960s on a Bell & Howell 16 mm movie camera, in color, but with no sound. It probably would have remained obscure but for a serendipitous meeting between Bacich and Jerome Liebling, the legendary documentary photographer and filmmaker who at the time taught at the University of Minnesota. Liebling’s students, most notably Rod Lazorik, shot additional footage and edited it into a half-hour reel. Bacich added his voiceover in the mid-1980s. Newly digitized from the original film by Thor Anderson at Saving Tape, this version of the video offers vivid colors and sharper images that help bring this remarkable era back to life. Note: After many years on the site, YouTube has decided the film should now be restricted to viewers 18 and over. It is graphic, no question. But it can’t be embedded on this site any more, so click here to watch it on YouTube.

To arrange a reading or appearance:

james.shiffer@gmail.com

The Gateway District, early 1960s: City of Minneapolis photos, courtesy Hennepin History Museum