Back in the 1930s, Minneapolis was the labor center for the much of the Northwest, where workers wintered each year, taking advantage of economy hotels, bars, gospel missions, artificial limb makers and other enterprises catering to the working man.
The area around Hennepin and Washington Avenues, known as the Gateway District, was the center of this semi-transient community. In the spring, labor agents matched up the men with jobs in construction, timber, mining, farming or rail road crews, and off they went for another cycle — earning enough to winter back in Minneapolis.
That system collapsed with the Great Depression, and many of these men found themselves marooned in a city that had not required their labor even in good times. They swelled the ranks of unemployed beyond those local residents who had lost their jobs in local mills and factories.
Caught without money, jobs or a permanent home, these men hung out in the Gateway District while they awaited qualifying for a relief subsidy that would provide them $10.80 a week in meal and lodging tickets. Because the commercial hotels were overloaded, many of them camped out or stayed in converted factories or warehouses — but when day came they were out on the streets.
Where are today's unemployed?
A friend confided to me the other day, an architecture professional told him 40 percent of the city's architects are out of work.
Each week, I hear rumors of teetering ad agencies keeping up a front as they quietly lay people off. Car dealers plan for the inevitable ax. Clinics see fewer patients — and not because people are more healthy.
Small businesses go under. A photographer closes up his studio and prepares to move out of his foreclosed house. And contractors stop hiring other workers and look for a job themselves.
Meanwhile, bigger employers, from health care companies to retailers, lay off hundreds at a time. At Best Buy this spring, 500 corporate employees took a buy out. They're not all working somewhere else now.
Bridge Square and Gateway Park are long gone, along with the flop houses and barbershops and haberdashers and saloons. The social safety net is better now, but it's not funded to expand.
Today's unemployed aren't sleeping on downtown boulevards. They're a much more diverse and scattered group than the uneducated seasonal laborers who once camped along Hennepin.
But they are out there, and I suspect many have yet to be counted.
We just don't know how to see them yet.
