Join us as author James Eli Shiffer takes us into a time when the heart of downtown Minneapolis was a densely packed neighborhood of bars, flophouses, liquor stores, rescue missions and second-hand shops catering to the last generation of seasonal laborers that had been part of the city’s history from the beginning. It was all cleared away in a massive urban renewal project in the Gateway District that started in 1959 and ended in 1963. Shiffer has been a professional journalist for 25 years and is currently a columnist and editor at the Star Tribune. His book, The King of Skid Row, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016.