An exhilarating rating sense of spaciousness is yours these days if you walk along Washington Avenue South ambling west from the Milwaukee Depot. Gone are the pawn shops and their transient merchandise, the bars that exhaled sourly as you passed on the sidewalk. The lunchrooms with the greasy windows, the liquor stores with their fast trade in cheap strong wine. The Persian Palms and its visitors, the woebegone movie house that’s swathed even its box office in the sharpness of disinfectant and the rickety staircase establishments proclaiming “hotel”… all vanished.
For now there is a more distant vista the new buildings challenge you to name them. The Minnesotan Hotel next to be razed still has hits in-the-sun sidewalk traffic of young men on their way to military service billeted until the train the train leaves. One big warehouse gone another will soon follow into a jumble of resistant rubble.
-George Grim
Minneapolis Tribune April 27th, 1963