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 re-create 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.

Brother's Keeper -- Skid Road -- The Sisters -- Ark of Refuge -- Shacktown -- Threshold -- State of Emergency -- Epilogue.

Skid Road tells the story of Seattle “from the bottom up,” offering an informal and engaging portrait of the Emerald City’s first century, as seen through the lives of some of its most colorful citizens. With his trademark combination of deep local knowledge, precision, and wit, Murray Morgan traces the city’s history from its earliest days as a hacked-from-the-wilderness timber town, touching on local tribes, settlers, the lumber and railroad industries, the great fire of 1889, the Alaska gold rush, flourishing dens of vice, the 1919 general strike, the 1962 World’s Fair, and the stuttering growth of the 1970s and ’80s. Through it all, Morgan shows us that Seattle’s one constant is change and that its penchant for reinvention has always been fueled by creative, if sometimes unorthodox, residents. With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Mary Ann Gwinn, this redesigned edition of Murray Morgan’s classic work is a must for those interested in how Seattle got to where it is today.

The legendary rock singer and Skid Row frontman holds nothing back in this “ribald and freewheeling memoir . . . a delightfully trashy and salacious read” (AV Club). FROM SKID ROW TO BROADWAY, FROM THE GUTTERS OF NEW JERSEY TO SAVILE ROW, HEREIN LIES THE TALE OF THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS OF BACH ’N’ ROLL, MOTHERTRUCKERS!!!!!! Sebastian Bach is the epitome of a rock ’n’ roll front man. Loud, boisterous, sometimes self-destructive, and constantly creative, he was the electrifying, iconic lead singer of Skid Row—the band whose platinum-selling songs “18 and Life,” “Youth Gone Wild,” and “I Remember You,” took the world by storm, and were MTV mainstays. But Bach is no ordinary rock star. In his funny, exhilarating, and brutally honest memoir, Bach tells his story of Skid Row: the parties, drugs, and international tours with Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith, Metallica, Slayer, and Guns N’ Roses, as well as the one-of-a-kind voice that carried him through Skid Row’s heyday and their eventual breakup. With his typical bravado, Sebastian reflects on the cost of fame, the price of creativity, and what it means to go from rock hopeful to rock star. From his birth in the Bahamas to his teenage years in Canada to the music that rocks his life today, 18 and Life on Skid Row is the ultimate story of Sebastian Bach and his devotion to the music he loves.

“A well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior.” —Los Angeles Times In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA. Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out & Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.

Luke Jensen lived on the wrong side of the tracks all his life, but that never stopped him from realizing his dream and making it a reality. Now, the King of the Street Racing scene, he finally has everything he wants and he won't let anyone take it away from him. Violet Barnes lived a sheltered life growing up, never fitting in except in the books that she loved. After losing her parents, she forges forward, creating her own little world, content in being alone. When Violet stumbles into Luke's shop, sparks fly but neither can let go of the hard lessons they learned growing up. Will Violet give Luke a chance to prove he's not just another gear head? Or will Luke write Violet off before they even have a chance to see that they both need to let go of their past, and focus on the future?

The 20th century's greatest poet was a guy from L.A. called Hank, who talked straight, drank hard, faced truth, and exposed beauty and vulnerability like no other in his place and time. Drinking with Bukowski is a celebration of that utterly original voice featuring contributions from everyone from the women who loved him to the Hollywood cognoscenti who courted him, from writers who admired him and actors who tried to emulate him to the barflies, strippers, gangsters, poets, crazies, and dreamers who knew him: Raymond Carver, Wanda Coleman, Harold Norse, Michael C. Ford, and Paul Vangelisti pay homage and recount the Dionysian days of L.A. poetry; record producer Harvey Robert Kubernik and journalist Barry Miles remember capturing Buk on vinyl for the first time; novelist Steve Abee remembers the early days of L.A.'s underground newspapers - Open City and the L.A. Free Press - Bukowski's early stomping grounds.

Biography of an Eskimo from the North flown south for job training, his problems with alcohol and subsequent jailing for murder.

This book is a unflinching, but moving picture of the lost street people who live in a glamorous city: Skid Row in Los Angeles. Alfredo Falvo originally came to Los Angeles to take photographs of rich people in Hollywood. People who had Picassos on their walls and toilets of solid marble. But when Alfredo accidentally wandered across Skid Row, it made an indelible impression on his heart and mind. He stayed on Skid Row for 4 months and got to know the streets, the people, the smells, and the stories. His photographs tell a story the reader will never forget. And Los Angeles will never look the same. This unique book shows a part of Los Angeles which should not exist in a country of such immense wealth, and yet it does. It is also a declaration of love for a forgotten people.

Ferret out the haunts and habits of those who kept speakeasy doors oiled and politics crooked in the Twin Cities. If you take a tour of former blind pigs today, you will probably encounter nothing more dangerous than a life-long attraction to the 5-8 Club's Juicy Lucy Burger, but Twin Cities Prohibition will return you to a time when honest reporting like that of Walter Liggett was answered with machine gun fire. Clink glasses with notorious characters such as Kid Cann, Dapper Dan Hogan and Doc Ames, the "Shame of Minneapolis" in Elizabeth Johanneck's raid on this fascinating era of history.