I literally took a wrong turn and ended up at this cool old North Side church...
Oh, wait. Folks insist it is a NORTHEAST church, not North Side. My apologies. I'm still learning the lay of the land. In any case...
The green dome and flags whipping in the wind were so striking, I decided to use my last frame of film. In the upper right corner, note part of my hand waving goodbye to old school photography.
It was deliberate creativity on my part. OK, it was an accident.
While I stood there on the secular sidewalk just at the edge of church property, the devil came along driving a black sports car and called out to me. He was an articulate (though self-educated) black man with a black leather jacket, a diamond pinkie ring shaped like a horse shoe, with the fingernail on his pinkie left long and uncut. It turned out the devil is something of a "low income rental property landlord," who owns housing on my block.
Well, I already knew that, though I've never really blogged about it. No, I don't blog about everything, contrary to the impression one might get.
The devil and I agreed to have a nice steak dinner a few blocks away, at an upscale restaurant surrounded by coffee shops and little art galleries. What a delightful corner of North Minneapolis I'd happened upon by accident! The steak and fish house was called "erte," uncapitalized. (Click here for a link to their website)
My biggest complaint about the place is their trendy use of an uncapitalized title. Oh, also, who serves a steak and makes you buy the potato separately? Madness. Even the devil pointed out the evil in that. But all in all, an impressive place. It's so spacious you can get lost behind the door to the bathroom, and the building is way old, way cool.
Take a date there who likes red meat and/or old buildings.
We went Dutch, me and the devil, and talked at length about neighborhood issues such as prostitution, sales of crack cocaine, the need for sex offenders to have housing, and differing visions of the neighborhood's future. The devil wants his piece of the pie, his share of real estate dealings stemming from efforts to create the Eco-Village.
The devil made this known repeatedly. He wants his cut of the Eco-Village pie.
The devil assured me nothing will ever change on my block, and folks are crazy to try, and made it known (in subtle ways) he was still willing to do business with me in regard to my property, if my other dealings fell through.
The devil barely touched his steak. I finished it for him after he left.
It was, of course, well done.
3 comments:
The church, and restaurant, would be in northeast, though technically on the north half of town, would not be "north side" as those terms are understood in Minneapolis parlence.
Agreed. I have always thought of north Minneapolis and northeast Minneapolis as two different places.
And for your further edification, Northeast here is pronounced "Nordeast". Culturally, it's worlds apart from North. If you want to ape cop-speak, Northeast is "twos", while North is "fours", these being the precinct numbers.
Thanks for your blog. We city crimewatchers always welcome new members among our ranks.
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