Lost Twin Cities

Lost Twin Cities is an architectural and social history of the downtowns of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The richly illustrated text emphasizes the growth and development of the two downtowns in the nineteenth century and their subsequent alteration by urban renewal and other forces of change in the twentieth. "This book is an effort to reconstruct, in words and illustrations, a lost urban world. It is not a formal architectural history of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Rather, it is a kind of mosaic, a narrative made up of bits and pieces retrieved from a largely forgotten past. Its theme is memory. Whatever else they may be, cities are structures in time, where past and present mingle and the future gapes out from empty holes awaiting yet another round of development. But time moves with a special and destructive speed in American cities, often erasing our monuments before we have a chance to appreciate them."-Larry Millett