🚸 Andy Sturdevant traces Longfellow’s “geography of childhood”

Andy Sturdevant’s whole deal is kind of hard to describe. An art school kid who moved to Minneapolis from Louisville in 2005, he has no particular training in architecture, history, urbanism, geography, or journalism. And yet over the past 20 years he’s become a one-of-a-kind chronicler of Minneapolis street life and history, amassing a body of work that includes four books, a dozen zines, hundreds of columns, a blog, and regular walking tours. (And none of that’s even his day job.)

He and noted local urbanist Bill Lindeke co-wrote perhaps the most fun book in the canon of Twin Cities history, Closing Time, a history of iconic local bars. The Stroll, his five-year-long weekly column for MinnPost, developed a cult following for his dispatches on the miscellanea of Twin Cities life. Some of those columns ended up in the excellent essay collection, Potluck Supper with Meeting to Follow. For 10 years he helped lead the Soap Factory’s “Common Room” tour series, high-concept walks looking at things like cat colonies or iconic necking locations. One publication described him as "the preeminent wit, flaneur and psycho-historian of the Twin Cities."