Gateway photos

My first step in re-creating the long lost Minneapolis Gateway District was to see what it really looked like. I visited the Minneapolis Collection in the Special Collections room on the 4th floor of the Minneapolis Central Library, and the staff there had several books and notebooks and clipping files to look through. One scrapbook had several pages of photos of bedbugs that were taken in the rooming houses of the district.
There was a special folder of photos that I hadn't seen before. They were taken in 1959 and showed the district just a few years before it was all gone. They were taken on a day that looked like a hot summer day. The streets were fairly empty. It looked like the buildings were just buildings. When I drew my ink drawings of the buildings to recreate the district, I based them mostly on these photographs. Something was changing here and the life was being drained, or was changing into something else.
What I did with all these photos is find interesting buildings and draw them individually. I would then put them all together in whatever order I felt like to build my own version of the Gateway District.