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...