Bedlam and West Bank not what you think

I read your front-page editorial concerning the recent developments in the West Bank neighborhood with great disappointment. Sure, Bedlam is being evicted and they will re-emerge someplace else. Bedlam, as a theater community, was never dependent on the West Bank for its peculiar genius. They will do just fine wherever they end up.

The fact that your editors have confused the young, radical Bedlam group with the ancient, far more passive, hippie scene I’ll never understand. Your statement that “the West Bank is now a Somali neighborhood,” is correct but superficial. The people who hung out at the Triangle, Mama’s and the Viking still frequent The Cedar, Palmers and maybe the Wienery and Hardtimes, too, depending on their age and financial status. The West Bank School of Music is still alive. As is Freewheel, Midwest Mountain-eering, etc. The West Bank remains a diverse neighborhood welcoming to immigrants mostly because of the unusual number of subsidized housing units, but it is far from being “a Somali neighborhood.” And even if they are the majority ethnic group, why would anyone, especially Southside Pride, want to encourage further Somali ghettoization?

Bedlam brought a fresh, alternative perspective to their Somali enclave and they encouraged white Minnesotans to come down to a very African part of town and mingle.

I was really upset by the fact that you let Fredda Scobey have the last word. Whenever a cultural venue like Bedlam—a champion of diverse, challenging, engaging thought and practice—is replaced by a religious

organization—champions of conformity, mediocrity, tradition and repression—we should all be up in arms. The saner elements on the West Bank, or at least the secular leadership—if it exists—should be screaming bloody murder over this. And don’t start with the “youth programming” nonsense. Whenever religion and “programming” are combined, civilization suffers.

I’ll remain a fan of the Bedlam theater but I will miss, sorely miss, visiting their roof deck at happy hour. Your editor—or whoever wrote this nonsense in the July edition of Southside Pride—has obviously never been up on the back deck of 1501 6th St. S. at happy hour. Or at night. Or as I was last week when a storm was sweeping in from the west. When a big storm is blowing up I often drop everything and rush over to 6th Street as fast as my bike will carry me. What a view! Maybe the best public view of downtown anywhere. And at happy hour you could enjoy it with a three-dollar Bell’s Oberon in your hand. How many, many people, how many groups of people from out of town have I taken there? I consider it one of the great secrets of this city. And now it will be lost to everyone outside Darul Quba Mosque.

Southside Pride owes the residents of the West Bank an apology. And if you want a reporter who actually understands the West Bank, why not go over to KFAI and ask around? Your kind of lazy, biased reporting has a lack of pride—even a depressing sense of surrender.

Robert Haddow