Great news for history lovers! After a two and one-half year effort, Hennepin County Library’s Special Collections department and Minneapolis Public Schools finally reached agreement on donating Joe Quigley’s aerials. They are now being professionally archived and scanned and will soon start appearing on HCL’s Digital Collections website for everyone to enjoy. Here is the story.
The Linden Hills History Study Group generously sponsored local historian Tom Balcom’s and my program on the Quigley aerials on Wednesday, May 23. Aaron Isaacs, author of “Twin Cities by Trolley,” pointed out the streetcar lines in Quigley’s aerials. Ted Hathaway, HCL Special Collections senior librarian, updated us on the effort to acquire the aerials from the Minneapolis school district. Gini Tyson, current owner of the house Joe built in 1916, was there, as were several Quigley family members. A great time — and all of us eager to see the aerials secured for the public domain. Here is the story.
Joe Quigley’s aerials of Minneapolis schools and neighborhoods in the late 1920s-early 1930s provide an unparalleled view of the face of the city. “Shot from the seat of an open-cockpit plane,” Will Craig wrote in 2018, “his photos show us real places where buildings have sidewalks, windows, and doors.” Clearly, the Quigley aerial collection needed to be made available to the public.
Here is the story as it appeared in the April 2016 Hill & Lake Press.
In March through May 2016 I was researching the 40-year history of Hill & Lake Press, during which I read through all 425-odd issues of the paper and discovered that Will Craig had in fact published the same four aerial photos of the Hill and Lake neighborhoods 34 years earlier. Here is the same story, updated a bit in 2018.
“Never-published aerial photographs” read the breathless headline in March 2016. Almost true: the aerial photographs hadn’t been seen as a group since Will Craig’s article thirty-four years earlier in the March 1982 Hill & Lake Press. But (re)discovering Joe Quigley’s aerial photos, and learning of the extent of the Quigley archive, was pretty exciting. Here is the story.
michael • wilson • writes 