"On December 18, 1961, wrecking trucks rumbled through the streets of downtown Minneapolis toward a rendezvous with the past. Their destination was the corner where the Metropolitan Building, for seventy-one years, had towered above its neighbors. But with the city in the midst of its greatest urban renewal project, the Metropolitan was about to come down, a victim of age, politics, and ideology. Lost Twin Cities, made up of images and stories reteived from a largely forgotten past, vividly reconstructs a vanished urban world. Many of the missing buildings are almost beyond recollection, while others remain etched in memory"--Back cover.