ARTICLE AD BOX
“It’s the people, not the place,” said the caption laid over photos on Instagram eulogizing a south Minneapolis punk house that for at least two decades has been known as Disgraceland. An era ended when the owner announced plans to sell the home and the last punks moved out on April 30.
Over the years, it has hosted live music, sheltered touring bands, and housed countless individuals within the local DIY and punk communities. The exact timelines and quantities of shows, housemates, and pets are blurred by time, cheap bee, and a lack of formal documentation, but the lore of the house in the Phillips neighborhood precedes even its final name.
“The institutional memories are kind of chaotic, but I think it’s been around for closer to 30 years than 20. But it's been through different names in that era,” said Bryan May, ex-resident of Disgraceland. “There are so many people who've lived in the city whose parents were punk, who will be like, ‘yeah, I was there when I was a kid’”.
Grace Birnstengel, another former housemate, estimated that the house emerged as a more communal living space as early as the late 1980s or early 1990s.
“It was the Pirates’ Cove. I’m not sure for how long, but long enough for people to know about it,” Birnstengel said.
How Disgraceland got its name
By October 2003, the home had new residents and a new name. That era started when local Black Label Bike Club member Eliot Gordon was moving out of his parents’ house, and his friends were seeking roommates. They found a big house in south Minneapolis and were looking for people to fill the rooms; together, five of them signed a lease. In the chaos of the move — and hosting the first-ever “Bike Kill,” a tall-bike jousting event in New York — they hadn’t realized how big the space was.
“We realized, holy crap! And then we got about five more people to move in with us because it was a large house, and we were kids,” he said, laughing, alongside Lucas Houle, another roommate at the time.
“There were a few couples, so they shared rooms and stuff, but I had the whole basement for $150 after everyone moved in. All of the first shows we threw in there were in my bedroom,” Houle said.
This era’s first six months were characterized as its most tidy with freshly redone flooring and shining woodwork — a far cry from what it looked like at Houle’s visit to the house two years prior for a show.
“The first time I ever went there, I was 15. My band was playing a show, and the whole first floor was painted black with silver stars just like the outside of First Ave. And they all had like ‘dis-’whatever band, shitty punk band names in all of the stars and it was really cool, it blew my mind,” Houle said.
This trend, of Twin Cities punk bands with names starting with “dis,” was also partially responsible for the naming of the space. A mutual friend coined the name “Disgraceland.”
“How I see it is, everyone thought I looked like Elvis. And the ‘dis-’ bands were big at the time. They were bad. They were loud. And our friend Frasier said ‘it’s like Graceland, because you lived there, but it’s shitty. So, it’s Disgraceland,” Gordon said. It probably didn’t help that he wore the same Elvis shirt every day.
Disgraceland has hosted hundreds of shows and residents
In the beginning, Houle says Disgraceland hosted a show every other month.
“It wasn’t like a crazy show house,” Houle said. “It was my bedroom, so we couldn’t do it all the time. I didn’t want to deal with that because, like, after the show, man, your bedroom smells like beer. When you're 17, you do not clean up very fast.”
For years, it served as a hub for the bike club and its friends, eventually transitioning to a more general DIY and punk house. It became known regionally and then nationally among the underground punk scene as a place to play and crash when you were on tour.
The frequency of shows changed over time. Birnstengel estimated during her time there it peaked at one to five a month. May guessed they hosted a show at least every two weeks. A low estimate would math out around 600, with 30 shows a year for 20 years.
It’s also been estimated that at least 200 people have taken up short- or long-term residence while the house was known as Disgraceland. Several sources recalled eight to 14 people living in the house at once.
At times, it was a bit of a zoo, with packs of five to six dogs in the house. Someone lost a snake named Kurt Russell, like the actor, and later someone else found and cared for it. There was the time someone brought home a rooster, and it ended up relegated to the porch until one day it disappeared.
How to run a punk house
Some may wonder why the shows never got busted, or the landlord never caught wind of the number of people living there or noticed the state of the house. Previous residents attribute it to the laissez-faire attitude of Disgraceland’s owner, which allowed for a great deal of freedom, but sometimes came with considerable work for the people living there.
An old roommate remembers getting dodged by the landlady because he was persnickety about repairs. Several people remember her sending a handyman who wouldn’t complete the work unless he was invited to smoke weed. Later, the landlady would ask them to make the repairs themselves, in exchange for discounts on rent.
Positive-to-neutral relationships with neighbors kept the peace. May remembers a block party where residents pulled out a deep fryer and made corn dogs for the neighborhood kids. Tenants were also cautious to keep people out of the front yard during parties and shows, and kept the address offline. Flyers for shows would be shared with “Ask a Punk” listed at the bottom — not intended as gatekeeping, but merely to keep a good thing going.
Additionally, in the wake of the 2023 mass shooting at the Nudieland punk house, the community’s desire for safety from those looking to harm and the police was paramount, especially in spaces where people would sell alcohol to pay the bands and overstuff the house with a bacchanal of bodies writhing in the pit in the basement or the structurally unsound garage to loud, abrasive music long after dark.
Details of the eviction and sale are unclear. Hennepin County tax information says the home, which was built in 1904, was last sold in 1992 for $1. MPR News contacted the listed owner and taxpayer but did not hear back.
Some clues, though, were given by previous tenants, who said the longest-tenured owner passed the responsibility to a family member who lived out of state, who may have become tired of remote management.
There are efforts to keep the house in the punk community. A potential buyer said several past residents attempted to lease the house, but the owners were not interested in doing so.
The prospective buyer expressed that they don’t intend to profit off tenants and sees every dollar put into the house as an investment towards punk futures.
Despite the eviction and the reports of a possible sale, the home had not been listed for sale as of June 25. Maybe the owners need time to repair where knives were chucked into the ceiling in the kitchen, paint over the walls teeming with colorful murals, refinish the beer-stickied floors, and shore up the aforementioned garage of which an adjacent tree has become a structural element.
Saying goodbye to a legend
Tenants held the venue’s last shows, Disgraceland Fest, on April 19 and 20. On the second evening, a grey sky and drizzle mirrored the bittersweet mood. It could have been any other show or party day at the house: dogs walked around, merch, drinks and spliffs were for sale, food was being served under the awning out back and a fire was burning in the yard. Both the basement and garage were occupied with a rotation of 21 bands, and a local tattooer was set up blasting pigment into the skin of attendees.
The only difference was that all of it was on behalf of those being displaced, as the house shut down after an attempt by tenants to purchase it fell through. A multigenerational crew rotated in and out throughout the weekend, and shared memories from when they lived there or reminisced about shows they’d seen.
Birnstengel said Disgraceland’s end is also a loss for underagers and historically underrepresented groups within the local music scene.
“To be part of that community and have the chance to try to make it welcoming and disarming for people younger than me and specifically young punks of color, young queer and trans punks, especially at all ages, DIY shows where no one is turned away for lack of funds,” Birnstengel said. “I just know how much that kind of thing meant to me, and I didn’t have access to that as a teen in South Saint Paul.”
“It’s always a blow to the music scene when active house venues and DIY spaces come to an end,” said Matthew Graves, local music archivist and promoter of UnderCurrentMPLS.
“However, it’s especially devastating when it’s a space as long-running as Disgraceland with so much history and significance to so many people in the community. House venues like this really become part of the DNA of what makes a music and arts scene thrive from the underground up. There is an intimacy to shows in spaces like this that really just can’t be fully recreated in official venues.”
Graves and fellow contributors in the UnderCurrentMPLS crew have amassed over 8,000 videos on his YouTube page from venues across the Twin Cities, with a plethora at Disgraceland from over the years.
“It’s rare to have a house venue last more than a couple of years. To have one last more than a decade is definitely magical, and to imagine someone painting over the incredible art on the walls of that basement to flip that house, or whatever they plan to do, is beyond heartbreaking,” he said.
It’s a shame that we live in a world where art, community, and the subcultures that foster it are so criminally undervalued by society at large. It’s all so much more important to every city’s identity than many understand.”
How the punk and underground scene is changing
Although Minneapolis lost another underground venue, punk in Minneapolis isn’t going anywhere; it’s just changing shape.
The Twin Cities have long been a hub for those looking to find–and create–spaces to call their own and bring others along for the ride. Punks from earlier generations have opened new spots to gather or host shows.
Maren Macosko and Brad Lokkesmoe opened their venue, Cloudland Theater, in 2023. It’s shown documentaries about different eras of the music scene and hosted packed sets in its 150-capacity space.
Kat Naden opened Duck Duck Coffee, a playful and cozy coffee shop that hosts an array of events, including occasional live music, art and comedy shows, as well as a support group for people recovering from substance abuse.
Gordon’s wife, Natalie, runs Seward’s This & That, a multi-use space that hosts art nights, gallery pop-ups, local makers’ markets and, of course, live music.
While a community is ultimately about the people, sometimes the place can have a longstanding and meaningful contribution to its legacy.
“This house ending is kind of tragic because there’s so much memory in a place like that,” said May. “I think a punk institution like Disgraceland, people put a lot of themselves into it, and it becomes like a living being in a way, and its going is really sad. I think the most important thing about a punk house is that it's different than the nuclear family, or like a house that's more private. It’s a space where people connect. I think we'll find new and different ways to connect.”
English (US) ·