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Drake Hotel

from Rust Belt Ballads by Emmett Doyle

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about

The Drake Hotel was an old establishment in downtown Minneapolis being used as a homeless shelter. It burned down on Christmas Day in 2019, with no direct casualties but with hundreds of people left unsheltered in winter in Minnesota, with Covid brewing on the horizon. Every year in the Twin Cities, camps of people suffering homelessness sprout up throughout the city, only to be chased down by the MPD and the SPPD over in Saint Paul, harassed and evicted, their belongings trashed. Every year, we build more and more high-end condos that these people can't afford to live in.

lyrics

Am E Am E Am
The wind in downtown Minneapolis skipped along over the snow
Am E Am E Am
And threw the white flakes on the sidewalk under the hotel window glow
G Am G Am
The red trucks dashed into the city, and tore through the night with a bell
Am E Am E Am E Am
The flakes tumbling higher were ash from the fire that gutted the Drake hotel

Oh mama, your baby is crying- She’s crying for something to eat
She’s wrapping herself in a coat too big, she’s shaking for loss of her heat
We sleep under bridges and byways, we sleep on the park bench or bus
The condos we build will never be filled, they’re a shelter for assets, not us

Who tried to blow on the whistle? Who swept that into the dark?
These projects are waiting for fixing, like a tinder box waits for a spark
From the ramshackle gas-line explosions, to the tower fire on the West Bank
We knew that this town was slow burning down, ‘fore the cops put a match to the tank

Go walk by the camps on the Greenway tell me who is deserving or not
Go walk by the cranes and the scaffold, tell me who’s gonna live in that lot?
Go walk in the ruins and the rubble and answer me if you can tell
Which pile of stones and burnt rebar bones was once the Drake Hotel?

credits

from Rust Belt Ballads, released September 1, 2023

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Emmett Doyle Minneapolis, Minnesota

Emmett is a working class rebel musician- a union carpenter, former river deckhand, raised on a farm in central Minnesota. With American country and blues and Irish traditional roots, he keeps the Long Memory going while singing about today's struggles. His work is rooted in social movements he's an active part of, from labor to defending the earth to fighting hate. ... more

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