Like Robert Zimmerman, after I finished high school, I moved to Minneapolis to attend college at the University of Minnesota. And like Zimmerman, I lived in Dinkytown, frequented the coffee shops, book stores, and record shops there (one was even called “Positively 4th Street” during my tenure) and longed for the life of a writer and artist. Well, Bob left Minneapolis and became Dylan, and I… well, I got a job and stuck around the Twin Cities to help start and raise a family.
Although my shared footprint with Bob Dylan is small, I’ve been a fan most of my life and have always been a bit fascinated by him. If anyone asks my favorite song of all time, from any aritist, my go-to response is Dylan’s “Tangled up in Blue,” which was recorded here in Minneapolis in 1975 during his Blood on the Tracks sessions. As someone who loves Minnesota’s “great Northwoods,” many of my travels have been Dylan-adjacent, resulting in an occasional nod or acknowledgement, or song cued up to play at just the right time. (“Highway 61 Revisited” as I hit the entrance ramp onto the highway, “Girl from the North Country” while driving across the Iron Range… you get the idea). But, I hadn’t really done a concentrated deep-dive into Dylan.
So, I figured with the release of the movie A Complete Unknown and much attention focused back on one of Minnesota’s favorite sons (whether he admits it or not), I figured now was as good a time as any to visit some of Dylan’s childhood haunts and see if they offered any of the same clues or inspiration to me that they did to young Bob Zimmerman when he was growing up in the North Country.
I started in Duluth, where Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman at then-St. Mary’s Hospital in 1941. The hospital has been subsumed into Essentia-St. Mary’s Medical Center, which stands across the street from the Fitger’s hotel and shopping complex. The stretch of Superior Street and London Road running from Fitger’s to the Armory Arts and Music Center has been designated Bob Dylan Way.
The Zimmermans continued living in Duluth until Bob was about six, when they moved to his mother’s hometown of Hibbing and into a tidy house on 7th Avenue East. It was there that Dylan recalled listening to radio stations playing artists like Hank Williams, Bobby Vee, and Johnnie Ray. The house is under private ownership, but a plaque commemorates the period during which its most famous resident lived there.
By the time he got to Hibbing High School—a few blocks down the street from the Zimmermans’ home, a stretch now called Bob Dylan Drive—Bob was ready to start playing music. He formed several bands during his high school years.
According to a statement he made after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, it was a Buddy Holly show he saw at the Duluth Armory that sparked him to take his performance to the next level—and he did. Dylan and his high school band, the Golden Chords, famously had their mic unplugged by the principal for being too loud at a talent show. The old armory is currently undergoing renovation and is set to reopen in 2026 as the Armory Arts and Music Center.
After high school, Dylan moved to the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota. He first lived in a fraternity house, but at some point, he reportedly moved into an apartment over Gray’s Campus Drugs on the corner of 14th Avenue and 4th Street Southeast. He immersed himself in Dinkytown’s coffee shop, bookstore, and folk scene, and from there, launched the career that sent him to Greenwich Village and on to fame.
I don’t think he’d recognize Dinkytown now. I lived there 30 years after he did, and I hardly recognize it. Gray’s is gone (it was still there when I was). My favorite coffee shop and all the record stores are gone. My favorite used bookstore, The Book House, abides, but it’s in a different location. Still, it’s comforting that something is hanging on.
And it’s the same story for most of the places I visited. I was an outsider looking in. All the spots were either closed, lacked the same character they had when they helped to inspire Dylan, or were now just part of Dylan’s victory lap, celebrating his life and accomplishments. Maybe it’s my age, but when I was in college before there was a Target Express and a Starbucks in Dinkytown, I could feel Dylan’s presence there. But now, he feels more ephemeral, like a once-heavy fog that has now mostly lifted.
The one place where I did get a sense of Dylan’s childhood was downtown Hibbing, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and where many of the businesses—although different—maintain the same façades they did when Dylan was growing up. Iron mining is still the town’s main industry, and the folks still get together for hockey, curling, and polka dancing. The Hibbing Public Library maintains a Bob Dylan Collection that, I think, serves to cement his presence in the town. It also offers a 14-stop walking tour that helps you place yourself in Dylan’s footsteps. In Hibbing, not in front of his house or his high school, but downtown, among the people, Dylan felt real and definitely of the place. I appreciated that. (As an aside, the city of Hibb ing itself has a fascinating backstory—it was actually moved so a mining company could open a new pit).
Back in the Twin Cities, not long after Dylan won his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, a massive mural commemorating the artist was painted on the side of a building at 5th and Hennepin in downtown Minneapolis. Depicting Dylan at three different ages, the work is called “The times they are a-changin’,” and after my little Dylan foray, I can’t disagree. What I felt left with after touring significant places in Dylan’s childhood and young adult years was a nostalgia for a simpler, kinder time, when the notion of being an artist was neither so far-fetched nor entangled with monetization as it is today. On the other hand, such crass capitalism was exactly what much of Dylan’s early work argued against; so, maybe it’s what I should be feeling after taking a few steps in Dylan’s shoes: “The battle outside ragin’ / Will soon shake your windows / And rattle your walls / For the times they are a-changin’.”…