Dinkytown — where Bob Dylan first performed

In the autumn of 1959, Robert Zimmerman arrived at the University of Minnesota and quickly gravitated to Dinkytown, the small bohemian commercial district adjacent to campus. He enrolled in classes but spent most of his time at the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a coffee house on 14th Avenue SE where folk musicians played to crowds of students and local beatniks. It was here that he began introducing himself as Bob Dylan, shed his small-town Minnesota identity, and started performing Woody Guthrie songs and blues standards for anyone who would listen.

Dinkytown in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a pocket of counterculture in the upper Midwest. The neighbourhood had bookshops, record stores, and coffee houses where students argued about poetry, politics, and folk music. Dylan soaked it all in — he discovered records by Odetta, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson, and began developing the restless, searching style that would define his early work. He also began cultivating the mythology that would follow him, telling people he had run away from home, ridden freight trains, and played piano for Bobby Vee.

The Ten O'Clock Scholar closed decades ago, and Dinkytown has changed significantly — chain restaurants and student housing have replaced many of the old storefronts. But the neighbourhood retains its connection to Dylan. A mural of the young singer stands nearby, and walking tours of Dylan's Minneapolis trace his path from the university dorms through the coffee houses where he first tested the persona that would change popular music. Dylan left Minneapolis for New York in January 1961, less than two years after arriving. He never came back to stay.