Logging, railroads, and labor-intensive agricultural practices had begun to decline even before the war. By the fifties, these industries and methods were all but extinct. Lumber production in Minneapolis virtually ceased in 1920. By 1935 flour milling had receded to its lowest capacity in a hundred and fifty years. Mechanized farming introduced in the thirties ended dependence on farm labor. Likewise, new railroad construction, after exponential growth through the 1870s, gradually leveled off as early as 1910, and from then until the outbreak of World War II consisted mostly of maintenance. During the same period, the automobile began its ascendance, and, after the war, dethroned railroads in carrying capacity. These changes eliminated the useful employment of lumberjacks, farmhands, and railroad gandy dancers.

Had their services remained in high demand, many original migrants would have been hard pressed to answer the call. By 1958 the median age of skid row residents was sixty, and fully a third were older than sixty-five and collected a fixed income. Instead of hopping freight trains to the next harvest, or shifting from coast to coast in boxcars, they crept along from hotel to park to tavern. Half of all skid rowers had lived in the city for five years or more. And two-thirds hadn’t set foot outside Minneapolis in the previous year. Skid row had become their retirement home.

As the migrant workers grew older and lost their mobility, they adapted the institutions that had provided housing and entertainment in the past to their new, settled existence. They converted the cramped and aging temporary cage hotels into virtually permanent housing. These tiny spaces became kitchen, living room, and bedroom, with, as one researcher observed, a “bewildering variety of paraphernalia” crammed into “a space little larger than the ‘his and hers’ closets of suburban ramblers.” A survey of the neighborhood turned up several men who had lived in their cages for more than thirty years.