. Or married. Or just to spend a Saturday afternoon. This lake has always appealed to the beach set - the people with money, looks, and youth. It’s the only one with a Gatsby-era beach club; it’s right by Uptown, the main theater-and-cafe district of south Minneapolis. An exclusive club open only to members sits on one side of the lake. But the beaches are open to everyone, of course.

As a single person in the 80s, it was my obligation to hang out here. By then the main single-person beach had shifted to the east shore, which was usually full of waitresses and wolves on a weekday. The lake isn’t much to look at - a round pond with a few scudding sailboats, some highrises on the north shore. But it smells and sounds like no other lake. On a summer afternoon there are a hundred radios playing, cars trolling past with stereos thumping, the air full of weeks and fish and suntan oil.

I went back here at summer’s end, and wandered around my old sunning spots. And I discovered it’s one of the few places in the city that politely, but firmly, informs me that I don’t belong here any more.

This site has three sections. The first concerns the old bath house built to serve the people who came in on the trolley lines. The second has some postcards, and the third section concerns the Calhoun Beach Club, a place of no smallimportance to me: that’s where I met my wife.