“If someone asked you, ‘Who is Neal Baxter?’ what would you say?”
“I’d say I’ve never met him. Who is that motherfucker?”
That was my subject’s cheeky reply on a summer morning outside Duck Duck Coffee, where we sat and talked for what simultaneously felt like three hours and five minutes. You may not know who Neal Baxter is yourself, but you’ve likely seen him before: six feet tall, white suit coat, walking up and down 38th Street in south Minneapolis at all hours of the day. You may’ve interacted with him at some point and not even known it.
Throughout our conversation, nearly every other person who passed by greeted him. It’s like that everywhere he goes. And he likes it that way.
“I just hate being home,” he says. “There's no social aspect. I'm obviously oriented to people.”
Born in the 1950s, Baxter is a retired deli worker and Guthrie Theater staff member who has been a resident of the Bancroft neighborhood for over 20 years, and a resident of Minneapolis nearly his whole life. His family has resided in Minneapolis since it became an incorporated city in 1867; he knows it inside and out. “The older I got, the less I wanted to move elsewhere, because you’d give up all your friends here. My dad was the same way,” he says.
Every day, people see Baxter out and about with his signature messenger bag and white seersucker coat (or wool coat if it’s cold enough). He tells me the suit coat is a lifehack—it makes you look professional and trustworthy. People often mistake him for a professor, or “accuse” him of being a lawyer or “an upper middle class, white-collar, fancy-pants worker of some kind.”
“I’m convinced it’s how I get away with being the stranger in the room,” he laughs. “You can look pretty shitty, and a suit coat makes you look so much better.” The suit coat also lets him get away with almost anything: “If you do something with a suit jacket, people will not accuse you of it. They’re thinking, ‘Oh, you couldn't have done that because you're too chi-chi.’ It's hilarious.”
(Plus, it has a lot of pockets. “My sunglasses are invaluable. My bus pass is invaluable. My notepad and pen are invaluable,” he explains.)
Baxter was an avid wanderer well before he lived in Bancroft. Once dubbed “The Mayor of Kenwood,” back when he roamed the Uptown area and was a frequent face at the Franklin Avenue Sebastian Joes, he’s never shied away from being a fixture of Minneapolis—he’s simply “constitutionally unable to stay in my house.”
Part of his saga includes a stint in performance art. “I never turned down a gig,” he says. That includes a five-year span spent reading “incongruous lists” on a stage, sometimes accompanied by live music. The most popular performance? A list that alternated between recent revolutionary events and advice for fixing a car. “This was the ’90s, and the revolutions in Eastern Europe just happened,” he explains, “people came up to me and said they wanted to hear it again.”
Once he bought a house in south Minneapolis, Baxter became a familiar face at multiple coffee shops and restaurants in the Bancroft and Standish neighborhoods. When Duck Duck Coffee opened in 2019 at 1830 E. 38th St., he became a regular, always ordering an espresso shot. Then came “Walking with Neal”—a recurring Wednesday stroll departing from the coffee shop.
“I just kinda thought that people would want to walk with Neal,” Duck Duck owner Kat Naden says. “Like… where does he go? Who does he talk to? How many shots of espresso does he have in a day?”
Baxter walks about 10 miles daily, staying east of I-35W, south of Lake Street, and west of Hwy. 55. Technically, he’s out and about running errands. But he deliberately lives without a car because walking is a more social form of transportation.
“With driving, you’re alone. You don’t see the city, you don’t learn the city. Everybody else is your enemy because you're trying to get somewhere and everybody else is in your way,” he says. “With walking, of course, you've still got to deal with the people you pass, and you've got to handle the assholes. But suddenly you learn who's around you, what they do, and when to turn a corner to avoid somebody. I mean, all that shit is part of being! It's all part of walking! I love that!”
People of all ages love Baxter, including the kids who join him on a “walking school bus” to and from Bancroft Elementary; when I attended Walking With Neal back in August, we were joined by Duck Duck barista Makayla Niko, her two-year-old daughter, and her mother. While we zigzagged between 35th and 38th Streets, I asked Makayla if this was the typical route.
“We just go wherever Neal goes,” she replied. “There’s always something or someone interesting he knows.”
And Baxter loves connecting with the people he passes by. He told me about an epiphany he had a while back: “I realized if I miss a bus, for instance, the right reaction isn't to get mad about it, but to get ready for seeing somebody I haven't seen for a while … I know half of Minneapolis, after all.”
Baxter almost isn’t joking about knowing half of Minneapolis. He knows the city really, really well. He ran for actual mayor in 2013: “My rule of thumb for almost anything is if I don’t do it, then what? If nothing’s the answer, then of course I’ll do it. Unless it’s illegal, immoral, or unwise, because that’s my mother’s mantra.”
And this mantra has led him to do many great things. This article was initially intended to be a brief profile on The Great Neal of 38th Street™, but I learned more magnificent stories than I have space to write about. From his detailed historical logs of Minneapolis elections to his adventures in Italy, Baxter is a civic treasure trove of interesting tales.
And, if you want to hear some of them, make your way over to Duck Duck Coffee on a Wednesday morning around 9 a.m. for Walking With Neal. You won’t regret it.
