MINNEAPOLIS — As night-life emissaries go, one could do worse than Robert John Wayne, a 31-year-old artist here who happily told a recent visitor about everything from an indigenous delicacy called the Juicy Lucy (a burger with cheese baked into the patty) to what women want, something Mr. Wayne should know, seeing as how he’s dating four of them.

“Nobody’s exclusive,” he said “That’s what dating is.”

Mr. Wayne, who described his work as “graffiti realism,” was at Mortimer’s, a wood-paneled bar on Lyndale Avenue in the swath of Minneapolis known as Uptown. It was a rainy night in mid-September, and the specter of winter, which some residents joke lasts 90 percent of the year, was already looming over the throng.

It’s surely no accident that in “Let’s Go Crazy,” the Minneapolis native Prince describes the afterworld as a place where “you can always see the sun, day or night.” Some eight miles downtown are connected by skyways to shield pedestrians from snow, hail and cold, turning the area into a kind of human ant farm. For residents of Uptown, which lacks skyways, going out can be a pastime for the very hearty — or the very motivated.

“You want to fall in love in winter,” said Hayley Lindma, a 23-year-old artist who was with three friends at Mort’s, as everyone calls it, surrounded by dartboards, Big Buck Hunter games and a jukebox. When it’s cold, she said, “You want to stay home and cuddle and watch movies and eat food and be with your pets.”