December 01, 2004

The zombification of downtown Minneapolis

I go back to Minneapolis about once a year. When I grew up there it was a town of about two hundred thousand people. Now there are about four. There were no slums, but the poorer people lived to the immediate north and south of downtown, mostly north. Minneapolis was a vibrant city of grain mills and small to medium size industries - with a lot of textile manufacturing. It sported two big train stations, just like other large cities in America - the Great Northern and the Milwaukee lines.

They're gone now. One is demolished and the other is an art gallery, I think. Most people lived in houses back then. As a young child I thought apartment buildings were strange. How can you live in a little cubicle next to total strangers and people running past your door day and night?

My sisters and I grew up in a middle class neighborhood. Not fancy, but clean. There was Miehl's grocery store on the corner of Bloomington and 47th Ave. Old man Miehl was proud of having employed Robert Oppenheimer as a grocery clerk once for a summer. Down the street was Max Sadoff's pharmacy where I got caught stealing a Playboy magazine when I was twelve and my hormones got the better of me. Across the street was Ted's barbershop where my dad got his hair cut every other week.

But downtown was alive! When the streetcars got pensioned off and replaced by buses, my mother and I used to wait across from Miehl's for the ride downtown. It took about twenty minutes and we got off outside Dayton's, a big, seven-story department store on Nicollet Avenue.

Right down the street was a giant Woolworths and Kresge's - two five and dimes that could thrive, despite the fact that they were only a block from each other. And there were at least three other big department stores nearby. The sidewalks were full of workers, shoppers and even a few asssorted bums here and there.




It was a big deal going downtown. I had to put on "proper" clothes. No jeans or sneakers. Downtown was where other people saw you with your mother.

How to zombify a city

When you make a zombie you dig up a fresh body and do a lot of wierd things to it. People think there's nothing wrong in the beginning, but then strange things start happening. The town was just fading away a little. Kresge's goes, because Woolworth's is making more money. Then Woolworth's re-opens in smaller quarters. The big banks that used to be on every other corner consolidate and the people who own the magnificient buildings that never, never can be replaced again think they're not making enough money anymore.

So over the space of about twenty years, Minneapolis got dug up and people did peculiar things to her. High steel structures with huge expanses of mirrors that reflect the clouds were erected and the banks moved back.




Dayton's became Marshall Field's and suburbia moved in.

Who knows which councilman came up with the bright idea? These were the zombie potions and needles that did the trick - skyways.

Skyways are sort of cool. You don't have to go outside in the rain or snow or sleet or wind. You just walk in your shirtsleeves from one building to another. This can be a good thing - in measure, but the the idea sort of caught on in the city council or maybe it was in the Minneapolis Downtown Businessmen's Association or maybe they were the same bunch of people. Over the next ten years the whole of downtown Minneapolis slowly lost its soul to a vast array of bridges above the streets.

Visit some of the suburbs of Minneapolis today and you'll see a thriving city. Visit downtown and you'll see a lot less. The bustling pedestrians, the cars, the buses, the taxis, the sounds of people talking and yelling and smell of fresh food when you open the door of the Forum - what used to be the largest automated cafeteria in the Midwest. It's all gone. Everything is cooped up, antiseptic like - and expensive.

People are there, but they're all sorted away in the innards of the buildings. You can see them from below as they walk above you, but you won't hear anything, either from them or from the absence of them on the streets.

And if you look really hard at the reflection of the clouds in the facade of the IDS Tower, you can see Mr Clean in the heavens, smiling down on his urban creation.





Can skyways be detrimental to social interaction?


  




1 comment:

Gabriel said...

Such a coincidence - I have a deli on my block that used to be run by Max Planck!