Transfer

« Nightlife Panel | Main | Hixton Wisconsin - Further 1994 »

November 17, 2004

To Minneapolis, With Love

Because I’ve spent so much time there, formative time, and even more so because my parents have left the area (for FL), I have a strong affinity to the simultaneously Forward and Backward thinking of Minneapolis. Especially in terms of it’s Urban & Architectural Heritage & Vision. I’ve been living in Brooklyn, watching from afar, that scraggy cosmo town on the cold windswept prairie. Making both great Advances, and continuing with myopic blunders. It is from that, and from here, that I write this love letter.

Minneapolis is a northern Midwest river town. Not quite a Great Lakes city, not quite a gateway of westward expansion. Owing itself to one of the 19th century’s greatest economic engines, the Mississippi, it was incorporated in 1856 with a population of only 1555, but grew to a population of 143,000 by 1887. It did so, nearly single handedly, by harnessing St. Anthony Falls to become the country’s leading flour producer, with the great mills of Pillsbury and Gold Medal Flour.

St Anthony Falls & The Stonearch Bridge

The Twin Cities are HQ for such biggies as 3M, Cray/SGI, US Bank, Honeywell, UofM, Prince, Target, Wellstone [RIP], Replacements, Medtronic, the world’s first heart transplant, and the Walker Art Center. Minneapolis is home to a theatre district that claims more theatre seats, per capita, then New York City. Home to a huge Scandinavian population & a long-standing African American community, it has also has become homestead for Somalis, the Hmong (on lead from Lutheran churches) & more recently, immigrants from Mexico. Yet its population sits at 370 thousand – less then the 540 thousand that lived there in 1950.

It sold the largest street car network in the country, to Mexico City, and bought into General Motors bus racket. The Gateway Project, as it was dubbed, cleared more blocks for 1960’s urban renewal than any other US City. Having long suffered, from being unhindered by natural boundaries, it has lost dollars upon dollars to the suburbs - for it seems a millenia. Is it any wonder the first totally enclosed shopping mall, Southdale, was built in a suburb outside Minneapolis?

Edina, MN

Yet, it has had a picturesque capturing of the right industries – technology and creative – which translated to a boom at the right time, in the harsh transition away from small farms and Great Lakes Region union factory jobs.

Perhaps it was the ability of boosters to always differentiate the "Twin Cities" from definitions of other regional midwestern cities. It has always seemed more Copenhagen or Stolkholm - than St. Louis. A northern outpost, but never on par with the gritty mine towns of the Iron Range, or the harsh lumber towns that built Paul Bunyan. By any standard the Twin Cities are huge, in geographic circumference, but the metro area tops just over 2 million persons. Making it still a mostly suburban 2nd-tier Midwestern metro. But with the cosmopolitan sheen of Northern Europe, & just enough gritty urban imagination to be resolutely Great Lakes.

The perfect combo for young creative dreamers who dot the Midwest, abandoning their seemingly simpleton small town upbringings for the regional heart of commerce in the tri-state area – which always makes for interesting culture.

Now the lofts have come to downtown, and Fingerhut is trying its damnedest to shut down First Avenue. Crime rates still heat the poor neighborhoods, and Minneapolis police are still notoriously bad despite media attention. While suburban aggregation eats the surrounding farmland at gargantuan rates - and the sucking sound continues.

But these issues aside, amazing new projects arise. Minneapolis’s Int’l Airport, MSP, (Northwest Airlines HQ’s), was just expanded and enlarged, and will be connected to downtown by, *finally*, the Hiawatha Light Rail Transit line. The Minneapolis Park System is the largest of its kind in the world – 6500 acres – with a record 15 million visitors in 1999. The Guthrie is closely approaching the completion of their Jean Nouvel masterpiece on the Mississippi, a new Central Library by Cesar Pelli (who also did the delightful Deco Norwest Center), and of course the newly expanded Walker Art Center, by Herzog & de Meuron.

Walker by Herzog

Guthrie by Nouvel

Library by Pelli

Yet you read articles like this, from the Star Tribune, about wholly uncompromising boards and remarkably impetuous design reviews. Only to be expected when it comes to residential architecture, this leads to my biggest gripe with Minneapolis, density & residential construction.

"The firm's all-glass design for Parc Centrale, a 21-story "Vancouver-style" residential tower in Loring Park, went down in flames this fall after a slew of neighbors opposed the height. It has redesigned the project as a six-story building inspired by the nearby classical Loring Park Office Building."

Admittedly most of the city center neighborhoods are many times beautiful, home of some of the finest residential examples of Prairie, Shingle, Richardson Romanesque, and Chateuesque homes – not to mention the fine-looking Queen Annes in South Minneapolis, and the eclectic Lake of the Isles. Yet Minneapolis residents beg for investment in areas like the Phillips neighborhood. Indeed loft conversation & construction continues, catering to returning wealthy suburbanites or child less professionals. A start, but a very one-dimensional development scheme.

A plea, to Minneapolis, to recognize your great feats as a city, as a Midwestern jewel of forward architecture and economics, and lay off the petrol, and retro low density housing, cause I miss not coming home to her over the holidays.

I love prairie construction – but let’s try it in row home form, and condo towers, lets look at metro planning more. Take a chance on moving beyond those great blunders of the past – and embrace a vision of residential living, that is architecturally and urbanistically intelligent.

Posted by jmarston at November 17, 2004 04:57 PM

Comments

Posted by: Doreen at November 18, 2004 10:51 AM

Posted by: Erik at November 18, 2004 12:39 PM

Posted by: Joe at November 18, 2004 03:34 PM

Posted by: Mike at November 22, 2004 03:31 PM