Masonic Joys

Masonic Building, Minneapolis. March, 2011

I just shot this 4x5 photo yesterday. I was having a low week at work, and decided that packing the view camera down to 6th and Hennepin and doing the Masonic Building would cheer me up. The whole kit, including a vintage Minolta lightmeter, 4 film packs, monorail Calumet 4x5 View camera on a 26" rail, etc fit pretty well into a big shoulder bag. With tripod I was lugging 20+ pounds, and I had a 12 block round-trip through the skyways. I think that coming back into the system through the Plymouth Building might have put me in a node I hadn't actually visited before.

When I went out to set up on the sidewalk, I realized I hadn't worn a jacket and it was about 38 degrees. I fought the urge to rush the set-up, and had to go under the dark cloth several times to recheck the focus. The corner I was on was good for attracting attention from groups of street kids, but they just wanted me to take their picture. No real hassles. When I had the front and rear tilts and front lift set on the camera, I realized the battery had gone dead in the spotmeter, so I had to guess the exposure. That wasn't too hard. The lens and shutter I was using was an uncoated 140mm f4.5 Kodak Anastigmat in an 1930s vintage Compur shutter, which I had to trust for timing in the cold. This was a 50th of a second exposure at f16 on Ilford Delta 100 film. I took another at a 10th of a second which I intended to underdevelop, but forgot and it came out way too dense to print.

I tray developed the two exposures I made, one at a time. This print shows that I over-agitated the negative, but I have to say that sitting in the complete darkness at 3 a.m. listening to the motor on the old Gray Lab timer and gently rocking the enamel pan back and forth was a spiritual moment for me. Total focus and total defocus, pardon the expressions, simultaneously. I had to be completely in the moment because my only clue that the timer was up was the sudden silence of the motor, which was only as loud as a cricket walking through straw in the first place. But, while my senses were acutely tuned to the chirring sound, and my wrist was flexing slowly enough to not slosh developer on my drawing board, I felt an immense peace, a completion of my sense of self that rarely occurs.

People wonder why I go to this trouble to take a large format photo that my Nikon D90 could do as well or better, they think. With so much less trouble.

The photo is just the package of the experience, and the experience is a distillation of years of being and hours of effort. The package has its discipline, the experience has its shape and meaning, the whole arc results in a few moments of pure joy that cannot be secured through any shortcuts I know.

So how do you like the "vintage" look? Seems appropriate for the old building.

Japan today live

Live streaming video by Ustream

The web is a skyway at times like these.

The way of the seashell

Skyways are rectilinear. Seashells are spirals. The lack of gradient in the skyways is felt as a kind of shock, your path jerks every block, jogs left or right, jams into a t-intersection, shifts up or staggers and staggers around a bit before shooting off into another tee or ell. There is not chance for the inner ear to find a melody to your path in the skyway. It has a certain rhythm. But no melody.

Yr Faithful Correspondant

That is me, age 15, on the left. Trying to decide if I wanted to become an astronaut or a captain of industry when I grew up. This photo was taken when the first skyway was a mere 6 months old.

Buildng + Community + Links = ?

Skywaifs present, past and future

Britt Aamodt started the ball rolling by interviewing people for a radio feature on skyways. She is an arts reporter with an extensive background in marginalia, having published a definitive work on the undefinable art of comix. When she approached me I recognized how marginal skyways and my blog are, so I agreed.

Ryan Siemers, Marsha Trainer, sharing down-to-earth but 20-feet-off-the-ground skyway insights and anecdotes.

And me, the skyway yay sayer and scribbler in the margins of the city.
Missing from the photos are Kevin Kirsch, who was there but got away before I snapped at everyone, and Mike Bleakmore, who wasn't even there to photograph, but who is a skywaif from way back.

We have found the skywaif! She rocks the skyways!

Ryan Siemers and Craig Hinrichs from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

I don't get to use the word "rollicking" often, but Ryan Siemers and Craig Hinrichs have given us a rollicking good time in their Videotect Skyway video entry. And when I put the call out for nominations for the skywaif of the month, little did I suspect she was captured in the frames of this piano-roll, or should I say piano-rollicking, romp through the city's second ways.

I have given up trying to garner all the votes for myself. There are too many great bits on the contest site. Go see them all at the AM link above.

The views expressed in this video do not necessarily represent the views of you or anyone like you. Or maybe they do

Kevin Kirsch from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo

I have a special place in my heart for the musicians on the skyways.  When Billy Chopper, an Argentine duo, busked in the USBank Plaza skyway last summer, I posted some video and got a thousand hits from all over the world.  Kevins's video does justice to the special musicians who grace the 4th Ave. skyway, which I see every single day.  I wish I had done something like this, but now Kevin did, and so enjoy it.

And you can vote for it on the contest site linked above, if you can't bring yourself to vote for my video.  Just kidding.  Vote your heart.  Or conscience.  Or ears.  whatever..

There is fame and fortune, and then there are skyway promotion activities...

Jeff Beddow from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

Hey.  My entry in the videotect contest for best statement about the skyways is ...well it's right there.  Go here to vote for the best video.  I hope it's mine.  But there is something for everyone.  I hope mine is something for everyone.  May the best video win.  I hope my video is the best video.

Note: Turn down the sound to a minimal level...the conversion process kept the sound levels almost intolerably high for most of the entries.

Bromeliad in Gaviidae Commons

Brilliant tropical colors liven up the courtyard on a grey winter day.

City within a city

A partial model of the downtown area was on display in the Crystal Court today. Signs of work meetings littered the tables nearby. Intriguing display. Anyone know what this is?

The ABCs of skyway floor treatments

Terrazo. This is the original skyway floor, unchanged since 1962. Does it remind you of your high school? It should.

Dogfood colored carpet. A statistical average of every pattern and color ever used in commercial carpets.

Bauhaus-inspired industrial weave. Weakly inspired. But it is strong enough to let you test your new trifocals for peripheral distortion effects. I like it so there.

M.A. Tees it up at the Skyway Open

My favorite local media personality M. A. Rosko does the skyway open:

M.A. Tees it up at the Skyway Open: MyFoxTWINCITIES.com

New art on the skyways

Margo Bohlander is having an exhibit of neoprimitive animal paintings in the Thrivant Building cafeteria. Well done, effective quotations from the genre of cave art and more naturalistic efforts.  I like the abstracted paleolithic versions myself.  Worth a lunch break.

Great lunch, great light and space

The Thrivent/old Lutheran Brotherhood building on 4th Ave between 6th and 7th Streets has a great cafeteria. Hot food made to order, lots of specials, great salads. And the dining room has this skylight that looks like a Jules Verne movie set. Captain Nemo anyone?

Shortest functional skyway

This looks to be about 20' or so long. There is a 12' skyway level bridge from the 5th Street Towers to a building north of it, but it is not used much if at all. Taking suggestions as to shorter/shortest skyways.

Skyway as phoneway

Can you hear me now?

Skyway as town commons, crossroads

Friends encounter each other at the intersection of the Cambell Mithun/TCF main routes.  A local uses the waste container as a desk while he studies his scratch-off lottery results.  The skyway is a commons, but it rarely feels like one.  It usually feels like a thoroughfare, a pedestrian artery. The skyways are the proverbial place where "push comes to shove" should you dally.

In the early 1990s, When Disney commissioned the planning of a Dream Town in Florida, (called Celebration, and meant to honor Walt's centenary) the planners insisted that there be many walking paths where residents would encounter each other casually, regularly, and in circumstances conducive to chatting and passing the time informally.  They knew that much real business of community gets conducted under these conditions.  It was an inflection point on the arc of urban planning which had pushed for efficiency and speed since the plans of Baron Hausmann ripped through the medieval heart of old Paris with new Boulevards, vast causeways designed to allow troops to march 100 abreast at top speed.

The great old cities of Spain, such as Madrid have their Plaza Mayors, the royal square where everyone who was anyone promenaded on Sunday evening, and where the great public events of the day automatically were assumed to happen.

In Egypt, Tahrir Square, in China, Tiananmen Square, were the focal points of confrontation between the old and new histories of entire nations.

If you think about it, the lack of a public commons in Minneapolis is glaring.  There is no central square,  park , pool, no reservoir of time and space that can focus the whole downtown, contain the idle, and create an idyll for the hasty.

The skyways need more of that, more eddy pools and sidings.  In the dense core of the city, everything is evaporating so rapidly.  We need places for time to condense, to precipitate out, to settle like dew for a bit before the sun of commerce burns it off.

Crystal Court could have been a contender.  Instead, it tends to be a lot of lonely people in the same space, relieved occasionally by great Christmas concerts and some odd art exhibits.

The skyway as phone booth

I have noticed a new trend...people sitting on the floor in the skyways talking on the phone.  It either signals a new privatization of public space, or people are confusing skyways with their parent's rec rooms.

Either way, it is a comfort thing.