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.