Sanctioned glimpse.

The official view of the Crystal Court. The legal bystander's view.

Island

On the first day of my adventure photographing the skyways, I caught this happy accident of a beam of light picking out a cell phoner on the ground floor of the Crystal Court. It was a perfect coincidence of the sun's moment and the man's social aphasia.  Shortly later, a security guard told me I could only photograph the American Flag and the fountain in the Crystal Court, since it was private property, and the building management could dictate what was worthy of immortality, and what wasn't. A call to the City Hall brought the news that security guards can't dictate what photos tourists can shoot.  And there you go, I am reborn as a tourist, now, forever.

The sign says transit. It is the eclipse of the act in the act of the sign.

This bus crashing through the wall like a sedate, midwestern version of the subway in "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3." It was a brilliant piece of signage/commercial design back in the day. Now no one notices it.

A man is doubled in reflection

This photo captures the epigram "a man is doubled by reflection" in a literal manner. When you think about something deeply, you wander into the looking glass world of philosophy where it is hard not to think of the thought itself, or of the thinker. So here is a nice little illustration of the notion, embellished with the attendant metaphors of a bus driving through a wall and a brokerage firm disappearing into the darkness of commercial entropy.

man. phone. flag. public art.

This business man talks on the phone and watches the action on Nicollet Mall while nearby a writhing chrome globule of some artist's psyche swims towards consummation with an American flag.

Bulls-eye. Human particles in an energy field.

This elegant O is the Target logo woven into the entry of the Target store at street level on the Nicollet Mall. I stand on the skyway level and have become fascinated watching the movement of bodies across the simple circular shapes. It is a kind of private cloud-chamber of the soul, in which the particles leave a graceful set of trails. Instead of colliding, as in blind physics, they stride with subtle navigation around and with each others trajectories, completely unknown to, but fully aware of, each other.
Watch:

Hail to thee blythe spirit...

The public imagination is served by large bird sculptures on or near the Nicollet Mall. I don't recognize the species, although there are parts that resemble a heron, but also an inflated sandpiper. Neither have the local cachet of the Loon, unless these are maladroitly shaped Loons I am slandering through ignorance. I am not sure they inspire me.

Join me for jokes and a pastrami some day

A number of design firms have these great conference rooms exposed to the skyways. I want to eat my lunch on this table, with strangers, and hear them laugh.

A legitimate basin.

This basin catches the lovely water plume of a fountain in the Crystal Court. It is okay to photograph this, I am told. Being me, I want to approach all the people on the white benches and ask them their life stories. At least, I would like to know when they first came downtown on their own, and what they discovered then.

Bishop Berekeley's civic misdemeanor exposed?

It was an Anglican Cleric, Bishop Berkeley, who posed the famous question "If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it really happen?" I snapped this skyway level shot of ground level lunch exposed with a kind of unbidden intimacy. I imagine the quality of the moment for the actors in this mime: hunched in suits, casual in shirtsleeves, reserved in business wariness, perhaps. The security guard accosts me and tells me I can only take pictures of the American Flag and the brilliant water fountain in the public area. He sees my name tag identifying me clearly, and relents a bit, offering lengthy explanations of how the skyways are owned, managed, and patrolled. But he insists that I take no more pictures. For him, it is literally "taking" pictures ... that are not mine. They are owned by the management firm and encoded into the terms of leases for the commercial establishment. Sanctions abound. Intimacy is rare. Confidence is low. I hasten away.
If I didn't know it was a crime to freeze this glimpse, is it still a crime, however petty and faceless, finally? Where does the Bishop stand on this matter?

No floral nooses. No stiff necks.

These guys model the serious attire of the downtown professional. Solid color shirts, open collar, no tie. Nice pants, expensive shoes. No nonsense, but no subjugation to the cravat, either. This is the 21st century freedom of well-intentioned men.

Glass, steel and very tough carpets welcome their sort

At the portal to the Investors Diversified Services Building skyway level, you are met with generous space and elegant glass walls. It is a peculiar feeling. Who is expected to walk through this shiny corridor of light and warmth above the frozen February street? Not children. The first reports on skyways advised the city fathers against having benches in the skyways, because in St. Paul, that was where the kids tended to hang out for hours.
So you have a clue. The skyway is a thoroughfare, not a ramble. Movement is required, not just suggested. Don't linger.
I linger to take a photo, and am acutely self-conscious of impeding a nameless flow. Whatever it is, it isn't the real Tao. But it is still benign to its own kind.
So if you recognize this space, and in fact live in something similar, then you are doubly welcome.

A golden bird in Gavidae Commons. I know there are some good myths about golden birds. This one sends me off to google them.

On a February afternoon, the streets are deserted. You can see a skyway in the distance. You are looking north, from within a skyway, over the void between the glass capilliaries carrying little human cells from organ to organ within the austere stone body of the city.
Skyways have been criticized for absorbing the life from the streets into themselves, as though they had some kind of inhuman, selfish motive. But this is the fact of a Minneapolis street in February. If people weren't moving in the skyways, they wouldn't move at all.

Granite and Geese

In the atrium of the US Bank building, stone parallelopipeds hang from a high ceiling by thin wires. The people walking underneath show no signs of distress for the hundreds of pounds of granite floating above them. These are carefully fashioned in a giant V that might allude to the formation of geese flying at the beck of changing seasons. Or might allude to a national economy in peril.

Suspense. Enigma.

This used to be called the Pillsbury Building. It was named for a family that put Minneapolis on the map for its millions of bushels of flour produced anually at the turn of the century. Now it is named for a bank. In this open, glass-ceilinged atrium, a mysterious sculpture hangs by thin wires over the heads of the security team and others on the ground floor. From the skyway level, you get a good view of the granite blocks, each fit and assembled into a giant grey chevron suspended between air and ground. It could be a metaphor for the financial system we have inherited that remains suspended above catastrophe by the thinnest wires...the filaments of a public faith that are stretched by daily events to some kind of limit. Perhaps they are a metaphor for the harp strings of angels that only play music in the air.

The social medium as vacuum

In the Gavidae Common, strangers share the rich light and impoverished social medium of lunch hour.

The Golden Bird of Minneapolis

A golden bird with a 20 ft. wingspan is frozen in midflight in the light drenched atrium of Gavidae Commons. Two office guys fly up the elevator to make it back to their cubicles on time. Or maybe they are the two brothers in the folktale who ignored the fox's warning and went to the bright, colorful inn.

Yippie Ki Yi Yo in the Lobby of Wells Fargo

The bright colors and hand-craft of this stagecoach recall the rosemaling of the Norwegian immigrants, and for me, the artistry of the self-taught Swedish craftsmen who built the trolley cars for the Minneapolis and St. Paul transit company. Those cars, that mass transit conceived in the 19th Century as a complete public transportation, are all gone. We have put the craft of a half-imagined era on display. We have created a distance between the idea of personal fulfillment, and the reality of our mass produced autos. That distance is not bridged by the sentimentality of a romanticized West.

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

April Fool's Day brings out the best in everyone on Nicollet Mall. Okay, this isn't a skyway picture, but I was headed for the Target store skyway. Really.