Skyway people

Close encounter of the skyway kind. Click to see the facial expressions.

Now that would make a nice wedding present

Classic Jaguar on the Nicollet Mall. On the day of the Royal Wedding...a coincidence?

A face only a toff could love

This vintage Jaguar sedan (I am guessing early 40s, although I have heard they didn't update the design during the war) was on display on the Nicollet Mall today.

Jaguars on the Prowl on Nicollet Ave today

Vintage Jaguars lined up on Nicollet Mall today near Orchestra Hall. Hey who parked that Ford near the beasts?

Spontaneous Joy

A warm Minnesota greeting to all the world from the skyway level of the Hennepin County Government Center.

Skyway people and the politics of bleakness

The closed, boring environment of this skyway serves as a utilitarian backdrop to the people moving from point a to point b.  If you are looking for something, there are few clues to help you find your way.  There is nothing to entertain or delight you here.  It is a prefabricated environment stripped of leisure or pleasure or distraction.

When you get to where you are going it is just another nowhere on the way to somewhere.

There is your car, surrounded by absence.  It doesn't threaten you, and within a few minutes the whole passage from cell to freeway will be forgotten. We have come to take these elisions of sense for granted.  The experiences of featureless, entranced movement through anonymous space creates gaps in our psychic fabric.  Our internal landscapes are erased, bit by bit.  Anything can fill these holes.  Fears, promises, the assertions of urgent people who want to borrow your attention and faith for a while to build pyramids of mass emptiness...anything can fill these holes.  Tomorrow, it will be the Royal Wedding.  Today it is the birth certificate.  Yesterday it was the weather going rogue and terrorizing whole states.  These wild disparities seems connected by the visual continuity of television, which is the information equivalent of the skyway, connecting emptynesses, providing passage of attention from abandoned place to abandoned place.  Or as the computer operating system marketing rhetoric puts it: "Where do you want to go today."

The people are full of life, and the potential for joy and fascination.  They are dense fabrics of memory and hope, feelings and dreams, needs and abilities.  Why do we throw our landscapes up with the haste of scenery designers?  Why did the program of Modernism in the urban world strip out the texture and push the utility forward with such a vengeance upon the human spirit?  Was it a kind of gnosticism, a despair of fulfillment in this world that can only be a waystation on the way to the next world? 

The people are full.  The cities, alas, seem empty. 

Government Center Fountain

Discussion at the end of the day on the Public Service Level. 

The skyway perspective lesson

When you learn to draw,  you learn to locate the vanishing point, where all parallel lines converge on the horizon in your scene.  There are many vanishing points in the skyway system.  Some of the skyways have vanishing points as ineluctable as black holes in the birth time of the universe itself, others have gentler doorways and doglegs that draw the eye off the main line of depth, convergence, disappearance.  These are three vanishing points from my trek the other day.

Elle at the salon

I ducked into a salon to get my hair setting wax with sesame, an Aveda product I can no longer live without. I lived a long time without product in my hair.  Now I am one of the productified masses. At the register,  Elle posed for a portrait, and gave me a coupon good for $10 off my next visit.

Real people. Souls with faces.

Using the Leica has added a new dimension to my photographing the skyways.  The digital cameras were too unresponsive to try to get certain moments on film, so I settled for scenes.  With the Leica I can respond more intuitively to the changing tableaux of faces, gestures and postures.  The people I see and photograph become more real, more individual.  It is a fitting time for that, with accusations flying among the insiders that the skyways are full of zombies...faceless and proletarian, soulless replicants.  Look at these faces and you see souls.

The last, really last snowfall of the season

A bit of white clung to the grey and black city as late as April 15 this year...tax day.  We were on our way to a record year, but I don't think we made all time history.  On a global scale the tragedy in Japan overshadowed our prolonged winter misery.  On a personal scale the impending death of my big sister Zoe has put the inconveniences of our climate into a humbling perspective.

The odd utilitarian romance of the Mill City

This sign down by the river was repainted in the last 20 years.  Before that, it had a charming desquamate appearance -- huge flakes of paint slowly deconstructing the identity of an enormous box.  By repainting it, the civic-minded sentimentalists rescued our drowning history.  But what did they save?  While the elegance and sensuality of the West Hotel or the Metropolitan Building fell beneath the brutal ambition of the Urban Renewalists in the 60s, this featureless warehouse and mill survived.  It is an enormous grinder, a huge pocket.  It ground up and stored a billion of bushels of wheat.  It has the charm of a blender or can opener, of a packing crate. Or casket, in which the competence and dull ambition of another century lies mummified.

We are obliged to like it, because we were robbed of what was more spiritual, more human in scale, and more sustainable in its reflection of our inner lives.  We are dwarfed, and affectionate, and stagger around clawing at random bits of an unknowable past, here, by the river.  Good for us.  Let's give ourselves a prize.

The city from the inside out

When inside is outside and outside is in.  Looking into the US Bank atrium from inside Chipotle. At the end of the lunch break, there are few figures to break up the chrome and glass vistas. The gloss and emptiness of the space is emphasized.  It is a difficult landscape, and the spirit does not settle into the geometry easily.

A knife-wielding businessman runs into a pal in the Crystal Court.  It breaks up the office routine, and forces a consideration of what security looks for.  At this very spot, an armed guard stops me because I am holding a camera. I don't know too many people who could run around downtown with a 12" knife unsheathed and not attract official attention.  I am sure it is a collector's item of some kind.  I am sure he knows what he is doing...because he looks the way he does, right? Turns assumptions inside out.

The skyway viewpoint

I have been reading the landmark collection of Berenice Abbot's New York City photos, executed under the auspices of the WPA in the late 1930s.  This photo reminds me of one of her street shots near Union Square, a choreography of isolated pedestrians emphasizing the urban grid and the randomness of human activity.

The randomness is only an illusion, of course.  Everyone has a purpose, and that sense of purpose is reflected in the city faces.

Standing in this skyway between the Crystal Court and Macy's, you see the bustle of the city syncopated to silent music.

Skyway people.

Geometry and short lunch breaks do not tell the story

The poet Wallace Stevens says that space is not filled with objects, it is filled with the meaningful relationships among people.  The same can be said for the skyways.  They are not objects containing and linking more objects and objectified people.  They are containers and connectors of relationships, past present and future.  I walked them yesterday on the look-out for anyone who fit the description of "zombie."  I didn't find a single human being who was dead-eyed, cold, grey, controlled by external forces of evil.

If strangers do not stop to interact casually with you on the skyways, it is because they have short lunch breaks, and often have to bring fast food back to their desks. 
Yesterday I saw several young families with children in strollers or in tow.  They didn't look lifeless.  Kids really dig the skyways, both for the vantage over the streets and sidewalks that give them plenty to gawk at, and the open space and revolving doors that challenge their sense of adventure.  Skyways aren't built to amuse children, of course.

What has been missing from the discussion in public so far is the compartmentalized social aspects of downtown.  Outside of major sporting events, you don't have areas where there seems to be a real mix of populations, except down by the Target store on Nicollet Mall.

There are residential areas that are far removed from the entertainment areas.  And most of the skyway system serves the working commuters who represent a narrow spectrum on the band of urban demographics.  Is it fair to call them zombies?  Is it fair to judge the people who you see using the skyways because they don't have much time when you see them?  We don't have an idle urban culture in Minneapolis..at least not in the visible form that is signature of Paris or New York or LA. But  the focus of criticism I have heard so far seems to be on the colorful aspects of cafe culture or the location-determined economics of impulse shopping.  Really?  Is that what we are trying to encourage above all else?

There is something else here that needs to be said.  The skyway critics aren't even talking about the real skyways. They are talking about a shibboleth called "skyways" that exists in cocktail party conversations and sound byte colloquiems of news anchors, political candidates and flyoverland elitism  -- the skyways of habitrail mindlessness, of midwestern parochialism, of unsophisticated rubes. If you go out and start walking around, you won't find those skyways on the real map.

How much time have the critics spent on the skyways?  Have they looked around with the simple curiousity of a child, or the discipline of a cultural anthropologist, or the creativity of an artist, or the vulnerability of an handicapped or elderly person on their own?  The best stories I have heard have been about people forced to find themselves, and, finding themselves on the skyways, they found a lively city to see and reflect on, not just chrome and glass.

Let's quit talking about the skyways in cartoon terms.  It is a disservice to the workers who benefit consistently from their utility, and it is an disservice to the intelligence of looking beyond the cariacatures. Look for yourself: see the faces, the real artistry of the building interiors, the real effort of the entrepreneurs that line the arcades between bridges.

If Videotect started the conversation on a kind of goofy, energetic note, let's find ways to keep it going. That would be a good thing.  It would do justice to the real quality of human relationships that are forged here in the midwest, the kind of qualities that make the skyways ultimately worth thinking about.

Skyways and Poetry in the same breath

An anthology of poetry by states' poets laureates has been published recently under the title "An Endless Skyway."  If you are struggling with the phrase "states' poets laureates" don't feel bad, because it took several minutes for me to figure out that this referred, literally, to poets who represented their respective states as Poets Laureate.

Anyway, the idea of poetry and skyways is instant dissonance for those who see the skyways as pure utility, the invisible shortest line between two frozen dots in the winter, and the air conditioned indulgence of fresh-averse cube zombies in the summer.

So just to prolong this moment, I have composed an instant poem in honor of the Videotect winning theme of "Zombies on the Skyway".

"Skyways: Yes, but..."
Dedicated to Mayor Rybak.
(I have added some grit and patina, vocabulary-wise, to whet the appetite)

I think that I shall never say
the Sky's more lively as a way
Than Street, sidewalk or alley
The walking dead through glassy shell
traverse their AC'd path from Hell
to desk and back. Don't dally
In the chromed Intestine coiled
Midst city belly.  Surging, roiled
clots of souls on furlough splay
Across the grid.  What cheer or joy
is, is not about  the second story.
The first story's yet untold  today.

The aimless urban microcosm

Mayor Rybak claims that 51% of his response to the skyways is dominated by zombies.  "The night of the living dead" is his reference.  He wants to put external stairways between the skyways and the streets to break things up a bit.  He says he needs the "grit and patina" of the streets.   

Britt Aamodt, who did a radio documentary on the skyways, admits that her take on the skyways was dominated by her reaction to her job downtown.  When she left her job, then came back to the skyways for their own sake, it changed her thinking entirely.  This blog tries to inspire people to leave themselves open to a world of experience available on the skyways. 

Things happen.  People wait.  Life has a mind of its own.

Rand Tower

1929 Deco glory on Marquette Ave. in Minneapolis.  What did these characters represent, the geniis of flight, the angel with Cuisinart blades for wings?  When the tower was built, it was the second tallest in Minneapolis, second to the Foshay, and held its own on the skyline for several decades.  Both buildings opened as the national economy cracked and split open, spilling out the depression, the chaos of the war.  But for a brief moment, it was prom night in the American Century. And what a future they dreamed then.

Studies of St. Mary's Basilica, Minneapolis

 More studies of this building.

 It's not technically on the skyways, but it is in the neighborhood, and it seems appropriate to post these photos here.