Bare feet buried in black sand at the bleeding of the day
Watching the red sun gulp it all—
Warm wind off the waves
Minty water opaque as milk
Toothy monoliths
Gravity groans, cracks
A split second where sand sifts skyward through your toes
Licks your skin like a cat’s tongue, then
All is unloosed
Your body wrenched from the earth
The earth wrenched from itself
The ocean gasped into space
Tectonic plates scabbed off the planet’s hot flesh
Twisting toward the stars
You feel the fault line of your sternum
Split, spread, crack you open like a pomegranate
The severed hemispheres of your brain
Register a multiplicity of being
Just before you dissolve
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I wrote this like two months ago and never posted it for some reason. Well, here it is.
With the deepening of dusk came a certainty that I needed to leave my house and walk north. The air was damp and cool in the aftermath of a thunderstorm. The sky: a textured gray. Greenery, heavy with the almost obscene lushness of a Minnesota summer, spilled onto the sidewalk and crawled up the sides of old buildings.
Details jumped out to me like they haven’t in months: the squat gauntness of a few weathered houses, a pompadour roof line, the evocativeness of an open dormer window on an unlit house. Choreographed by the music in my ear buds, perception reached an intensity bordering on hallucination. This came as a joy and a relief. I’ve had little time for reflection lately and was worried that my attention to detail was slipping away.
I was maybe halfway to my destination before I realized what that destination was: the cycling bridge over Lyndale Avenue. It’s a liminal space over a busy road and next to a highway ramp — not designed as a place unto itself, but it’s always felt like one to me. Downtown rises from the landscape to the north. To the south, the chaos of Lyndale is tamed into comprehensibility by a god’s-eye view. Despite proximity to people and hurtling metal, the bridge offers a moment of solitude and calm.
When I arrived, I saw that I was not the only one compelled to go there and linger. Fresh, exuberant paint declared the spirit of a city that’s starting to feel more and more like a home. I bore witness, then turned and headed home.
I’d like to propose a different kind of art. Call it creative perception. Our bodies are incredibly sensitive instruments capable of knowing nuances of spacetime, gravity, electromagnetic radiation, and who knows what else. Throw that qualitative wealth together with language, metaphor, and imaginative recombination, and there are worlds upon worlds waiting to explode in every crevice of lived experience. I often think of the synesthetic deliciousness of Septimus’ experience in Mrs. Dalloway. “Red flowers grew through his flesh….” True, it’s important not to sink so far into fantasy that you lose touch with other people. But then, it’s just as critical to realize that every reality is someone’s fantasy. The more you explore the alternatives, the more easily you can slip into someone else’s shoes.
What I’m getting at is that art is broader than the production of a beautiful or meaningful thing. It can be productive, but it can also be receptive. Guardians of the English language favor the active voice, but to be passive is not necessarily to be weak. The subject-object relationship, if you’re taking that duality seriously at all, does not have to be hierarchical. Doesn’t beauty go to waste if it doesn’t happen to someone? And what about falling in love, or being loved? Or feeling the sun on your skin? Abuse exists. But to be affected is not to be weak. In fact, there are few things more courageous than allowing the world in.
In some ways, receptivity offers the more radical resistance to domination. The perceptual richness you cultivate is personal, intimate, and intangible. The utter subjectivity of the experience makes it resistant to the cult of object-denigration. Your perception of tree branches as cracks in the sky cannot be bought, sold, or reduced to exchange value. If you write it down or photograph it, then sure. But the act of perception? That belongs only to you until you decide to share it.
Eventually, action is necessary to effect change in the worlds we share. But receptivity has to come first and has to be equally valued. Don’t have a body, be a body. Create beauty if you can, but also be beautifully moved. Feel. Listen. Reclaim sight as a receptive sense—as an interception of the world rather than a projected gaze. Realize a sunset is actually the sky rusting where the ocean meets it. Feel the blood squirting just beneath your skin (especially if it makes you uncomfortable). Conceive the beach beneath the pavement.
Biking is the closest thing I know to flying. The kind of flying from my childhood dreams: rooted in the body, a visceral balancing act. It’s the thrill of kinesthetic speed—each pump of the pedal translating to so many feet traveled. It’s nothing like the sedentary act of driving, and more like a dance than walking or running. The body responds to curbs, potholes, and traffic the same way it moves to music. A constrained but boundless freedom, a unity between self and environment.
The other day I hit all the traffic lights just right and traveled the miles to work without touching the ground. You’re keenly aware of such things when stopping, starting, and climbing hills are registered in the burn of quadriceps. Topography and acceleration stored in muscle memory.
Admittedly the danger can play into the excitement, but I’m suspicious of anyone who romanticizes the risks of the road. I’m a twenty-something, able-bodied and active person and a relatively experienced cyclist. I’m also male, like 75% of commuting cyclists in the US. Which is to say, it’s significantly safer and more socially acceptable for me to travel by bike than it is for most people. Associating the exhilaration of cycling with the conditions that make it less accessible is inherently exclusionary.
I tend to think that the best course of action is to build better bike infrastructure. Over half of Americans are interested in biking more but unwilling to risk sharing space with motor vehicles. But then, bike lanes are infamously associated with gentrification and it’s telling that the two most common income groups among regular cyclists are those who make under $20,000 a year and those who make over $100,000.
The politics of biking are complicated, and I hesitate to identify myself as a Cyclist with a capital C because I’m suspicious of cycling culture and advocacy without nuance.
That said, there is a sheer joy and poetry to sailing through space on a machine that feels like an extension of the body. There is a delight in the mechanical simplicity of gear and chain. There is an empowerment in the execution of a perfect turn or deft avoidance of an obstacle. A pride in miles measured in sweat. The experience should be available to anyone who wants it.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
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In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” the philosopher Martin Heidegger muses on the ability of a bridge to transform space into place. “With the banks, the bridge [...] brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.” Where a bridge touches down, the earth gains new significance and the potential for something to happen.
Minneapolis became a town in 1856, a year after the original Hennepin Avenue Bridge connected it to the town of Saint Anthony across the river. Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues converged on the bridge, creating a triangular engine of commerce and life that propelled Minneapolis into cityhood by 1867 and led it to absorb Saint Anthony by 1872.
The bustling nexus of Hennepin and Nicollet came to be known as Bridge Square. Though largely unplanned and plagued by infrastructural shortcomings such as a lack of sewers, the area became the heart of the city and developed an organic kind of order with City Hall opposite the bridge and a lively diversity of businesses and residences along the sides.
Minneapolis City Hall in 1900, flanked by Hennepin Avenue on the right and Nicollet Avenue on the left. Source
The relocation of City Hall to its current home in 1888 (several blocks south and east), the increasing use of the space by migrant workers in search of recreation rather than well-rounded public space, and the movement of key retailers to larger and newer buildings elsewhere in the city all contributed to the decline of Bridge Square into a skid row in the early years of the 20th century.
Rather than look for creative ways to rejuvenate the space while accommodating the needs of the lumberjacks and farmhands who called the square their seasonal home, the city planned to rebuild the area in a sterile Beaux-Arts style inspired by the City Beautiful movement.
A 1917 plan for the Gateway area, featuring a diagonal connection to the newer City Hall. Source
The City Beautiful overhaul never happened on the scale shown above, but the old City Hall and over a dozen other buildings were demolished to make way for a Gateway Park, completed in 1915. The area ceased to be known as Bridge Square.
Gateway Park, 1922. Source
The park largely failed in its goal of sanitizing the space. Although Prohibition effectively closed the saloons and limited public drunkenness, speakeasies and disguised brothels continued to flourish in the 1920s. The 1930s brought the Great Depression and made the Gateway District a gathering place for the down and out.
While many commentators then and now characterize the Gateway District as overrun by degenerates during this period, it is important to remember that those in power always have motivation to vilify the disadvantaged. As Kirsten Delegard puts it on the Historyapolis blog:
In the historic heart of the city, the alcohol flowed freely, the idlers wiled away their days in the park and on the sidewalks; the prostitutes were brazen; men sought sexual encounters with other men; the buildings were dilapidated and vermin-ridden; the communists and Wobblies called for the overthrow of capitalism and the American political system. Its flophouses sheltered people not welcome elsewhere. In these squalid conditions, a community took shape that included exhausted lumberjacks and harvest hands; alcoholics wanting to drink out their last years in peace; Chinese men seeking respite from West Coast racial violence; Native Americans looking for anonymity in the big city.
Source
First the Depression, then wartime, then postwar urban abandonment ensured that the Gateway area was in an advanced state of decay by the 1950s. Add to that the Second Red Scare and a mid-century, car-centric ethos and it’s no surprise that planners favored wiping the slate clean over rehabilitating the historic heart of the city.
Gateway Park right before its razing. Source
Over 200 buildings in the Gateway District were leveled between 1959 and 1965, wiping the city’s oldest area off the map. Nicollet Avenue (Nicollet Mall by 1967) was truncated at Washington, destroying the longstanding intersection of Nicollet and Hennepin that gave natural order to the space. In the following decades the blocks of the district were populated with modernist towers, largely unused green space, and vast expanses of parking lot.
See the flagpole at the terminus of the old park below?
Gateway Park. Source
It’s the one thing that remains in a public space that has become a no-place.
This is the view, just past the flag, of the so-called Gateway Park that exists today:
The Minoru Yamasaki-designed office building whose portico frames a view to Nicollet Mall is graceful in its own right. It even attempts to respect the history of the area by allowing a visual connection between the shortened Nicollet and the place where it used to meet Hennepin. But the area as a whole lacks coherence. It is a place to be driven through, or rarely passed through on foot. But there’s no compelling reason to linger and nothing resembling public life. Here are some maps to help visualize the change:
A cropped section of a 1914 map of Minneapolis. Source
Approximately the same area today, in Google Maps
The parking shown lot below occupies the same space as the impressive hotel that used to preside over the head of the park (see the picture of the dilapidated park from earlier).
On a personal note, I’ve often been drawn to this area despite its nowhereness. Partly it’s that Yamasaki building, partly it’s the river that attracts me. But maybe it’s also the ghosts of city and people past. The residual magnetism of Bridge Square and Gateway Park, rowdy lumberjacks and horse-drawn carriages, soapbox speeches by working men hoping to change the conditions of their lives. All you can hear now is the dull roar of traffic.
That’s one story.
It’s a story you can find on countless blogs and history sites. It’s a true and an important story, but it’s also a falsification by omission. And selective forgetting is a kind of violence.
Let’s tell this backwards — at the end of this post and in reverse chronology; starting in the general vicinity and zeroing in, event by event, to the place that gave birth to Bridge Square. Not because any of it can unhappen or because the grim chain of implication and causality should be obfuscated, but because history is alive and to suggest that it is buried or no longer relevant is to perpetuate violence. The memory is still here and so are the Dakota, no matter how hard some have tried to erase both.
From 1862 to 1863, just a few years before and a few miles downriver from the Bridge Square at the top of this post, over 1,600 Dakota women, children, and old men were held in a concentration camp in the shadow of Fort Snelling. Conditions were brutal. Cholera claimed over 300 lives before the prisoners were released and transported to drought-ridden land.
Dakota internment camp on Pike Island. Source
The internment was retaliation for the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, a conflict that began with an attack on white settlers by Dakota men but really began with decades of dishonored treaties and stolen land, with a shortage of food and money and options. A conflict that ended with the largest mass execution in U.S. history, with the digging up and dissecting of Dakota bodies by doctors, with varnished Dakota bones in a kettle in the home of the Mayo Clinic’s founder, with the nullification of all previous treaties and the attempted expulsion of the Dakota from the state of Minnesota by way of bounties on their heads.
But further back, and closer to our origin point. The exact land that was to become Bridge Square, in 1852:
1852 daguerreotype by Tallmadge Elwell. Source
There is no bridge yet. The John H. Stevens house, Minneapolis’s first building, is just visible in the background, but it is the Dakota tepees that dominate the frame. The roar of Saint Anthony Falls is probably audible from here; they are not yet destroyed by a rabid lumber industry.
1805. Zebulon Pike makes an unauthorized treaty with the Dakota to purchase the land including the falls and the future Bridge Square. The U.S. government will retroactively reduce the agreed-upon purchase price by 99.9% and consider it paid. The ultimate goal of the purchase is to construct Fort Snelling. The island that will house the internment camp will bear Pike’s name.
1680. The egotistical Father Louis Hennepin is the first white explorer to see the majestic waterfall that the Dakota call Minirara (curling water), Owahmenah (falling water), or O-Wa-Mni (whirlpool), and that is known to the Ojibwe as Kababikah (severed rock) and Kichi-Kababikah (great severed rock). Hennepin names the falls after his patron saint and proceeds to write a sensational description that will attract more explorers and eventually settlers from his home continent. He also tells his countrymen that the Dakota, who control this stretch of river, will suffer God’s judgment because they “violate the Law of Nature, and live in Stupidity.” They need to be civilized into submission before they can be converted.
And then there is a time not measured or recorded in the Year of Our Lord. And it is not a bridge but a waterfall that makes a place, because the people who use the river as a road need to come ashore and carry their canoes from one level to the next, and where people rely on the ground the land has meaning. An island just downstream of the thundering falls is home to a woman’s spirit and death song. An island to the north is a place to give birth.
Built in 1993 and apparently not maintained since, an inconspicuous gazebo sits in Minneapolis’s Loring Park. Its metal bars catch leaves, trash, anything light enough to be carried by the wind. Rust shows where the dark green paint has chipped. The roof, also made of bars, provides neither shelter nor shade.
But it’s a nice place to sit on the first warm day of the year, as the shadows grow long and birdsong blends with the tolling of church bells.
Plaques stationed around the gazebo offer up scraps of T.S. Eliot. A poetic force field, an attempt to carve something out of space and time.
Pause, breathe, note the shadows. You are the music while the music lasts.
My last post considered the Saint Paul skyway system as a prime example of what architect Rem Koolhaas terms “Junkspace”—the vast interiorities devoted to capitalist machinations (think malls). Here are some thoughts on how Junkspace is morphing in the contemporary built environment.
The Junkspace of the mall is a postmodern profusion of meaningless historical references. In the gentrifying warehouse district or former streetcar neighborhood, on the other hand, actual historical features are appropriated, consumed, and rendered as pristine as any mall. Garish patchwork buildings of corrugated metal spring up among the fetishized historic structures, branded with names that evoke either classic urban neighborhoods or software companies—Oxbo, Harlo, Lime, Vue. The streets of these neighborhoods are as conditional as any interior conditioned space. No loitering is permitted. Benches and planter edges have metal ridges to keep people from getting too comfortable in economically unproductive pursuits.
A harbinger of gentrification in the West Seventh neighborhood of Saint Paul, built along a former streetcar line. Source
An example of West Seventh’s historic architecture, whose very appeal threatens the fabric and affordability of the neighborhood—this building is almost directly across the street from the previous one. Source
Disturbingly, the retail environments in gentrified urban neighborhoods may offer fewer encounters with difference than suburban malls. Malls reduce people to the status of mere consumers, but there is something democratic in the wide range of offerings and the diversity of the visitors. The Time article I linked to earlier mentions that growing inequality is partly to blame for malls’ decline. The more aesthetically mature Junkspace of the gentrified neighborhood focuses on a (wealthier) demographic with specific consumption patterns and bases an entire “community” on that. It blends work and life, turns the personal into a brand. It is as curated as a lifestyle Instagram account. Consumer capitalism merged with physical space and social identity.
One of the more heinous structures in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis (also along a former streetcar line). The target demographic is so clear that it’s more billboard than architecture. Source
Of course, street address has always signified status. But there is something different about the social-media-ready urban interventions manically declaring neighborhoods “up and coming.” Though these new-old neighborhoods manifest the same mixed-use typologies as romanticized urban communities of the early twentieth century, their relationship to their inhabitants is fundamentally different.Â
One of Uptown’s historic buildings, not far from the previous one. It began life in 1915 as a community-oriented theater, which refused to raise admission prices when other theaters did so. Source
A simplification: the history of consumer culture in the U.S. is a determined crawl up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Old-time advertisements, like the ones in circulation when those gentrifying brick neighborhoods were first constructed, amuse us with their exaggerations and lack of tact. They appealed directly to practical needs. By mid-century, products were increasingly associated with aspirations and status to appeal to a savvier and wealthier consumer base. Emphasis was on a distorted sense of belonging and keeping up with the Joneses. By Koolhaas’s writing of Junkspace at the turn of the millennium, consumer products were established by marketers as articles of personal identity. Now, social media allows us to buy and show off the self-actualized lifestyle, the script to go along with identity.
Photogenic gentrification, high-design cafes, and boutique stores are the tasteful backdrop to this lifestyle. Though they’re more aesthetically pleasing than what Koolhaas describes, I’d argue that these places are an evolution of Junkspace, which is, as Hal Foster puts it, commodity suffused into space. Space, product, advertisement, and consumer are one and the same.
Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing…the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock…. Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness…. It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means….
—Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace
In reading Koolhaas’s polemic against the physical manifestation of consumer capitalism, I realized that the Saint Paul skyway system is its epitome. A hermetically sealed pastiche of halfhearted architectural and historical references, an interiority so expansive and byzantine that it sheds all reference to the world outside. A place where plants inhabit windowless rooms.
As a barista within the skyway, I have a privileged view of its psychological effects. Space takes on a different logic in the semi-planned indoor sprawl, simultaneously obscuring immediate environs and suggesting such extensiveness as to appear infinite.
The most common question I’m asked by lost denizens of the skyway is how to find the restroom—an essential bit of infrastructure that’s both nearby and almost impossible to find without insider knowledge. Language fails to articulate its location at least fifty percent of the time. I watch people take a wrong turn despite my best efforts to explain, their gait slowing until they lose all certainty and find themselves adrift between food courts. I’ve gotten in the habit of walking restroom-seekers to the very edge of the coffee shop so I can physically indicate their destination. Better to point and grunt than to waste words in the skyway.
The system is poorly designed and nowhere near as extensive as, say, the Minneapolis skyway, but it is nevertheless a total system that implies infinity and denies the existence of anything outside. I’m often asked how to take the skyway to the capitol or some other far-flung destination. It doesn’t occur to the directions-seeker that getting to the capitol would require a comically long bridge across an interstate and sparsely developed dead land. It also doesn’t occur to people that they can traverse sidewalks open to the sky. When I answer the perennial question and tell someone that the nearest Starbucks is a few blocks away but not accessible via skyway, their eyes glaze over and they either drift away aimlessly or settle for the coffee I sell.
Map of the Saint Paul skyway system. Source
Of course, I only point them in the direction I think leads to Starbucks. I’m about seventy-five percent sure I know the cardinal directions from within the skyway. Inside and outside are disconnected realities.
“Because it costs money,” Koolhaas writes, “conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space.” The skyway offers some refuge for the homeless and dispossessed, some room for human contact and pursuits in its variety of spaces; but humanity is kept within strict parameters. Eventually the seating areas are closed and the bathrooms locked. Coffee shop seats are for customers only, and a cup of water costs just enough to withhold patron status from the penniless. A racist security guard patrols his zone in dark sunglasses and black gloves that look like they might have reinforced knuckles.
The Town Square skyway junction at night, when security guards are likely to ask questions
Aside from the actual bridges connecting buildings, skyway space is predicated on and solely in service to capitalism. Many visitors to the city, unfamiliar with the concept of connecting downtown buildings to defend against the extreme cold, venture out of the hotel near the coffee shop and ask me in confusion if they are in a mall. Or they assume they are in a mall and ask where they can find a clothing store.
I have a feeling the Saint Paul skyway system will mirror the fate of downtown Saint Paul, hobbling along while the urban fabric remains somnolent and maybe seeing a rejuvenation if the area livens—after all, the network of bridges serves the practical function of shielding city workers and inhabitants from the bitter Minnesota winter. But what is the future of the rest of Junkspace now that its poster child, the mall, is dying? Some thoughts on that in another post.
Panaorama of Kiruna by Alexandar Vujadinovic, via Wikipedia
Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost town, is being undermined by a state-owned mining company. It’s a matter of time before the earth gives way, swallows itself and the town it supports.
Economics dictate that the logical course of action is to relocate the town two miles to the east so that the profitable mining can continue. The process will include the dismantling and reassembly of over twenty notable buildings, a slow-motion skittering back from the edge. It’s literally unsettling, this concept of an established place sliding across the land, remaking relationships between buildings and people.
The new Kiruna will not be the old Kiruna; place doesn’t translate like that. The town’s beloved church was guaranteed a spot among the elect buildings moving to sturdier ground, but the project’s urban planner couldn’t have foreseen some of the things that would matter most to the people of the town. “What about the birches?” they kept asking him. “What about a grave?”
Church destined for relocation. Photo by Heinz-Josef LĂĽcking, via Wikipedia
Knowing a place is like knowing one’s own body. Anyone can see it from the outside, but the knowledge that comes from time lived in it is inviolably private. The most precious details to one person may be overlooked by the next. Century-old birches, the smell of a patch of earth through the seasons, the way light falls on a building at the break of day.
I wonder what will become of the buildings that are left behind. The ones too insignificant or expensive to move. I imagine a ghost town, gap-toothed from the extraction of key cultural sites, slowly sinking into the earth. Maybe teenagers and adventure-seekers will climb to abandoned rooftops, light bonfires and speak in hushed tones as the sun sets on eerily unlit streets. Maybe longtime residents will make pilgrimages to the homes they lived in as children in an attempt to reclaim memories threatened by the rearrangement of the new town.
More likely, the remnants of old Kiruna will be demolished and fenced off for the safety of the populace.
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Illuminated from unnatural angles by fluorescent and LED bulbs, nighttime vegetation gives the uneasy impression of being frozen in the headlights, caught in action, only momentarily still.
Or these are bizarre new deep-sea species, seen for the first time in a submarine’s searchlight, throwing into question the definition of life itself.
Though, it doesn’t take marine or extraterrestrial fantasy to find beauty in the abrupt contrast of these leaves and flowers against the ink-black night. There is the sheer delight of the familiar made strange.
And the realization that these plants underwent hundreds of millions of years of evolution without once encountering light in this way.
And if we understood the sky to be a body of water?
Suddenly we’re on the edge of something churning and massive. Skimming its surface, standing on its shore, crushed beneath its weight.
Re-conceiving negative space as positive amounts to a shift in gravity. A candlestick becomes two human faces in profile, locked in each other’s gaze. Something wells up in the white space of a poem. A rest between notes undoes the listener. The sky becomes something to drown in.
You either clutch madly at the passing tree branches or embrace the plunge.
The sun moves too slowly for us to see the movement of shadows. Yet, look away for a minute or two and a shadow’s progress on a wall is alarming. The present expands infinitely, but a day or week or year is lost in short order.
My inability to see the shadow move makes it cruel and confusing that I can’t hold a moment in the palm of my hand. As far as I can tell, time is only noticed in terms of loss.
But what if I were to watch the same shadow for an entire day? Maybe that kind of attention — call it love, call it prayer — is enough to hold onto time. To absorb it into the self.
During a recent trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan I had the good fortune of experiencing the joint exhibition of Mirror Variations, by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, and Intersections, by Anila Quayyum Agha, at the Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM).
Mirror Variations is a series of geometric sculptures sheathed in mirror mosaics. Iranian mirror mosaics (ayeneh kari) originated in the seventeenth century as a creative reuse of imported Venetian mirrors that broke during transit. It is a traditionally architectural practice, featured as an immersive design element in mosques and palaces.
Source
What I find remarkable about Farmanfarmaian’s sculptures is how, despite being closed objects, they exert such a powerful influence on their surroundings that they generate a kind of architectural field. They cast space as a spell around the viewer — wearing their environment in chameleonic glory, throwing constellations of reflected light on the walls.
Through reflection and manipulation of shadow, the mosaics pull the viewer into their alternate reality. As with immersion in powerful architecture, the discovery of the self in that space prompts meditation. Farmanfarmaian’s work encompasses, remakes, happens to the viewer.
The sculptures also evoke the spirit of the mosque architecture that inspired them. Their dazzling beauty and aura of mystery, as well as the fact that they reveal a different picture to each new viewer in their faceted reflections, lends them a spiritual gravity. They are as ripe for endless discovery as religious texts.
Intersections, accessible only by passing through Farmanfarmaian’s work first, is a shadow-casting cube of Islamic geometry created by Anila Quayyum Agha. Here the creation of new space is even more literal than with the mirror mosaics. A single light bulb at the center of a laser-cut cage imprints the spare, white-walled room with gorgeous abstractions.
Intersections is the artist’s response to her childhood experience of being excluded from certain holy spaces because of her gender. In contrast to such exclusivity, the room of light and shadow her piece generates is radically inclusive. Viewers are not only immersed in it; their shadows actually mix with those cast by the cube to constantly recreate the space. As a result, there is the empowering possibility of discovering a new kind of sanctity in oneself and in others.
This is my first paid post, by which I mean that I paid about $200 for the privilege of taking this walk and freeing my car from the impound lot on Friday. I’m not bitter — it’s my own fault for holding onto a car I don’t use and checking on it too infrequently. In fact, any chagrin I felt at the fee and hassle was quickly displaced by the existentially harrowing (and strangely beautiful) experience of traveling on foot from my apartment in Loring Park to the impound lot just twenty-five minutes away.
Most of the dusk-time walk takes me down a stretch of Lyndale Avenue that has been virtually transformed into a highway. A narrow sidewalk, seemingly a vestige of a Lyndale that no longer exists, runs unbuffered alongside high-speed traffic and beneath the shadowed bellies of overpasses. The environment is so hostile that it doesn’t occur to me to take pictures until I’m through the worst of it.
This segment of Lyndale is visibly a kind of war zone. Pyramidal rebar formations and chain-link fences block off the narrow concrete ledges beneath the overpasses — the city treating homeless people the same way it treats unwanted pigeons. There is something sadistic about weaponizing even the unwanted no-man’s land of a city.
Beyond the overpasses, surreal vistas that weren’t designed to be seen unfold in the growing richness of the warm dusk. There isn’t a soul to be found outside of the mechanized rhythm of automobile traffic.
On the other side of a chain-link fence: a series of yellow-lit scenes through the small windows of a monolithic building. Cubicles, a break room, computers from the 1990s. Not a person in sight.
The roof of an industrial building, with its abstract forms in a bed of gravel, is a soulless zen garden. Beyond it, the skeletal form of a power station blends with the treeline to form an uninhabited bionic landscape.
Although I am at this point intoxicated by the quality of light and the experience of a new element of the city, I am acutely aware of the exclusionary power of liminal spaces and growing darkness. This walk would be more dangerous if I weren’t a cisgender white man. The location of the impound lot in a difficult-to-reach place, while undoubtedly driven by the economics of real estate, is, like the rebar and fences beneath the overpasses, injustice woven into the urban fabric.
Turning onto 2nd Avenue, I enter a terrain of empty surface lots and abandoned buildings interspersed with industry and timid gestures at redevelopment. A door to nowhere contributes to the feeling that this is a wasteland, or a set with prop buildings. In the bewitched twilight hour, one could almost believe that this place is home to insubstantial spirits for whom a blocked-off entryway is no issue.
A lone smoker outside a dog daycare is the first person I’ve seen outside a car since a construction crew in the median of Lyndale. They promptly retreat inside and the street is deserted once more.
Finally I turn onto Colfax, the street that ends at the impound lot. The Minneapolis skyline reappears. Though I have not traveled far, it is like seeing the earth from outer space.
By the time I reach the humble administration building of the impound lot, the warm breeze of the late May evening and the drama of the darkening sky lend the place an apocalyptic air. But it is a gentle, poetic kind of apocalypse, and not entirely disagreeable.
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Pictured above is the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Minneapolis. Built in 1897, it has seen no significant activity since it was briefly occupied in 2012. It has been abandoned for even longer.
The city’s second Church of Christ, Scientist was built in 1929 in a striking ziggurat style. It has long since ceased to be the home of the church, and is now somewhat disrespectfully engulfed by the Hotel Ivy building. No longer a commanding presence, it has been reduced to a bizarre architectural tumor.
On the same block as the 1929 building is a 1952 structure that served as the church’s longtime home. It is now abandoned, however, and a developer is eyeing the one-story building surrounded by a parking lot. Cities need to grow and change, and the increased density supplied by a new high-rise would be welcome in downtown Minneapolis. Nevertheless, there’s something tragic about a building uncared for and destined for destruction.
So here’s a kind of tribute. A documentation of a building whose predecessors either barely cling to life or have lost a dignified relationship to the city around them, and whose own future is nonexistent.
Nerd with no life that I am, I spent a couple hours yesterday scrolling through the Hennepin County Library’s digital photo collections. I was immediately arrested by the distinctive brick pattern over the window in the above image. It was familiar. It didn’t take me long to realize that was because I walk by 1365 Spruce Place pretty much every day. It’s two and a half blocks from my apartment.
But it wasn’t just the familiarity that caught my attention. The caption accompanying the old newspaper image reads “Grocery Store Murder.” A little snooping turned up a bizarre story which, although officially concluded, raises more questions than it answers.
In July of 1941, fifty-year-old Frances Aagaard was working in the neighborhood grocery she ran with her husband, Chris Aagaard. A customer entered and asked to have some meat sliced. When Aagaard turned her back to prepare the order, the customer announced that this was, in fact, a robbery. Frances turned around, still holding the meat knife, and the spooked thief shot her and ran. Aagaard ultimately died from the gunshot wound, but not before relaying the details of the incident to the police.
Inside Aagaard Grocery. The meat display is on the right; the slicer is on the left. Source
Three years later, the killer had not been found. Presumably the police had long since dropped the investigation. Frances’ husband had died and the grocery store was under new management. In short, everything about the case was in the past. Aside from the victim’s grave across town, the only evidence that the shooting had even happened was the bullet hole that remained in the refrigerator behind the grocery counter.
Joe Numedahl, the owner of the grocery in 1944, indicating the bullet hole. Source
Then, on the night of September 22, 1944, Alice Weld called Detective Supervisor Charles Van Rickley and confessed to the murder. Weld’s account of the incident generally matched witness descriptions, but investigators were skeptical because Aagaard had specifically described a male attacker before she died. Weld insisted that she had dressed as a man.
In the end, Weld’s confession was accepted and the case was considered solved. But, was it? I’m admittedly working with fragmentary evidence here, but Weld’s story seems tenuous.
For one thing, cross dressing would likely have drawn unwanted attention on the busy 1941 street — arguably garnering enough visibility to counteract any benefit gained by appearing more threatening or masking identity. Basically, the cross dressing seems to be more complicated than necessary for what was supposed to be a minor holdup. The simple fact of carrying a gun should have been enough to discourage Aagaard’s resistance.
But what really seems suspicious is the decision to confess three years after the fact. If Alice Weld really had convinced the world that a man committed the crime, then she was very safely in the clear by 1944. The St. Cloud Times reported that she “said her conscience was bothering her and that she was unable to sleep without using sleeping tablets,” but if she was so wracked with guilt, why did it take her years to confess?
Maybe Weld did it, maybe she didn’t. It’s likely that the evidence was more convincing than the scraps I’ve found. Regardless, the question of why she turned herself in is deeply intriguing. If she committed the crime, what events precipitated the surge of guilt that compelled her to throw away her second chance? If she was innocent, was she running from something? Was prison somehow the best of her alternatives?
I’ll never know. But every time I look down this alley (which I’ve always felt compelled to do when I walk by), I’ll think about how someone made their escape here after shooting Frances Aagaard nearly eighty years ago.