Here Was One Room

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.

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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.

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. 

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.

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.

Like the nation’s malls, the Saint Paul skyway is languishing. Some retail spaces are perpetually empty. The mezzanine level above where I work has supposedly been closed for a decade or more, temporary-looking signs permanently blocking its dormant escalators. Décor in many spots is at least a decade or two old, which in the fast-moving world of branded interior design is hopelessly tacky. Melting snow reveals leaks in the roof. An unpredictable drip from a pipe above the entrance to my store is received by a five-gallon bucket guarded by a wet floor sign.

Escalator to Purgatory

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.