Memory of a Place
Bridge Square in Minneapolis, 1867. Source
Here is one version of a story:
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.
