(no subject)
I spent a long weekend in Minneapolis for block break. It's a strange city-- like Portland and Seattle, its depressed period was early, and so now it's recovered and booming. Every street is lined with tidy '20s houses, and everyone looks professorial. Warehouses are being replaced by condos, the sorts of corners where Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck would have bummed around are now filled with glossy cafes. But I still like Minneapolis-- I like it for being leafy, cozy, and autumnal, and I like how a lot of signs are in four languages: English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali.
Sarah and I stood atop the outdoor balcony of the new Guthrie Theater. Below us were the ruins of a mill, built in the 1870's, closed in the '60s, burned (mostly) down in the '90s. And jutting into the ruins was the shiny glass-and-steel Mill City Museum. The other warehouses and factories were mostly gutted and turned into apartments or offices. Their neon signs from the '40s were left up, as if they somehow lent some kind of credibility. I did, however, like the statues of Greek agricultural deities. God, I love how Victorian industrialists viewed their factories as modern temples. And all of this was at the Falls of Saint Anthony (now dammed, natch), which gave birth to all the mills and the city that grew around them. A neighborhood that once produced so much wealth has now become a cultural relic, and it now consumes money, funded by families that built the mills to begin with. Suburban office towers were clearly visible on the southern horizon. It was kind of like the apotheosis of everything I'd studied, as if I was given a telescope that could examine the entirety of Midwestern history and geography at one single locus.
ALSO:
Hung out with Kai in St. Paul and Harmony/Claire/Christina in Iowa City. Good times were had.
Sarah and I stood atop the outdoor balcony of the new Guthrie Theater. Below us were the ruins of a mill, built in the 1870's, closed in the '60s, burned (mostly) down in the '90s. And jutting into the ruins was the shiny glass-and-steel Mill City Museum. The other warehouses and factories were mostly gutted and turned into apartments or offices. Their neon signs from the '40s were left up, as if they somehow lent some kind of credibility. I did, however, like the statues of Greek agricultural deities. God, I love how Victorian industrialists viewed their factories as modern temples. And all of this was at the Falls of Saint Anthony (now dammed, natch), which gave birth to all the mills and the city that grew around them. A neighborhood that once produced so much wealth has now become a cultural relic, and it now consumes money, funded by families that built the mills to begin with. Suburban office towers were clearly visible on the southern horizon. It was kind of like the apotheosis of everything I'd studied, as if I was given a telescope that could examine the entirety of Midwestern history and geography at one single locus.
ALSO:
Hung out with Kai in St. Paul and Harmony/Claire/Christina in Iowa City. Good times were had.