Over lunch yesterday, I rented a car in order to drive an Irish artist I know — formerly living in New York and now temporarily residing in Minneapolis — around town to scout for a location for a public art piece he was working on. Specifically, he was looking for abandoned billboard support structures, and a mutual friend had told him that of all the people in town, I’d be best able to help him navigate the landscape. I said of course, I thought I knew of lots of stretches of city road that were home to clusters of billboards. Surely a few must be abandoned.
I picked him up at the U, and we drove down Cedar and Minnehaha to East Lake Street, where I thought we’d find forests of billboards. I take the bus down East Lake into St. Paul every day, and I seemed to recall seeing a lot of billboards from my seat.
Actually, it turns out there’s not so many. There’s a few, on top of commercial buildings, but all appear to be in use. Most depict local network weather people, sleazy bilingual attorneys, or gurgling babies mouthing platitudes about their fingers and dreams. There is one billboard near Cedar of a corpulent local conservative talk radio host, wearing a billowing white shirt so massive it looks like it was draped over him by Christo.
The artist tells me in New York, billboards are a bigger part of the visual landscape. He thinks it’s because of the aboveground trains. Most Minneapolitans see the city from a car. A billboard is really too high up and too fleeting to be effectively seen from that space. On city streets, anyway.
I’d forgotten how unattractive Minneapolis is, as seen from car. Unattractive, and even ugly. At 40 miles per hour, behind glass, most of the city is a bland, indistinguishable blur of one- and two-story buildings, on a flat, unending grid that stretches off to the horizon in all four directions, broken up only by massive parking lots. There are no curves, and there are no diagonals. There is little variety in the elevation. Just a grid; just a blurry one- and two-story x axis blowing past you, and an infinite y axis around you. And half the year, it’s all covered in snow.
Minneapolis wasn’t built for the automobile, which is something I didn’t understand at all until I started seeing the city from mass transit and bike and foot. The city was laid out for streetcars, starting mostly in the 1890s, with most of the layout done by the 1920s. On public transit, you see that Minneapolis is really a thousand classic small-town Main Streets, low-rise strips of brick buildings, sewn together in a tiled pattern stretching over sixty square miles centered around the St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi.
The start-and-stop rhythms of mass transit mirror the way the city blocks are organized: each suite of blocks begins with a cluster of brick commercial buildings and storefronts, where the streetcar or bus stops to collect passengers. Here, during this pause, the eye rests on the commercial signage and the window displays and the people entering and exiting the shops. Then, as you begin to move again, a short collection of quiet, tiny brick and stucco houses on small lots, of all colors, passing by with increasing speed, then decreasing speed, and then drawing to a close at the next intersection, another cluster of brick buildings and storefronts, back to the activity and color and visuals of the street corner.
I think of it almost in musical terms: the four or five blocks between stops a bar of music, each little structure you pass — a house, a church, perhaps a storefront — comprising a note, all working as a melody, and then at the end of the bar, a rest.
Really, the only things that look truly great from a car are the neon liquor store signs — Franklin Nicollet, Minnehaha, Skol, Zipps. I had a visitor from New York in town this weekend, the mutual friend that introduced me to the artist. The one feature of the landscape she was consistently bowled over by was the liquor stores’ neon signage. “There’s that one liquor store sign I liked again,” she’d say when we passed one on the street. “No, that’s a different one — the one you liked before was Hum’s. That’s Lowry Hill.” I’d say. “Another one!” she’d exclaim. The liquor store neons were meant to be seen from a car, which is why half of those stores have drive-in windows. They’re absurdly garish, and they’re one of my favorite things about the city.
This gridcentricity is one of the reasons, I think, why so many people bike around the city, and why even committed automobile users will usually snowshoe or cross-country ski in the city parks as a winter hobby — they just need to be able to move diagonally. When you see the city from bicycle or foot (or snowshoe), it’s a richer, more self-directed experience. You are freed from the grids, and you may move through parks and past rivers and lake shores and through alleys and side streets and plazas and parking lots in more rambling, discursive sorts of ways.
Back to my friend the artist. I felt as if I’d let him down; I’d disappointed him and made a poor case for the city. I’d wanted to help him find what he was looking for, though what he was looking for possibly doesn’t exist in the same way. Minneapolis isn’t a city that gives up what you’re looking for easily. It’s not always eager to help you. As I have written here before, it’s not a city that wears its eccentricities on its sleeve. You really have to get out and look around.
As it happens, we did find a potential site for him — not a billboard support, but a railroad bridge. A beautiful, iron-wrought industrial design that lifts a segment of a major road up over a series of rail lines that meander through the grid below grade. Minneapolis can often seem stubborn, and unwilling to help. But if you’re willing to look on its terms, you can usually find what you’re looking for.
All photos by Eric Neely.
