Old Man River

The Mississippi River gnaws its way through the Twin Cities like a dull knife on bark. Sediment and ever-changing currents have maligned its banks for centuries. Yet, much like my fascination with Lake Nokomis, I’ve always harbored a deep affection for the better sister of ‘the Old Muddy.’

The river is one of those icons that I can leave for a long time and yet return to with the same affection and emotions that it draws out of me every time I return to its sandy banks. The river has been with me my entire life. Just as I have grown and changed and meandered in different life directions, so too has this mighty river.

It played a subtle yet important role during my ‘lost years’ when I found solace, comfort, and companionship along its ever-changing shoreline. It was, at once, a place to go to get lost, to engage in worldly conversations, life-changing decisions and distractions from the reality of the moment.

One day, a visit to the river might mean a winter hike exploring its rocks and crevices with a friend, coffee thermos close at hand. The conversation has long since been forgotten; the cold not so much.

The next time, it could be offering up my car hood as a solar blanket to keep my girlfriend warm.

It was a moment in time for silly things like that.

Other times, it meant slipping down its rocky embankment for a solitary walk along its shores.

While I was working at Twin Cities Public Television, the station produced a documentary on the river and its special draw to Minnesotans.

It highlighted the river’s long and storied history as a landing spot for fur traders and steamboats. The film chronicled its importance to the commerce and industry that fed both cities, but especially the small hamlet of Saint Paul.

It’s been labeled the Port of Saint Paul and has long been a harbor for small boats on Harriett Island.

All through high school, I would hitchhike everywhere I went. One familiar route was down along Sheppard Road; a route that bordered the Mississippi River all the way to downtown Saint Paul. There, along the banks of the old river, sat the shacks, hovels, and homes of generation upon generation of immigrants who worked the river and factories in the city. Those immigrants who collected along its shoreline below the High Bridge finally evolved into St. Paul’s own Little Italy before its demise after the floods of 1965.

Anyplace along the river was always a great place to go on a date. Not just to make-out if that was on the agenda but also to wander and wonder and philosophize about anything under the moon.

The monument was just such a collective spot.

Once known as Shadow Falls, the monument was erected to honor the soldiers of World War I. Over the years, its surrounding landscape and accouterments have changed and evolved with the times but its overlook never fails to impress even the most familiar of visitors.

When I was living in near-squalor by the University of Minnesota, I would sometimes wander down to the riverbank across from downtown Minneapolis with Susan in hand to look and imagine where we might be in the future.

Susan and I would map out our lives, talk about our careers respectively in television and nursing, our dysfunctional families and everything we had in common. We would wax and wane philosophically about where we might be in ten years. Those salons of hopeful dreams were exciting, fruitful, and fulfilling for the moment, even though at least one of us knew, quite unspoken, that our future of pastel colors and soothing flavors probably wouldn’t include the other person.

Now fast forward almost fifty years and I’m once again wandering those Mississippi shores. When Sharon goes to her art class in Norde East Minneapolis, I find myself, once again, drawn to the river.

The times have changed, old friends come and gone, but the river remains constant. Old and sometimes slow like me, it continues its meandering down toward the gulf of Mexico but leaving behind all those wonderful old memories just piling up along its translucent transparent shores. It speaks to me of youth and inexperience, love, loss, success, failure, and most of all, longevity.

Nothing remains the same, they say.

Yes, I reply, but some things never change.

Where the Natives Gathered

Down through the centuries, every city has had them. Small enclaves of residential housing, usually no more than hovels and shacks, where succeeding waves of immigrants first established themselves in a new town. The Twin Cities are no different. Each has had its own pockets of poverty where first timers got their start before moving up through the generations to someplace better.

Most folks my age are locked into their own generational history and their own decades of living in that black and white world of their parents homestead and first neighborhood. As such, it’s easy forget all those who came before us. Those early settlers who established their own little enclaves of like-minded souls after the frontier had been established and towns like Saint Paul and Minneapolis slowly began to grow into metropolitan areas. Through the decades and multiple generations, immigrant populations all found their own areas of settlement.

Unbeknownst to me back then, I was on the tail end of the slow demise of a lot of those early settlements in the Twin Cities. Back then it was my world. It shaped me. It formed my work ethic, drive, insecurities and hunger for more.

While our family was still whole, Irvine Park became our second neighborhood to live in after the duplex on Smith Avenue.

Our ancient six-plex apartment building was next door to Little Sisters of the Poor. The Wilder Playground and daycare was up the street. DP (displaced people from World War Two) lived in tenement housing just down the block. There was the Gem Theater and a small ethnic neighborhood grocery store within walking distance. Out my second story window, I could see low-income housing across the street and the Ramsey house on the corner.

Old East Saint Paul had all but disappeared by the time I was a grade school commuter to downtown Saint Paul. Our relatives (mainly aunts and uncles) in East Saint Paul would hardly acknowledge its existence. By then, the Swedes and Norwegians were being slowly replaced with brown-skinned immigrants from south of the border. My relatives were either isolating themselves from those newcomers or had moved on by then.

The West Side of Saint Paul was OK but we were cautioned to keep away from the flats. By that time the Jews and Poles had moved on and the Mexicans had moved in. I learned early on that my Mother still harbored the ignorance and fear of her rural forefathers for others not like her.

Little Italy was a tiny enclave of immigrants from Italy who worked at West Publishing, Schmidt Brewery and Hamms Brewery in East Saint Paul. I can remember walking along the Mississippi River and hitch-hiking my way downtown. Yearly spring flooding finally forced the city to condemn the entire area and raze all the houses there.

Bohemian Flats came first and then was followed by the Gateway District. Both areas attracted the bottom of the immigrant barrel. Both succumbed to newer generations climbing up the economic ladder and leaving the area.

Above the Bohemian Flats, the West Bank neighborhood sat across the Mississippi from the University of Minnesota. By the time I arrived on scene (during my wannabe hippie phase)  it had been slowly crumbling away for decades. By the mid-sixties, it had become just a sad reminder of working class neighborhood it had once been.

The Lower Town part of downtown Saint Paul was just beginning its transformation from decrepit to decidedly middle class when my employer, Twin Cities Public Television, moved its facilities from Como Avenue to Lower Town.

Now in the autumn of my years a new frontier has been established in North East Minneapolis with the convergence of the Northrup King manufacturing plant into artist studios. The grain-milling plants, small factories and Eastern European enclaves are slowly being replaced with artists’ lofts, new apartment buildings and commercial development along major corridors. This time around, the artists as well as newly arrived immigrants are forcing the changes in the area.

In so many ways, it is still a melting pot like so many of the enclaves that came before it. Areas of exclusion from the cookie-cutter mainstream of society. A place for those who don’t live a nine to five existence, white picket fence and chicken in the oven kind of life. A bit out of the mainstream and happily creating new currents of their own.

Welcome home again.

NE Arts District

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time”

                                                                                    Thomas Merton

I’ve been there before. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. An old steel and brick icon of prosperity in an ethnically tight community gradually succumbs to the ravages of time only to be reborn years later as the cradle of artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors. The NKB; that ancient Northrup King Building in Northeast Minneapolis, is now buzzing with life. The age of antiquities is alive again and with it come some old familiar problems.

While growing up in Saint Paul I was never aware of old Norde East. It could have been on the other side of the planet for all my wanderings around town. Even after college when I lived in a hovel near Dinky Town, Northeast was one part of town that held absolutely no allure for me. It was on the other side of East Hennepin Avenue and considered no man’s land to most of us late night wanderers.

Now gentrification, that flip side of success, has poked its commercial and economic head into the area and not everyone is happy about it. It’s an evolution that has gone on for the ages and it never seems to change. Artists in the area first notice nearby buildings being remodeled, coffee shops spring up along with boutique shops, art galleries and craft breweries. The current residents have seen it happen before. More people means higher rents, fewer affordable options for living and finally displacement when rents force out many of the old-timers.

Minneapolis is in the midst of a building boom that has seen building permits exceeding one billion dollars this year alone. Millennium homeowners, renters, suburban empty nesters and visitors seeking craft beer and vintage shops are transforming the area. What was once an Eastern Europe enclave of factory workers has been transformed into the Twin Cities hottest and most diverse creative community. Urban planners can only shake their head and say: “What else did you expect”

Northeast Minneapolis began as an ethnic enclave supplying workers for the factories that lined Central Avenue and batched them in clusters throughout the neighborhood. My only vague connection back then was a secretary who worked in our office at the Minnesota Department of Public Health. I remember she commented once that she lived in Norde East.  It never registered with me where or what it was.

Fifty years after the West Bank of the University of Minnesota harbored the disenfranchised, the hippies and other malcontents of a similar ilk; their decedents have now migrated to the North-east part of Minneapolis. In an unplanned, almost organic metamorphosis of a cityscape, this unwashed morass of creativity has moved west. Old Nordeast, an eclectic enclave of blue-collar Eastern European nationalities, has become the new West Bank.

This stumble back in time reminded me of my own barstool contemplations spent at the Triangle Bar on West Bank. This was shortly before the neighborhood slowly began to recede from the expansion of the University of Minnesota and high rise apartments towering over that dusty old neighborhood.

Now that same feeling of change in the air hit me after I dropped my wife off at her art class in the NKB. I ended up meandering the old hallways and vacant caverns that once housed huge stores of seeds. I began perusing the framed photographs that lined the entrance halls. The old seed factory has now become an artist’s enclave encompassing five stories of concrete and brick. It reeks of artistic ventures, bold colors, creative design and old world charm in an ancient brick building now repurposed for the creative at heart. I feel like I’d come home again.

Back in twenties and thirties Northrup King was one of the largest seed producers in the world. Time and changing economics changed the equation and the business went bust. The building lay dormant and empty for many years, inhabited only by vagrants, dopers and rats. Then a new generation of entrepreneurs discovered its solid foundation, huge windows, cheap rent and a blank canvas for change.

Most of Norde East is like an old graveyard of senior buildings brought back to life by creative resuscitation. Vesper College is located in the Casket Arts Building. Originally built as the Northwestern Casket Company building in 1887, caskets were still being made there until 2005. Now the five-story building houses over 100 artists and businesses such as Vesper.

Other notable nests of creativity are the Architectural Antiques Building, originally a coffee roasting plant. Of course, the Northrup King Building, originally a seed distributor for the world. The Waterbury Building, manufacturers of boilers and multiple buildings that were part of the Grain Belt Brewing complex.

Now instead of transplanted hippies, there are artisans, house flippers, yoga gurus, craft beer specialists, software developers and other creative types flocking to the area. A new variety of business has also sprung up whose main purpose is to breathe life into the arts for a whole new generation, young and not so young.

The roughhewn, anti-fashion, individualistic, truth-seeking individuals whom I find so fascinat-ing all hang out there. It’s not as compact as Dinky town but the atmosphere is the same. The haunts of past lives have come alive again in that charged arena. It’s almost as if inquiring minds once again scream for an exploration of life’s truths in that modern version of old Bohemia.

Sharon has found an outlet for her creative expression. That, in turn, has brought me back to that other part of my old world. Inspiration comes in all kinds of strange packages even in a seed shop in the middle of a confused dreamland called eternal youth.

While I’m there, I want to haunt the halls and soak up the atmosphere. Perhaps I can build a nest someplace while my wife is in class where I can just write to my heart’s content. It seems like a good place to explore the recesses of one’s mind, mining whatever thoughts and ideas might be lingering there. I’ve got a lot of hard miles on that gray matter of mine.

Time to go exploring again.

Liquid Lightning Two

Sharon is finding her muse once again with new approaches to her painting. In the beginning, it was welding and metal art. Then it was making collages out of old National Geographic magazines. The particular arts and crafts exercise didn’t really matter as long as they suited her fancy…if even for the moment.

Sharon first became a metal head after a career in academia and business. She learned to pinch metal around stone like Giacometti and apply torching like Motherwell. She was comfortable with heavy metal in her hands and blue-yellow flames framing her face.

A couple of years ago Sharon took classes from Vesper College located in the heart of Nordeast. Vesper is one of those non-profit schools offering classes in such esoteric areas as metal bending, torching, welding and stone sculpturing. Sharon loved it…and I love the fact that she’s found a new outlet for her creative juices.

Now she has expanded her creative expression far beyond metal art. The medium that Sharon pursues is less important than the act or process that she goes through to get there. She began with classes on alcohol ink painting at the old NKB (Northrup King Building) in NordeEast Minneapolis.

Alcohol ink is an acid-free, highly pigmented, and fast drying medium used on non-porous surfaces. By mixing alcohol inks an artist can create a vibrant marbled effect. For many enthusiasts, it’s a new way of artistic self-expression. It means discovering the almost magical ethereal mutations that take place when alcohol colors mix and integrate into themselves. It’s layering colors, mixing tones and textures, morphing shapes and sizes into a kaleidoscope of  bastardized offspring’s of color. For its many disciples the process is full of constant discovery and, often times, pure amazement at the results. It’s like trying to cup liquid lightning in your hands.

By the end of this last season in Palm Springs, Sharon had expanded her artistic expression to cover a gamut of new avenues. She moved from the Palm Springs Art Center to specialized classes to her own roughhewn studio in our garage.

Then this spring, she discovered the White Bear Center for the Arts and a new medium called ‘cube art.’ Now it’s exploring new techniques at the Plaster Center for the Arts and International Market Square where some of her work is being displayed.

But it always seems to come back to Norde East and the NKB building. Even as the neighbor-hood grows with its artistic enclaves and new breweries, it retains its old charm.

Little has changed there since I camped out near the University of Minnesota. It’s the same old neighborhood just 55 years later. Millennials are rediscovering the place where they can be urban and ‘in the city.’ With establishments like Psycho Suzi’s Motor Lounge and Fried Bologna Vintage, how could they go wrong?

Fifty years after the West Bank of the University of Minnesota harbored the disenfranchised, the hippies, and other malcontents of a similar ilk that population or their decedents have now moved to the Northeast part of Minneapolis. In an unplanned, almost organic metamorphosis of a cityscape, this unwashed morass of creativity has moved west. Old Nordeast, an eclectic enclave of blue-collar Eastern European nationalities, has become the new West Bank.

But instead of hippies, now people of color, Hispanics, artists of every variety, house flippers, yoga gurus, craft beer specialists, software developers, and other creative types are flocking to the area. A new variety of business has also sprung up whose main purpose is to breathe life into the arts for a whole new generation, young and not so young. These include art classes of every type, including metal sculpting.

The roughhewn, anti-fashion, individualistic, truth-seeking individuals whom I find so fascinating all hang out there. Now my wife does too. It’s not as compact as Dinky town but the atmosphere is much the same. It’s almost as if inquiring minds once again scream for an exploration of life’s truths in that modern version of old Bohemia.

So while I’m there I want to soak up the atmosphere and perhaps build a nest someplace where I can just write to my heart’s content. It seems like a good place to explore the recesses of one’s mind, mining whatever thoughts and ideas might be lingering there. I’ve got a companion in the arts now, sharing the same excitement I feel every time I put finger to pen or keyboard.

Strange how after fifty plus years, some things change and yet many things remain the same. Now I get to explore my creative self with Sharon alongside me doing the same.