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Issue 9 - Segregation & Integration - November 2005
COMMUNITY: Skywalking: An Inside Look at the Interstates of Downtown Minneapolis
by Eve Daniels
In the mid-20th century, Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys proposed a utopia called New Babylon, "another city for another life." As described in an extensive collection of writings, models, paintings, photos, prints, and collage, his city was comprised of a chain of "sectors"--tiered interior spaces--raised on pillars fifteen to twenty meters above an existing city. Eventually, these sectors would grow toward and connect with each other, covering the entire planet.
Underlying Nieuwenhuys's vision was a desire to synchronize urban space with lived experience. "While vehicular traffic rushes underneath...the inhabitants drift...through the huge labyrinthine interiors, endlessly reconstructing the atmospheres of the spaces," he wrote in an early manifesto. New Babylon's architecture would automate the fulfillment of daily needs so that its inhabitants would have no need to work except to constantly reconstruct the architectural space; the process of reconstruction would become not "work" per se but a collective creative process.
Minneapolis may be New Babylon's closest modern realization. The city boasts the nation's first and most extensive network of enclosed skyways: seven miles of 78 bridges connecting more than 70 blocks; 1,000 businesses; 2,000 condos; and 4,000 hotel rooms. Each day, close to 200,000 pedestrians cross 3 million square feet of downtown, not once setting foot on the street. Minneapolis has effectively created a city above the city, a collective realm for play and connectivity that might make Nieuwenhuys proud.
Master Plans
The skyways were born soon after Southdale Center--America's first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall--opened to the public in 1956. Located in a suburb just nine miles from central Minneapolis, the mall proved stiff competition for downtown retail.
Leslie Park, president of Baker Properties, and his partner, architect Edward Baker, led the effort to draw shoppers back downtown by conceiving of a network in the sky. Plans began for two second-story links, barely ten feet wide. Suspended above Marquette Avenue and Seventh Street, the pair of walkways would connect the Cargill Building and Northwestern National Bank to department stores, eateries, and a large parking garage. In 1962, after $26 million in design, engineering, and construction expenditures ($6 million more than it cost to build Southdale itself), the original links opened for business.
The skyways had a dramatic economic effect. Second-floor property, once the domain of pawn and seamstress shops, rocketed in value. Retail sales improved: studies show that the average city worker now spends more than twice as much money in the financial district as they did prior to the building of the skyways. Corporations such as AT&T, Pillsbury, and Wells Fargo, as well as large city entities such as the Minneapolis Convention Center, have linked skyway corridors to lavish, welcoming guest lobbies.
Surprisingly, the Minneapolis skyways have developed through a system of private cooperation and, other than the links to parking ramps and public buildings, are privately owned. The city's planning department, however, sets restrictions on their production. Each skyway must stretch at least 12 feet wide, but no wider than 30 feet. It must appear to be horizontal, even if the two buildings being connected differ in height. It must stand at least 16 feet above the street.
For the past two decades, architect Dennis Sachs and his Minneapolis-based firm have designed skyways across downtown. Constructing a skyway, which is typically made of steel and glass, can be quite an enterprise. "They're really unique animals," says Sachs. "You've got weather exposure on four sides, you've got buildings on either side of the street, and steel changes dimension at a very specific rate. Every time the temperature changes or the wind blows, every time one building is loaded or unloaded, there's some movement that takes place at each end of the skyway. All of this needs to be accommodated."
Sachs also cites one of the positive features of construction: accessibility. The skyways must comply with all building code requirements that incorporate the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. "Once a handicapped person is in the skyways," Sachs says, "they can go almost anywhere, to any building the system connects." Without traffic lights or ice to heed, the skyways present a convenient alternative to streets below for the disabled--and for everyone else.
Lifestyle and Livelihood
In a recent interview with Twin Cities-based magazine The Rake, skyway pioneer Ed Baker admits that while the skyways have become "a little unwieldy" over the years, they have also turned into "a way of living." While for some, skyways are just shortcuts between parking garage and office, for others, the skyways are the office.
Take Larry, for example: a red-nosed man whose "work desk" lies somewhere between Orchestra Hall and the Hilton where he can be found cradling the Greth acoustic he's owned for eighteen years. The parrot logo on his Kahlua sweatshirt is beginning to fade, and he hasn't shaved for some time. He sips something strong from an old thermos and coughs. "My roommate just died from cancer," he says with barley breath. "My cat needs dry food and wet food and litter. That cat is one of the big reasons I play here, all sixteen pounds of her."
One of a dozen skyway artists, Larry describes his fellow buskers as "autonomous types." Because of their autonomy, he doesn't know the name of the woman who often plays violin a stone's throw from where he sits. Larry and a puppeteer work adjacent skyways, but they are total strangers. And after playing the skyways for more than a decade, Larry and the fiddler of the Target Center Bridge have yet to shake hands.
"There was a time when all of us were going to unionize," Larry says, "but there was so much argument, too many independent minds." His eyes glass over as he takes another sip. He remembers the Super Bowl in 1992, when the city hired musicians to play throughout the skyways. "I think it gave out-of-towners a false impression of Minneapolis," as if the business district is always in festival mode.
On the public links, a nod of approval from a guard on his rounds is the only prerequisite for performers like Larry. The city did issue street musician licenses at one time, but the courts annulled the process as a violation of free speech. Nonetheless, the buskers must conform to a set of rules. They may not use amplification. They may not obstruct pedestrian traffic. They must steer clear of private property without written consent. They may not solicit money. But the city cannot otherwise close an open instrument case.
Jerry, another sky-busker, plays his traveling music at the bridge that links a multilevel Marshall Field's to the City Center. A chrome harmonica hides his warm and weary face. He wears a flannel shirt and gold corduroys, his silver ponytail pulled through a red baseball cap. A Breedlove custom guitar complements his high-desert hands.
Over the past few years, at this very spot, Jerry has sung about the Civil War, his experience in Vietnam, and his trip to France where he traced the steps of Joan of Arc. He pulls in $15 on an average day and $30 on a good day, up on what he calls "the interstates of downtown Minneapolis." As long as he pays his half of the rent, "that's an acceptable haul."
Above the Law
John Frederick is a wizardly guy with bony fingers and happy feet. At a central nook of the Target Center Bridge, a button accordion rests beside him. He props a fiddle across his chest. If it were not for John and his grit, Larry and Jerry might have had to take their business to street level, come sleet or driving rain.
Following a stint as a substitute teacher, John set up on a bridge above Eighth Street and LaSalle Avenue in 1987. On his third day there, a security guard asked him to take his act elsewhere, but John found a glitch in the early policing of the skyway: "You get three songs out, and then they come along and tell you to leave. So, I would do three songs, then move on to the next skyway, then the next, and just do a round robin."
The Minneapolis skyways have kept a close eye on trouble from the start, installing closed-circuit television and call-for-assistance buttons throughout the system. As a result, less than one percent of crimes committed in the downtown area happen in the skyways. In 1992 and 1999, two "Skyway Bandits" did rob a handful of sky-level banks, but even then, they merely pretended to bear arms.
Since he began sky busking in the late-80s, John has been jailed on at least four occasions for allegedly harassing downtown merchants. "The [then] head of the downtown council saw the skyways as strictly business," he says. "Didn't see any room for a 'carnival-like atmosphere'--that's what he called it."
By 1993, however, John had become a familiar face in the Minneapolis skyways. A few by-the-book security guards came and went, but the key decision makers--city council members, the deputy mayor--felt his music offered a break from downtown's hustle and bustle. One December day, he even received a Christmas card. It was addressed to "The Fiddler in the Skyways, Downtown Minneapolis." A post office clerk delivered it, right after looking through his ground-floor office window at the bearded dancer on the bridge above. Safety measures aside, today both the guards and the guarded respond to this sometimes carnival-like atmosphere as if it's business as usual.
Analogized Landscape
Over the past four decades, critics worldwide have called the skyways many names: "architectural afterthoughts," "pseudo-sensible amenities," "bland modernist modules," and "bourgeois boutiquesville." The same critics claim that skyways have robbed downtown streets of their vitality.
In his essay "Underground and Overhead: Building the Analogous City," for instance, architectural historian Trevor Boddy blames the skyway and its kin for an "urban suburbanization" that--by limiting where a person can travel, shielding users from the weather, and reducing the possibilities for accidental interactions between occupants--replaces the democratic potential of public spaces below. "We must start to question the motives of cities and citizens who find themselves suddenly incapable of dealing with climate, even while they praise the lively street culture of sweltering Cairo, rainy Milan, gloomy London, or icy Stockholm."
A critic could also possibly accuse the skyways of constituting a landscape of consumption. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin examined mass culture through the eponymous glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors of 19th-century Paris. The Arcades, he observed, offered not only shelter from the elements but a "primordial landscape of consumption" where flaneurs, or accomplished strollers, could window-shop free from the world's mud and noise. Like their terrestrial, ancestral Parisian cousins, skyways at their worst represent the ultimate bow to our consumerist urges: a safe haven where customers stroll through lobbies and department stores, between bourgeois boutiques and banks.
Finally, as even Sachs acknowledges, a number of skyways are aesthetically flawed: "some I think they should have taken the pencil away from the architect a little sooner." But, he argues, "There are always skyways that you really like and some that you dislike. Anything that brings people downtown to work and playI I don't know how you could be against that."
Despite the critics, skyways have gained momentum. Urban planners from Des Moines to Spokane have followed Minneapolis's lead. More recently, eight of the nine proposals in the recent World Trade Center competition featured bridges, multilevel interconnected structures, and tangential intersections raised high above the streets of Manhattan. It seems Nieuwenhuys's vision of a global superstructure that would free the creativity of humankind has come a few steps closer to realization.
The Next American City Inc. © 2004
Issue 9 - Segregation & Integration - November 2005
COMMUNITY: Skywalking: An Inside Look at the Interstates of Downtown Minneapolis
by Eve Daniels
In the mid-20th century, Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys proposed a utopia called New Babylon, "another city for another life." As described in an extensive collection of writings, models, paintings, photos, prints, and collage, his city was comprised of a chain of "sectors"--tiered interior spaces--raised on pillars fifteen to twenty meters above an existing city. Eventually, these sectors would grow toward and connect with each other, covering the entire planet.
Underlying Nieuwenhuys's vision was a desire to synchronize urban space with lived experience. "While vehicular traffic rushes underneath...the inhabitants drift...through the huge labyrinthine interiors, endlessly reconstructing the atmospheres of the spaces," he wrote in an early manifesto. New Babylon's architecture would automate the fulfillment of daily needs so that its inhabitants would have no need to work except to constantly reconstruct the architectural space; the process of reconstruction would become not "work" per se but a collective creative process.
Minneapolis may be New Babylon's closest modern realization. The city boasts the nation's first and most extensive network of enclosed skyways: seven miles of 78 bridges connecting more than 70 blocks; 1,000 businesses; 2,000 condos; and 4,000 hotel rooms. Each day, close to 200,000 pedestrians cross 3 million square feet of downtown, not once setting foot on the street. Minneapolis has effectively created a city above the city, a collective realm for play and connectivity that might make Nieuwenhuys proud.
Master Plans
The skyways were born soon after Southdale Center--America's first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall--opened to the public in 1956. Located in a suburb just nine miles from central Minneapolis, the mall proved stiff competition for downtown retail.
Leslie Park, president of Baker Properties, and his partner, architect Edward Baker, led the effort to draw shoppers back downtown by conceiving of a network in the sky. Plans began for two second-story links, barely ten feet wide. Suspended above Marquette Avenue and Seventh Street, the pair of walkways would connect the Cargill Building and Northwestern National Bank to department stores, eateries, and a large parking garage. In 1962, after $26 million in design, engineering, and construction expenditures ($6 million more than it cost to build Southdale itself), the original links opened for business.
The skyways had a dramatic economic effect. Second-floor property, once the domain of pawn and seamstress shops, rocketed in value. Retail sales improved: studies show that the average city worker now spends more than twice as much money in the financial district as they did prior to the building of the skyways. Corporations such as AT&T, Pillsbury, and Wells Fargo, as well as large city entities such as the Minneapolis Convention Center, have linked skyway corridors to lavish, welcoming guest lobbies.
Surprisingly, the Minneapolis skyways have developed through a system of private cooperation and, other than the links to parking ramps and public buildings, are privately owned. The city's planning department, however, sets restrictions on their production. Each skyway must stretch at least 12 feet wide, but no wider than 30 feet. It must appear to be horizontal, even if the two buildings being connected differ in height. It must stand at least 16 feet above the street.
For the past two decades, architect Dennis Sachs and his Minneapolis-based firm have designed skyways across downtown. Constructing a skyway, which is typically made of steel and glass, can be quite an enterprise. "They're really unique animals," says Sachs. "You've got weather exposure on four sides, you've got buildings on either side of the street, and steel changes dimension at a very specific rate. Every time the temperature changes or the wind blows, every time one building is loaded or unloaded, there's some movement that takes place at each end of the skyway. All of this needs to be accommodated."
Sachs also cites one of the positive features of construction: accessibility. The skyways must comply with all building code requirements that incorporate the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. "Once a handicapped person is in the skyways," Sachs says, "they can go almost anywhere, to any building the system connects." Without traffic lights or ice to heed, the skyways present a convenient alternative to streets below for the disabled--and for everyone else.
Lifestyle and Livelihood
In a recent interview with Twin Cities-based magazine The Rake, skyway pioneer Ed Baker admits that while the skyways have become "a little unwieldy" over the years, they have also turned into "a way of living." While for some, skyways are just shortcuts between parking garage and office, for others, the skyways are the office.
Take Larry, for example: a red-nosed man whose "work desk" lies somewhere between Orchestra Hall and the Hilton where he can be found cradling the Greth acoustic he's owned for eighteen years. The parrot logo on his Kahlua sweatshirt is beginning to fade, and he hasn't shaved for some time. He sips something strong from an old thermos and coughs. "My roommate just died from cancer," he says with barley breath. "My cat needs dry food and wet food and litter. That cat is one of the big reasons I play here, all sixteen pounds of her."
One of a dozen skyway artists, Larry describes his fellow buskers as "autonomous types." Because of their autonomy, he doesn't know the name of the woman who often plays violin a stone's throw from where he sits. Larry and a puppeteer work adjacent skyways, but they are total strangers. And after playing the skyways for more than a decade, Larry and the fiddler of the Target Center Bridge have yet to shake hands.
"There was a time when all of us were going to unionize," Larry says, "but there was so much argument, too many independent minds." His eyes glass over as he takes another sip. He remembers the Super Bowl in 1992, when the city hired musicians to play throughout the skyways. "I think it gave out-of-towners a false impression of Minneapolis," as if the business district is always in festival mode.
On the public links, a nod of approval from a guard on his rounds is the only prerequisite for performers like Larry. The city did issue street musician licenses at one time, but the courts annulled the process as a violation of free speech. Nonetheless, the buskers must conform to a set of rules. They may not use amplification. They may not obstruct pedestrian traffic. They must steer clear of private property without written consent. They may not solicit money. But the city cannot otherwise close an open instrument case.
Jerry, another sky-busker, plays his traveling music at the bridge that links a multilevel Marshall Field's to the City Center. A chrome harmonica hides his warm and weary face. He wears a flannel shirt and gold corduroys, his silver ponytail pulled through a red baseball cap. A Breedlove custom guitar complements his high-desert hands.
Over the past few years, at this very spot, Jerry has sung about the Civil War, his experience in Vietnam, and his trip to France where he traced the steps of Joan of Arc. He pulls in $15 on an average day and $30 on a good day, up on what he calls "the interstates of downtown Minneapolis." As long as he pays his half of the rent, "that's an acceptable haul."
Above the Law
John Frederick is a wizardly guy with bony fingers and happy feet. At a central nook of the Target Center Bridge, a button accordion rests beside him. He props a fiddle across his chest. If it were not for John and his grit, Larry and Jerry might have had to take their business to street level, come sleet or driving rain.
Following a stint as a substitute teacher, John set up on a bridge above Eighth Street and LaSalle Avenue in 1987. On his third day there, a security guard asked him to take his act elsewhere, but John found a glitch in the early policing of the skyway: "You get three songs out, and then they come along and tell you to leave. So, I would do three songs, then move on to the next skyway, then the next, and just do a round robin."
The Minneapolis skyways have kept a close eye on trouble from the start, installing closed-circuit television and call-for-assistance buttons throughout the system. As a result, less than one percent of crimes committed in the downtown area happen in the skyways. In 1992 and 1999, two "Skyway Bandits" did rob a handful of sky-level banks, but even then, they merely pretended to bear arms.
Since he began sky busking in the late-80s, John has been jailed on at least four occasions for allegedly harassing downtown merchants. "The [then] head of the downtown council saw the skyways as strictly business," he says. "Didn't see any room for a 'carnival-like atmosphere'--that's what he called it."
By 1993, however, John had become a familiar face in the Minneapolis skyways. A few by-the-book security guards came and went, but the key decision makers--city council members, the deputy mayor--felt his music offered a break from downtown's hustle and bustle. One December day, he even received a Christmas card. It was addressed to "The Fiddler in the Skyways, Downtown Minneapolis." A post office clerk delivered it, right after looking through his ground-floor office window at the bearded dancer on the bridge above. Safety measures aside, today both the guards and the guarded respond to this sometimes carnival-like atmosphere as if it's business as usual.
Analogized Landscape
Over the past four decades, critics worldwide have called the skyways many names: "architectural afterthoughts," "pseudo-sensible amenities," "bland modernist modules," and "bourgeois boutiquesville." The same critics claim that skyways have robbed downtown streets of their vitality.
In his essay "Underground and Overhead: Building the Analogous City," for instance, architectural historian Trevor Boddy blames the skyway and its kin for an "urban suburbanization" that--by limiting where a person can travel, shielding users from the weather, and reducing the possibilities for accidental interactions between occupants--replaces the democratic potential of public spaces below. "We must start to question the motives of cities and citizens who find themselves suddenly incapable of dealing with climate, even while they praise the lively street culture of sweltering Cairo, rainy Milan, gloomy London, or icy Stockholm."
A critic could also possibly accuse the skyways of constituting a landscape of consumption. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin examined mass culture through the eponymous glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors of 19th-century Paris. The Arcades, he observed, offered not only shelter from the elements but a "primordial landscape of consumption" where flaneurs, or accomplished strollers, could window-shop free from the world's mud and noise. Like their terrestrial, ancestral Parisian cousins, skyways at their worst represent the ultimate bow to our consumerist urges: a safe haven where customers stroll through lobbies and department stores, between bourgeois boutiques and banks.
Finally, as even Sachs acknowledges, a number of skyways are aesthetically flawed: "some I think they should have taken the pencil away from the architect a little sooner." But, he argues, "There are always skyways that you really like and some that you dislike. Anything that brings people downtown to work and playI I don't know how you could be against that."
Despite the critics, skyways have gained momentum. Urban planners from Des Moines to Spokane have followed Minneapolis's lead. More recently, eight of the nine proposals in the recent World Trade Center competition featured bridges, multilevel interconnected structures, and tangential intersections raised high above the streets of Manhattan. It seems Nieuwenhuys's vision of a global superstructure that would free the creativity of humankind has come a few steps closer to realization.
The Next American City Inc. © 2004