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Laurie Hertzel series, Part 2: When I Was ... 19

2010-09-06T10:30:00.004-05:00

When I Was ... is a monthlong series that will appear on this blog on Mondays throughout September. The series, by Star Tribune books editor and author Laurie Hertzel, moves chronologically through Hertzel's early years and adventures in writing and while on assignment at the Duluth News-Tribune. You can find the first entry in the series here.

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When I was 19, I started working as the newsroom clerk at the Duluth News-Tribune. (Pictured above is the Duluth News-Tribune newsroom around 1978.) My job was to answer the city desk phone, write obituaries, call down to the harbor twice a day to get the marine traffic, and walk across the street to the county courthouse to collect information from marriage license applications, divorces, building permits, and bankruptcies. All of this suited the snoop in me very nicely, and I loved it.

I did not have my own place in the room, but moved from desk to desk, taking over reporters’ vacated spots like a vagrant. In the mornings, I sat at the city desk, but in the afternoons, when the nightside city editor showed up, I had to find somewhere else to sit. This could be challenging, because the morning News-Tribune shared a newsroom with the evening Herald, and when both staffs were working, the room was crowded. More than once I found myself without a place to sit, and one day, my work mostly done, no typewriter or phone available, I took my book and went and sat on the floor by a window and started to read.

Some of the reporters thought I was making a political statement about the overcrowding, and they cheered me. But really, I was just passing the time until someone went out on assignment and I could nab his desk. I was far too shy to make a statement like that, even if it had occurred to me. In those years, I felt myself not exactly a part of that room, but an observer of it. The newsroom was full of larger-than-life characters, fascinating people that I never tired of watching as they went about their work.

There was a sportswriter—quite famous, locally—who had been born with no arms below the elbow. He could still type 100 words a minute, though, using rubber-tipped rods that clamped to his upper arms. There was a chunky, fast-walking copy girl whose job it was to run down the hall to the composing room with sheaves of typewritten copy and wire photos. She once called in sick because she said she had scratched her eye on her pillow—a truly bizarre injury that I figured must be a fluky, once-in-a-lifetime thing. A couple of weeks later, she called in sick and said it had happened again.

There was a copy editor who once cross-country skied to work in a snowstorm, six miles from Lester Park, put out the morning paper, and then, when the storm didn’t abate, slept the rest of the night on the newsroom floor.

There was a former mayor turned reporter, and a big burly guy who covered the waterfront—and who took the month of November off every year to work on the docks himself. It was legend—I wasn’t there at the time and cannot promise that this is true—that he once walked to work in a blizzard, crossing the Blatnik Bridge from Superior, a bottle of whiskey tucked under each arm. One was for the way to work, and one for the way home.

Me, I was not a character; I was just a shy person sitting in the corner, and, occasionally, on the floor.

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Laurie Hertzel is author of News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, published by University of Minnesota Press. Click here for more information, including a list of upcoming Minnesota reading events and links to Hertzel's website and Facebook page. You can also check out the News to Me book trailer.

New series by Laurie Hertzel: When I Was ...

2010-09-01T09:13:00.043-05:00

Today the UMP blog is kicking off a monthlong series by Star Tribune books editor and author Laurie Hertzel. The series, When I Was ..., will move chronologically through Hertzel's early years and adventures in writing and while on assignment at the Duluth News-Tribune. Read on about her multiple early career ambitions.

After today, this series will appear on the UMP blog on Mondays throughout the month of September.

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A young Laurie Hertzel reads with her brother, David,
on the steps of their childhood home in Duluth.
Gateway to Storyland was one of their favorite books.

When I was growing up, my parents gave us books for every birthday and every Christmas. I was only seven when I got my first Laura Ingalls Wilder book, Little Town on the Prairie--yes, they gave me the series out of order--and I was deep into reading it one afternoon when Ace Levang stopped by.

Ace Levang was my father’s friend, an English professor at UMD, and I loved him because every time he visited he crouched down to eye-level and asked me, very seriously, what I was reading. After I told him, he then wanted to know what I thought of the book.

In the case of Little Town on the Prairie, which I had only just started, I wasn’t sure what to tell him. “The chapters are short,” I said (Chapter One was less than a page). He laughed, stood up and said, “That’s a valid criticism,” and went off to find my father.

Books, his attentiveness told me, were important. Reading was a serious pastime. This reinforcement was terrific, because my ambition even then was to write my own book some day.

I started with comic books, even though I couldn’t draw, and spent hours in my room creating paneled stories that featured characters based on my favorite comic book hero, Millie the Model.

When I got a little older, I left illustration behind and ventured into journalism, creating a family newspaper, which I filled with what passed for news in our house—the dinner menu (laboriously recreated, right down to the nightly vitamin pill that I always worried was really for dogs—our veterinarian uncle sent them to us by the cartonful), the comings and goings of my nine siblings, and the birthdays of my friends.

Always a mimic, I channeled the inverted pyramid structure of newspapers just as I had previously channeled the big-city adventures of Millie the Model.

At fourteen, it seemed that it was time to get busy on my future. A friend had gotten a job as a page at the public library (and yes, we laughed about being pages in a building filled with books), and I thought it sounded like a perfect job. The Carnegie Library in Duluth was one of my favorite places, with tall stained-glass windows, marble floors, and a cathedral-like rotunda. Best of all, it was filled with the most precious items on Earth—books.

It wasn’t very long, though, before I grew terribly bored at my job. Yes, I was surrounded by tempting books, but no, there was no time to read any of them. My job was this: I put them away. I spent a lot of time in the back workroom, where all the returned books were dumped. Some of us sorted them onto carts, and some of us wheeled the carts out into the library and put them back on shelves. On those rare days when we got everything put away, we spent our time reading the shelves to make sure that all the books were in the proper order.

I learned pretty quickly to keep an eye out for certain men who liked to hang around the library. One of them sat at a table and copied poetry into a grimy notebook in his big scrawly childish hand; he’d rip out the page and carry it over to us and tell us that he had written it just for us. He was a slow, shy guy and seemed harmless, but there was another man, rather good-looking, with dark hair, who was of more concern. The dark-haired man used to stand on the other side of the shelf from me and when I squatted down to shelve a book he would squat down, too. It was pretty clear what he was trying to see—the library required us pages to wear skirts to work—and often his creepy presence would send me fleeing for the safety of the workroom.

It didn’t take me very long to know that libraries were probably not my future. Writing books was one thing. Tending to their care was something else entirely.

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Look for more entries in this series on Mondays throughout September.

Laurie Hertzel is author of News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, published by University of Minnesota Press. Click here for more information, including a list of upcoming Minnesota reading events and links to Hertzel's website and Facebook page. You can also check out the News to Me book trailer, which was recently featured as Shelf Awareness's book trailer of the day.

Want to know what's on the cover of the book? Check it out (click image to enlarge):

Shelf Awareness features NEWS TO ME trailer

2010-08-31T09:18:00.006-05:00

Check out Shelf Awareness's book trailer of the day:

Click for more information about News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, by Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel. Our website offers a list of upcoming reading events and an infographic that breaks down the items that appear on the book's cover.

Then and Now: "Old Gray Heads," part two -- Elizabeth Close

2010-08-30T13:14:00.008-05:00

"Then and Now" is a series by Alan K. Lathrop, curator of the Manuscripts Division at the University of Minnesota Libraries from 1970 to 2008. He is author of Minnesota Architects and Churches of Minnesota.

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Elizabeth Close and her late husband, Winston Close, were partners in an architectural firm in Minneapolis for many years. Close Associates, as it was called, is still in business, now under the ownership of Gar Hargens.

Elizabeth Close was born Elizabeth Sheu in Vienna in 1912. She grew up in a home filled with culture, where visiting artists were frequent guests. Young Elizabeth became interested in architecture at an early age and attended the Technische Hochschule (Technical High School) where she took a degree in the subject. In 1935 she fled Vienna because of the increasing Nazi influence and came to the United States. She studied at MIT's architecture school, then moved to Minneapolis and joined her new husband in practice.

Charlie Nelson and I chose Elizabeth Close as one of the speakers in the “Old Gray Heads” series because, by the 1980s, she had amassed an impressive array of outstanding buildings in the Twin Cities and elsewhere. She and Winston designed the University of Minnesota's Ferguson Hall (pictured), as well as numerous residences, several of them in the area of Falcon Heights known as University Grove. “The Grove,” as it is familiarly known, is a neighborhood adjacent to the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota in which many faculty and administrators erected houses on property leased from the University on a long-term basis. The Closes themselves built a house there as well.

We held the meeting in the mansion that housed the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota and I remember Elizabeth sitting in a large chair in a comfortable drawing room near a warm fireplace on a cold December evening, holding forth with stories about her life and about architects she had known. Among her memories was of growing up in a house designed by the distinguished Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, and of the cultural richness of her childhood home. Loos’ drawing for the house hung on a wall in her office.

Years later I had the pleasure of helping the Northwest Architectural Archives obtain digital copies of some valuable materials that Elizabeth made available, including a guestbook that held the signatures of the visitors to her parents’ home, including Richard Neutra, the poet Ezra Pound, and the noted author, John Gunther. These digital copies are now part of the collections of the Archives and open to researchers. She also gave me a tour of her home in University Grove.

I shall always cherish my acquaintance with this gracious and talented person who contributed so much to the architecture of our community.

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Alan K. Lathrop is author of Minnesota Architects (2010) and Churches of Minnesota (2003).

Also in the Then and Now series:
-"Old Gray Heads," Part One: Roy Thorshov.
-Fine architecture in Winona, MN.
-Art deco treasures in the Twin Cities.
-The Guthrie Theater(s).
-The Metropolitan Building.
-The Hollywood, Uptown, and Varsity theaters in Minneapolis.

Want to know the architectural history of your favorite Minnesota building? E-mail suggestions about content you would like to see here to sattl014@umn.edu.

Images in this post are from Creative Commons.

"No One Loves a Loser" -- life on the streets in San Francisco.

2010-08-25T09:00:00.006-05:00

The following is an excerpt drawn from the new book Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco, by Teresa Gowan. Gowan will be giving a talk and signing books tonight at University Press Books in Berkeley, CA, and tomorrow night at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco. Find more event info on our website.

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No One Loves a Loser

Willie, a lanky, gravel-voiced white man with a stoop, came from a hard-drinking “hillbilly” family in Stockton. His mother ran off when he was seven, leaving him with his biker brothers, who beat him frequently and taught him to skip school. On New Year’s Eve, 1973, fifteen-year-old Willie witnessed one of his brothers killing a man in a drunken rage, smashing his head with a heavy chain. Overwhelmed by fear and disgust, Willie left home early the next morning and caught the bus to Fresno, the nearest sizeable town. There he slept rough for a few weeks while looking for work. Lying about his age landed him a mediocre job in a rubber goods factory, and he soon found an apartment to share with a couple of other young men. He never went back home.

Willie could move, but he couldn’t change California’s passionate affair with chemically enhanced experience. His early life had left him with a great fear of out-of-control drinking and drugging, but this fear was always tinged with desire and curiosity, for not only the bad times but the good had been charged by drug use. In Fresno, it proved hard to stay away from the constant drinking and drugging of his friends and co-workers. It was the 1970s, the height of American drug consumption, and it seemed like everyone Willie knew was involved with drugs one way or another, using marijuana and Quaaludes to chill, PCP and coke to fly, poppers for sex, and heroin—why with heroin you didn’t even need sex, so they said. Willie tried them all, thinking he would just experiment. Heroin proved too strong for him, holding him in a bitter and sordid embrace that steadily led him to unemployment and petty thievery, and then to jail. When he came out a year later, Willie decided to move to San Francisco, thinking that the variety and opportunities of a big city might help him steer a new course. He worked a few temporary construction jobs, and stayed out of jail for a couple of years, but his hold on himself was fragile, and he failed to land the kind of work that could anchor a new life. He started using heroin again in 1988, and his shoddy collection of part-time jobs was woefully inadequate to feed his habit. Again he turned to stealing, this time motorbikes, which he sold to a fence for between $50 and $200. Within months he was in jail again.

Willie had told me this backstory one day when heavy rain prevented us from recycling. Giving up on making any money that day, we had gone to the St. Francis, a two dollar cinema on Market Street, to see some second-rate action movie. It was warm and dry, and one of the only places in town where you could get away with smoking inside. I remember Willie’s low voice and the glow of his cigarette in the dark, as the gunfire rattled and the explosions roared around us.

I met up with Willie again one year later, a couple of months after he had landed a dishwasher job at a small hotel. His clothes were cleaner and his beard was gone, leaving a handlebar moustache and sideburns that suited his angular face.
“Remind me how it was you got to be homeless in the first place,” I asked him.
Willie leant towards the tape recorder. “I got clean in the county jail in 1991, and I stayed that way for a while. I was dishwasher and short order cook at the Shamrock, on Harrison, I was there seven years.”

“Where were you living?”

“I had a room in the Delta Hotel.”

“Euw.”

“Okay it was a dump, but I had one of the best rooms, up on the fifth floor, with a window looking out right over the corner of Sixth and Mission. I had a girl who didn’t do junk, a nice colored girl... She was only 23 when we hooked up, but she really liked me. She was a cocktail waitress in North Beach. … We wanted to see the West, the mountains, Vegas, the desert, you know. The plan was to buy a van, something we could live out of. We had about $600. Then I lost the money and most of my things in the fire in 1997. You heard about that fire?”

“Sure, it was a bad one,” I said. “The place is still empty.”

“The top floors were hit the worst you know. All my shit was destroyed. I had to move into the All-Star, in the Mission. It was all I could find, a stinking little hole with no air, no windows, crackheads roaming the hallways, partying.” Willie paused. “A few weeks later my girl dumped me.”

“Do you think it had anything to do with the fire?”

“It felt like that. You know, no one loves a loser. She was mad with me over losing the cash, said I shoulda put it in the bank. Like I had enough money for a bank account. I was paid in cash, never had that much.”

“You took out your disappointment on each other?”

Willie shrugged. “I guess. I wasn’t great company; I was in a dirty mood. Then she caught me with a rock in my pocket, and that was it. Her parents were dope fiends, and she wasn’t gonna tolerate me using.”

“Were you using a lot of crack?”

“I wouldn’t say a lot. Couple of times a week maybe. I was trying not to, that’s for sure. But I could feel her drifting, flirting with other guys, dressing up more sexy when she was working. And when I talked about getting our shit together again, getting out of town, she wasn’t interested. She would just watch TV when I was trying to talk to her. It made me feel like shit. I mean, this was the best thing I ever had, and I knew it was over. ... And I was worried about my job. Some developer was trying to buy out the boss so he could tear down half the block for some of those new condos. The boss was giving us a good line but we all knew he was going to take the money. It was obvious, the way he started spending more on his car, his clothes. He was just waiting on a better price.

“I needed something to look forward to. I was getting so angry, bitter angry, I thought I might hurt somebody. I wasn’t going to go near heroin, I knew better than that. But I thought, well cocaine, that’s not my drug of choice, I can take it and leave it. I had done it before a few times, before I got with Theresa. And there was this guy at work; we would go up on the roof some times after work. I tried to keep it to a couple of rocks. I knew it was foolish, but I couldn’t do any better. I didn’t have the strength in me. It was a bad time.

“After the bar closed, I went on GA, started looking for another gig. But GA barely covered my rent. I had to get some money for my daily expenses. So I started panhandling on Market Street, by one of the entrances to Montgomery BART Station. I didn’t know what else to do. My idea was to panhandle in the morning then go out looking for work. I wasn’t looking for a hustle. I’m too old for that. I just figured panhandling was the most honest way, you know, I need money, I ask people to spare a few pennies.”

“Had you ever done it before?” I broke in.

“Panhandling? No. And it wasn’t easy. ... You get to hate the people marching past.”

Willie cleared his throat and glanced up at me, a strained look in his eyes. “I was having dreams of being invisible, really invisible, like I couldn’t see my hand. One dream I had, I was standing on a big staircase somewhere, and all these people, this whole line of people I used to know. They came down the stairs past me, and not one of them said a word. They didn’t even seem to see me.

“And then I had to get up and try to find work. Except I had to go back to the hotel and change my clothes to look for work. It all took time, and I was so down, it was hard to come into a joint and ask for work. And they didn’t seem like the right kinds of joints for me.” Willie hesitated, struggling for the right words. “You know how the city, it’s become so yuppie. Like I’m too old, not educated enough. ... Seems like it’s not good enough to be just a regular guy... in the end I gave up on looking for work, and I was just sitting out all day panhandling.”

“Did you ask people for money?” I asked. “Or just fly a sign?”

“At first I had me a sign, and I would just sit and read a book, but you don’t get much if you don’t ask. Then I used to give people this intense look, just say ‘Please, anything helps.’ I figured people should like that, showing you’re not fussy, you’ll take the pennies. ... The thing is, after a while, you hate them, you hate everyone, and they feel it, they know.”

“So how did you come to recycling?”

Willie was silent for a moment, casting his mind back. “See, I was watching Julius every day come past me with this big load. We would say hi. He lived on Sixth Street at one time you know. I realized that he was having a better time than me, it was that simple. He seemed okay, less depressed than I was for sure. Then it took a while for me to get used to the idea of pushing a shopping cart. Seemed to be like saying, ‘Look at me, look at this poor homeless motherfucker.’ And I wasn’t even homeless. I still had my room, just. ... But what’s worse than sitting on Market Street begging? So I asked him could I go out with him, figure out if I could make it work for me.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was okay, but the money was bad, worse than panhandling. I couldn’t see it, working all day and it’s hard manual labor, pushing that bone-shaking cart. You know you should be getting 12, 15 bucks an hour and you’re getting maybe one or two bucks an hour if you’re really going at it. It wasn’t till I lost my room that I went back to it. The thing is, it’s real different when you’re homeless. For a start, you’ve got nowhere to go so you don’t care if you’re working a lot of hours.”

“The more the better?” I asked hesitantly.

“Yeah, just about.” Willie turned to grin at me. “And it took me a while to realize that. I’m in this mentality of 'I’m not gonna work for nothing.' But with recycling, you’re not working for someone else; you’re working for yourself, so you don’t have to feel like someone’s getting rich off you. There’s no boss. No one’s making you do it. OK the money’s not going to do much for you but it’s something, and it gives you something to do that’s not just sitting around. I got stronger than I had been for maybe 10 years, pushing that cart, slinging those bags of bottles. It kinda hurt my shoulder, but otherwise it was real good for me physically. I started cutting down on cigarettes, because I needed my lungs for my work, and I wanted to save.”

“Did you manage to?”

“Not much. But the recycling did get me off the streets. I really think it did. See I met this buddy of mine back from my Fresno days, and I arranged to stay with him and his girlfriend and put something towards the rent. So I was recycling and every day I’d give them 10 bucks. My mentality was so much better, I would go look for work in the mornings, then do a big load of recycling in the afternoon. And it paid off, at least for now. I moved with Wayne and Sherry, we got a place in East Oakland now, got my own room. Things are coming together again, I hope.” Willie resolutely tapped the oak bar with his open hand.

“Couldn’t you have stayed with them anyway, if you weren’t recycling?”

“I dunno. No, I don’t think so. They could see I was doing something for myself, like I wasn’t going to be just hanging around with a long face, getting wasted. You know, I had this routine for myself, work times, work gear, it was like I was working.”
“You just weren’t making much money.”

“Yeah. But money’s not everything you know.”

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This vignette appears in Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco, by Teresa Gowan.

Then and Now: "The Old Gray Heads," part one -- Roy Thorshov

2010-08-23T10:00:00.001-05:00

"Then and Now" is a series by Alan K. Lathrop, curator of the Manuscripts Division at the University of Minnesota Libraries from 1970 to 2008. He is author of Minnesota Architects and Churches of Minnesota.

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Some fifteen years ago or more, the late Charlie Nelson, architectural historian at the Minnesota Historical Society, started a short-lived series of programs for the local chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians called “The Old Gray Heads.” He and I conferred on the scope and details of the series, and it was well received by the membership of the local SAH chapter.

Each year at the December meeting, one of the older architects in the Twin Cities was invited to speak about his or her career, works, and architects of their day. Unfortunately, the series ran out of steam after five years or so. Out of all architects who had been invited, I am going to write about two: Roy Thorshov and Elizabeth Close (who will be featured in Part Two).

Roy was a heavy-set, jowly, good-natured soul who had started practicing in the early 1920s with Long & Thorshov (whose work includes the now-former Dayton's dept. store in downtown Minneapolis) – the “Thorshov” in this case being his father, Olaf, a native of Norway who had migrated to the U.S. around 1901. Olaf died in 1928 and Roy succeeded as the “Thorshov” partner. By the time I knew Roy in 1977, he was semi-retired with a hefty body of work behind him (including work at the Hennepin County Courthouse and at St. Mary's Greek Orthodox Church in Minneapolis) and was well respected in the community of architects, both within Minnesota and nationally. He had been a long-time member of the Sons of Norway and his firm designed their building on West Lake Street (pictured) in the 1970s.

The name of the firm changed in the early 1940s, becoming Thorshov & Cerny after Robert Cerny joined it and a decade and a half after the last Long had passed on. (Thorshov & Cerny's extensive body of work includes St. Olaf's Catholic Church.) It dissolved in 1960 and each partner went into other practices: Roy Thorshov joined Willard Thorsen, and Robert Cerny started his own firm, Cerny & Associates. Both occupied offices within a couple blocks of each other in downtown Minneapolis for a number of years: Thorsen & Thorshov was in the Old Republic Title Building at the corner of Fourth Street and Second Avenue South, and Cerny had offices in the Soo Line Building at Marquette Avenue and Fifth Street South.

Roy was one of the initial members of the Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission, formed by an ordinance in 1973. He was still on the HPC when I came on board in 1977. Because of his extensive knowledge of the city’s architectural history, he was a valued member, both of the Commission and of its Catalog Committee. The latter was a three-person group consisting of Roy, Kermit Crouch, and me, most ably assisted by staff members Gail Bronner and Camille Kudzia. Our task was to spend two or three hours once or twice a month driving through city neighborhoods and identifying buildings of all types that seemed to merit, on the basis of their appearance, further research (by the staff) to determine their date of construction, original owner’s name, architect’s name, and other pertinent information. Any structure that met the criteria of stylistic and historical significance could potentially be nominated by the Commission to its list of historic structures and thus be protected from wanton destruction.

During these trips up and down city streets, Roy would regale us with stories about neighborhoods, architects of the past, and even owners whom he may have known as either clients or by reputation. He was especially knowledgeable about Prospect Park in Southeast Minneapolis, where his family had roots and his sister still lived in a house built in the 1880s. He would point out a house and remark, “So-and-so lived there,” and proceed to tell a story about the person or the house or both and chuckle over its humorous aspects. Needless to say, these were gloriously fun-packed days, filled with first-hand history from a man who “had been there and done that.”

When it came his turn to speak at the “Old Gray Heads” program, we held the meeting in the City Hall. Roy spoke all too briefly about his career – being a very modest man by nature – but he treated everyone to a ride in the very cramped clock tower elevator to the roof of City Hall, where we had a delightful view of downtown. Of course, Roy pointed out the sights and commented on buildings that had once stood there. It was a lesson in living history, and I shall never forget it.

Sadly, Roy has been gone for nearly twenty years and took with him a wealth of information about the architectural history and heritage of Minneapolis. I feel immensely pleased and honored to have known him as one of the “Old Gray Heads.”

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Alan K. Lathrop is author of Minnesota Architects (2010) and Churches of Minnesota (2003).

Also in the Then and Now series:
-Fine architecture in Winona, MN.
-Art deco treasures in the Twin Cities.
-The Guthrie Theater(s).
-The Metropolitan Building.
-The Hollywood, Uptown, and Varsity theaters in Minneapolis.

Want to know the architectural history of your favorite Minnesota building? E-mail suggestions about content you would like to see here to sattl014@umn.edu.

Images in this post are from Creative Commons.

MPR's Peter Smith on high-school football: "We stunk and we knew it."

2010-08-18T10:18:00.014-05:00

Brett Favre is here and Minnesota is rejoicing—and perhaps remembering how Al Franken totally called this last week.

We've got football on the brain (and not to mention cautious hopes at a Super Bowl championship). In honor of the season, we are happy to share an essay by Peter Smith, who remembers with "fondness" his days of high-school football. Smith is a weekly contributor to MPR's Morning Edition with Cathy Wurzer and author of the forthcoming essay anthology A Porch Sofa Almanac.

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For a while there—most of freshman, and all of sophomore, junior and senior years—my high school football team was mired in a losing streak. Once a year, we might tie someone. Or even eek out a win. The sad truth was that, for a variety of reasons, we just weren’t very good, and from the start of practice in late August to the day we turned in our equipment in early November, the deepest bruises and contusions were the ones inflicted on our hearts and souls. We stunk and we knew it.

Other teams greeted the new season with fresh hope and surging spirits. They jogged out there with enthusiasm that first day of practice, and they launched into their calisthenics thinking this could be the year. Not us. We walked onto the field ruefully, the smokers among us stubbing out their last cigarettes before going into training. We slouched into our drills with a shrugging, “Here goes nothing,” resignation.

Ours was a tradition rich with abject failure and adolescent nihilism. Around our program, the stench of futility was as pungent and pervasive as the smell of the last owner’s sweat inside your just-issued helmet.

I doubt Coach could have spelled nihilism, let alone define it, but he knew it when he saw it, and, year after year, he saw it in us. Undaunted, he coached on, trying to instill character as he installed his offense and defense. More than just building a football program, Coach wanted to build fine young men—upright, resolute, stout-hearted young men. Young men who would preside over the Student Council, give the Valedictorian speech, and win the two hundred and fifty dollar college scholarship from the local American Legion. Handsome, community-minded types—like Frank Gifford, the much-admired New York Giants’ halfback.

Sadly, no. Most of us were more in the mold of the Baltimore Colts’ enigmatic Joe Don Looney. Joe Don had been known to run the wrong way on purpose. He played when he felt like it. He didn’t play when he didn’t. He once told his coach he couldn’t go into a game because his karma wasn’t right. When his playing days were over, Joe Don spent several years tending elephants for a Hindu swami.
All this in that post-Elvis, pre-Beatles era. Bob Dylan had not yet pronounced it, but you could feel it—the times were a-changing.

Coach, a straight-shooting, flattop-sporting character builder, had his hands full. Just fielding a team in time for the regular season was a victory.

The losing began when the season began, and went on and on, week after week. In cities and towns across three counties, we were that one game on everyone’s schedule that the old timers could circle and count as a victory long before the game was played.

Even when things were going good, something would go bad. Someone on our team would “cheap shot” somebody on the other side. First and ten would become first and twenty-five. The thin veneer of success would crack. Failure would reemerge and, with failure, an oddly reassuring sense of normalcy. We were losing again. All was right with the world.

When the chips were down and our backs were against the wall—which was pretty much every week—Coach brought in a nervous little man with a clipboard to deliver an inspirational speech before we took the field. The nervous little man had been student manager on Coach’s college team, and he shared Coach’s belief in God, America, and the character-building power of football.

Week after week, the nervous little man would look to the ceiling. The fluorescent lights would glint off his glasses and he would take a deep breath, fix us with a righteous stare and start his speech on an innocuously low key and obvious point.

Something like, “Well boys, this is it. The Barrington game…”

Referring to his clipboard now and then, he would begin to build steam. He would recall every slight, real or imagined. Every missed call, every Barrington cheap shot and lucky break, and every opportunity to beat Barrington that we’d fumbled away on the one yard line. He would pile bad break on top of unlucky bounce, injury on top of indignity, working himself slowly to a crescendo. He would pace back and forth and chew and jawbone and snarl and seethe and scrap and yap like a Jack Russell terrier on a rag doll, building a righteous, Elmer Gantry-like indignation.

Then, suddenly, clipboard high overhead, he would pause in mid rant, as if struck by some new and incredibly more important thought. The clipboard would come down. So, too, would the tone. Where only fifteen seconds before it had been ringing, now it was confidential. Cajoling.

“I don’t have to tell you this one’s important, boys,” he would wheedle. “This is Barrington, for goodness sake. Bare… Ring… Ton…”

He would begin to build anew—a series of, “I don’t have to tell you’s.”

“I don’t have to tell you how bad Coach wants this win…”

“I don’t have to tell you the whole season is riding on this one…”

When he finished telling us everything he didn’t have to tell us, he turned his attention to the memories we were making for ourselves. These were the best days we would ever know. So let’s go out there and make the kind of memories we could be proud of in the future.

His voice always broke on the word, “proud”. This was our cue to stand and put on our helmets. He would use “proud” three or four more times – “Go out there and make your parents proud. Your school proud. Your town proud.” If the game were big enough, he even would even manage to make himself cry just a little.

And we would huddle up and lean in and give a big, albeit false-hearted cheer. And we would clatter out of the locker room on our high-topped football cleats. Smelling of fresh athletic tape, pine tar and a mentholated substance called “Atomic Balm,” we would push down the hall, out into the brilliant autumn sunlight. We would stride across the parking lot and through the gates and take the football field – our home football field – with a gritty-but-thinly-rooted sense of purpose.

And we would lose. Week after week, we would fail Coach and our parents and our school and our town. We would send the nervous little man back to the well for more tears and more inspiration.

“Well, boys, this is it. The Crystal Lake game…”

“Well, boys, this is it. The Woodstock game…”

“Well, boys, this is it. The Zion game…”

Our record my senior season is etched on my heart. 0-7-1. We battled to an uplifting 0-0 tie at Homecoming—a rainy moral victory that echoes down through the ages.

August again. I long since quit smoking, but part of me longs to light up a Lucky Strike if only to drop it and grind it out under a cleat, slide a stinky old helmet on and walk out onto the practice field once more—to make everyone—Coach, Mom and Pop, the school—the whole town—proud.

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Read more essays by Peter Smith in A Porch Sofa Almanac.

Stay culturally satiated this month ...

2010-08-19T12:40:00.009-05:00

In Metro Magazine.

Aaaaand we're back to the State Canvassing Board.

2010-08-17T11:29:00.023-05:00

As Minnesota's State Canvassing Board meets today to certify last week's close-but-not-close-enough-for-a-recount primary election results, one can't help but remember a time in 2008 when all eyes, locally and nationally, were turned to the State Canvassing Board.

The University of Minnesota Press has compiled this infographic timeline that lays out all of the events surrounding the 2008 Coleman–Franken Minnesota Senate recount—the largest, longest, and most expensive election recount in American history. The Minnesota recount lasted about 35 weeks; the 2000 Bush–Gore Presidential recount, by comparison, lasted 36 days.

For more information, check out This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount by Jay Weiner, forthcoming this fall.

You can download a larger, PDF version of the timeline by clicking here.

Peter Paik's politics of catastrophe—as revealed in The Matrix films, superhero comics, and other science fiction.

2010-08-16T12:24:00.010-05:00

Scholar J. Kameron Carter looks at the problem of political theology as he sees it within Peter Y. Paik's book From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe.

The ethics of earth art — different approaches to understanding ourselves in relation to the planet.

2010-08-11T09:09:00.029-05:00

Today's Q&A feature is with Amanda Boetzkes, assistant professor of art and design at the University of Alberta and author of the soon-forthcoming The Ethics of Earth Art.

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Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970. Photograph JEK 2005 ©. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo from CreativeCommons.org.

Q: You write in your book's introduction: "Contemporary art counters two deeply flawed but nevertheless pervasive stances toward the earth" — the instrumental view that seeks to master the planet and the romantic view that seeks a "state of unencumbered continuity with nature." Does your book find a middle ground?

The arguments I put forward in The Ethics of Earth Art implicitly critique two ways of understanding ourselves (humans) in relation to the planet. On the one hand, there is the more dangerous of the two, in which humans presume dominion over the earth by harvesting natural resources for profit. This means that not only is the planet conceived entirely as a means to the human end of producing a reserve of energy that can be exchanged for money, but also that there is an infinite demand for those resources which inevitably leads to the exploitation and destruction of highly complex ecosystems. The global economy is entirely dependent on colonizing the earth in this way, without regard for the health and diversity of other forms of life. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an example of how the drive to instrumentalize the planet can easily lead to catastrophic negligence.

This predicament is perhaps no surprise, but the danger I see is that the instrumental model is also accompanied by a counter-discourse that attempts to criticize it, but in fact does little to dismantle it. This counter-discourse is, at its core, a fiction that humans can return to a natural state of being. I call it a romantic view because it is characterized by a profound, even quasi-erotic, desire to be reunited with “nature.” According to the logic of this discourse, nature is untouched, a Garden of Eden that existed before a mythological time before modernity, before science, before technology, before money. To return to nature would be to recover an essential human condition. But no such essential condition exists, and often the division between what is natural and what is not only serves the purposes of a corporate ideology.

I cannot say that I take a middle road between the two positions, because I see them both as fundamentally misguided. In my book, I try to posit a somewhat different approach. While perhaps our anthropocentricism is inevitable, it is not impossible to recognize our limitations. One’s experience of the planet is bound to a frame of reference that is particular to our species: our history, knowledge, and bodily experience. Yet, there was life on earth long before humans and there will be long after we have died out. It always outstrips what we purport to know about it or experience of it. To me this is a sublime realization. I argue that earth art gives rise to this humble position in the face of the earth’s excessiveness. A stance of ontological humility is the beginning of ethics. From this perspective, a position of transcendental mastery is impossible and the notion of “the natural,” entirely untenable.

Q: Some suggest that Robert Smithson was the first earth artist; others disagree. Where do you stand?

Earth art is far too diverse to be attributed to any one artist. I am also wary of patrilineal histories that posit a single male artist as the creator of a movement or style. There were many artists who were roughly contemporaneous with Smithson who were engaging in similar forms of experimentation, and there were many others who had quite different approaches to making art but who were nevertheless important in defining the arena of earth art in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Performance artists like Ana Mendieta, Dennis Oppenheim, and Joseph Beuys, systems-based artists like Hans Haacke and the Harrisons, environmental artists like Betty Beaumont, and postminimalist sculptors like Richard Serra, all made significant contributions to exploring the aesthetic and ethical territory of earth art.

I do address some of Smithson’s work, which is undoubtedly very rich. However, my goal is not so much to present him as an originator of the massive earthworks sculptures he is often associated with. Rather, it is to analyze how he used a variety of media, such as film, mirrors, installation and photography, to alternately deprive the viewer of an object of representation and then saturate the senses with elemental phenomena such as blinding sunlight or lapping water. In this way, I suggest, Smithson exposed and challenged the limits of the perceptual field.

Q: What specific differences do you spot between earthworks of the ‘60s and those that are more modern?

The standard history would describe a shift from “land art” to “eco-art.” Often it is understood that most earth art of the ‘60s and early ‘70s consisted of monumental sculptures that were deliberately inaccessible and did not have any particularly “environmentalist” content, while the following decades saw the rise of smaller scale interventions that reveal the ecological subtleties of a landscape or public space, and are more invested in environmental restoration and activism. To me, this story is not historically accurate and is perhaps too simplistic in its characterization of the ethical investments of the artworks.

Certainly, it is true that ecological imperatives have become a more familiar discursive field from which to interpret more recent artworks. But there are two main points I wanted to make in writing this history of earth art: the first is that the earlier generation of earth artists were not just sculptors, they were multi-media artists who were interrogating the aesthetic experience of the world and attempting to create alternate modes of perception. The aesthetic dimensions of the artworks had ethical implications. Equally, subsequent generations of earth art have not simply been concerned with restoration, but consistently explore how aesthetics are inextricable from ecological investments. So in answer to a question about historical differences, I am actually suggesting that there are continuities between the generations of artists that are sometimes overlooked.

Q: Does feminism fit into your book's argument?

There is a branch of feminist theory that strongly inflects my arguments about the ethical dimensions of earth art. The book is strongly engaged with the way that ethics is defined in the phenomenological tradition, not only by philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger, but more importantly by feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler who have developed some of the most sophisticated understandings of ethics. Irigaray is particularly attentive to the way that ontological recession, the precondition for an ethical acknowledgment of “the other,” is associated with an abundance of sensation. Irigaray’s elaboration of the ethical encounter as an aesthetic experience allowed me to consider how ecological imperatives might be redefined through the vehicle of earth art.

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Learn more about Amanda Boetzkes' The Ethics of Earth Art, which will be available this month from University of Minnesota Press.

Works by Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, among others, are currently on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Between Here and There exhibit. The exhibit ends in February 2011.

Then and Now: Winona, Minnesota. (Highly recommended as a destination for an end-of-summer road trip.)

2010-08-09T10:29:00.038-05:00

Winona County Courthouse, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Without question: Winona, that beautiful little city on the Mississippi flood plain in the southeastern part of the state, holds some of the finest architecture in all of Minnesota. Between the early 1870s and the first decade of the twentieth century there was a virtual explosion of extraordinary buildings going up in the city. Concentrated within its confines are several unique and elegant churches, two spectacular banks (one of which was nearly lost in the early 1970s), a magnificent court house (which also came perilously close to demolition in the same era), and several residences of notable style and grace.

The ecclesiastical contributions range from the large and impressive St. Stanislaus Polish Catholic Church (1894-5), with its tall, graceful drum and dome, to the much smaller but equally impressive St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, erected two decades earlier of locally quarried stone. Each was designed by resident Winona architects Charles Maybury and Ananias Langdon, respectively. In between are such gems as First Congregational Church (1880-82), designed in the Romanesque Revival style by William Willcox of Chicago (later St. Paul), and First Baptist Church (1888-93), in the same genre, by the brothers George and A.S. Bullard of Springfield, Illinois.

There are also two banks of special note, built at roughly the same time: The Merchants National Bank, a product of the genius of William Purcell and George Elmslie of Minneapolis (1912-13), and the Winona Savings Bank (which also housed the Winona National Bank) designed by George Maher of Chicago and erected in 1914-15. Both are exquisite creations. The Merchants National Bank embodies all the theory and practice of the Prairie School style, which owed its genesis to Louis H. Sullivan and his most famous pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright. This brilliant gem of a building was almost lost in the early 1970s, before the bank's president was persuaded, by an avalanche of letters and phone calls of protest from alarmed and angry citizens far and wide, to change his mind and undertake a restoration. His name was Gordon Espy and when I talked to him at the grand opening of the restored structure in 1972, he was still grumbling at the expense incurred and wondered if it was all worth it. Rest easy, Mr. Espy, I told him; you can be assured it is.

The Winona Savings Bank/Winona National Bank is equally as magnificent, but in a different way. It is solidly constructed of marble and limestone instead of brick, as was employed at the Merchants National Bank, giving it a heavier quality. Its design incorporates Prairie School elements, especially in the treatment of the fenestration and characteristic opulent stained glass, with the result bearing a strange resemblance that some think hearken back to Egyptian antecedents. For this reason the building has mistakenly been called Egyptian Revival, but it is not. The architect, George Maher (who also was responsible for the masterful J.R. Watkins office building in 1911), simply sought to create an edifice in which the “plan and general design follow no precedent either in this country or abroad and are therefore original and American in spirit ... The architecture was to express the idea of service and of beauty ... [and] the exterior design directly reflects the general aspect of the interior plan; that is to say, the interior purpose of the edifice is clearly portrayed on the facades."

The Winona County Court House (pictured at top) is an exemplary exponent of Midwestern Richardsonian Romanesque. Its architect was hometown boy Charles Maybury. The court house was erected in 1888 and came close to being razed during a period of enthusiastic, if misguided, attempts to spruce up the downtown area. Fortunately, again, citizen activism blocked the effort and the building still stands.

Finally, the city seems to have more than its share of impressive residences, several of which are among the finest examples of Italianate architecture in the state: The Huff house (1857), the Sinclair residence (1870s) and the Keyes house are perhaps the best. The Schmitz house (1890) epitomizes the disfunctionality of the Queen Ann style, and the Gallagher residence (1913) by Purcell and Elmslie is among their best Prairie School houses.

Unfortunately, as is also the case with many American towns and cities, much noteworthy architecture in Winona has fallen victim to accidental loss, but far more has gone to landfills through insensitivity and failure to recognize the contribution that older buildings make to everyday sociological currents. Yet, the city still has much to offer and should be on everyone’s list of obligatory exploration.

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Alan K. Lathrop is author of Minnesota Architects (2010) and Churches of Minnesota (2003).

Also in the Then and Now series:
-Art deco treasures in the Twin Cities.
-The Guthrie Theater(s).
-The Metropolitan Building.
-The Hollywood, Uptown, and Varsity theaters in Minneapolis.

Want to know the architectural history of your favorite Minnesota building? E-mail suggestions about content you would like to see here to sattl014@umn.edu.

Images in this post are from Creative Commons.

Great crowd at Rod Carew book signing

2010-08-06T09:33:00.020-05:00

Here are some photos we've received from the very busy book signing with hall-of-famer Rod Carew at a southern California Costco last Saturday. We're told that people started lining up a whopping 2 hours before the advertised time to see Mr. Carew.

Carew was signing copies of the new edition of his memoir Carew, which features a foreword by former Twins great Torii Hunter and a new afterword by Rod Carew.

Submersion Doesn't Come Easily: How the musical score in "Inception" is a lesson in collective dreaming. (As well as an ode to Hitchcock's "Vertigo.")

2010-08-04T09:20:00.005-05:00

Today's post is by Amy Herzog, associate professor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She is author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film.

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In a sequence from Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), we are introduced to the mechanics of shared dreaming alongside the young architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), as she is being recruited by master dream manipulator, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). While sitting at an outdoor Paris café, Dom reveals to Ariadne that they are in fact communing in a dream space of her own subconscious design. As the realization washes over Ariadne, the surrounding streets begin to tremble and fracture. Building facades burst like concrete and glass puffs of popcorn. The earth heaves with a low-end groan, and the air fills with the detritus of what had moments ago been the weighty objects of urban life: produce crates, cobblestones, shards of furniture.

Ariadne later ventures into the Paris of her mind as the score swells to buoy the movements on screen. She is able to bend and metamorphose the streets in ways that defy waking-life physics, creating new planes of movement and new spatiotemporal rules. She tells Dom that she is surprised to learn about the rich multisensory nature of this domain; she had imagined dreams would be dominated by the visual, but this world is in fact dictated by “feeling.”

Inception has generated a flurry of debates among critics, fans, and bloggers, such that a substantial portion of reviews consist of metacommentaries on these feuds, and on the role of film criticism in general. A particular lightning rod has been the score, composed by Hans Zimmer, which has been described as everything from “masterful” to “trombone-heavy music … which pounds us into near-deafness, if not quite submission.”

Regardless of one’s position on the critical value of the film, it is difficult to deny the centrality of music to Inception’s aesthetic and thematic project. The soundscape at large is bombastic, washing over the action in a densely layered soup of real and synthetic elements. On the level of narrative, the characters make poignant use of Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” as a cue throughout the film. Piaf’s song serves as a sonic guidepost to carry the dream-infiltrating team through the subterranean layers of consciousness into which they have submerged. Though the visuals of the film are indeed intensely rendered, the overall spectacle is a true audiovisual fusion. Much like a dreamer’s reverie, our affective responses to this mix supersede logic or reason.

Which is not to say affect is the only level on which Inception resonates. While critics have tended to pit intellect versus emotion in the film (reading it as either a compelling drama about lost love or an intricate and meaningless logical exercise), I would argue that the film circles ambiguously around these poles. Critics on both sides, I suspect, are responding to the film’s refusal to satisfyingly root itself either in a plausible emotional drama or within in a philosophical construct that holds water once the rush of sounds and images has faded away. Yet this refusal may be the film’s most interesting move, one that seems linked to its larger commentary on the machinations of cinema as an art form.

Cinema, like the dream, toes a self-conscious line between reality and fantasy, narrative structure and spectacle, reason and feeling. Inception invites this comparison between film and dream most pleasurably in a rush of cinematic allusions. These nods are at times direct visual references, such as Ellen Page’s styling in one dream world as a mirror image of Kim Novak’s Madeleine from Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) (with every detail rendered, from the twist in her hair to the folds of the scarf beneath her fitted gray wool suit). At other times, the connections may be more oblique, but there are clear resonances with films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), and The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999) — be they visual echoes, or hauntingly similar spaces or tones.

Yet the tie to Vertigo strikes me as the most revealing. In both films we follow our protagonist/investigator down a rabbit hole in which reality is revealed to be anything but transparent. We, alongside our on-screen avatar, are seduced by an image of love that unravels into pure fabrication. But the emotional impact of that memory is not diminished by this revelation; rather, it is the pillars of the “real” world that begin to crumble and quake. The ground shifts, and we are left in a maddening and extremely disconcerting realm between knowledge and feeling.

The question of music remains key here. Vertigo, too, is driven by a score that refuses to play a subservient role to the image. Neither Bernard Hermann’s score for Vertigo nor Zimmer’s for Inception, for me, tip into the realm of the “musical moment”—those instances where song wells up to dictate the rhythm and flow of images, no longer moored to narrative reality. The music in both Vertigo and Inception never assumes complete, embodied control in this sense, but seems to provide simultaneous commentary on both emotional and symbolic registers. The themes circle round in cascading circles of notes or in overlapping waves of orchestration. We are lured in, but are left, in the end, purposefully adrift rather than immersed.

Multilayered allusions are further entrenched within Inception’s soundtrack. Zimmer, in fact, constructed his score on a heavily manipulated fragment from “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” Extracting an isolated beat from the song, Zimmer’s team enhanced it with “isolated brass stabs,” and built the rhythms of the score around “subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track” (Hans Zimmer, quoted in Dave Itzkoff, “A Film’s Mysteries Include a Tease to Édith Piaf,” New York Times, 1 August 2010). Without prior knowledge of this borrowing, the connection between song and score, for most listeners, would not be fully apparent. Given the particularly forward nature of Zimmer’s composition, however, the resonance lodges (or is pushed) into our subconscious. It is a carefully orchestrated technical feat, but one that builds on the very real, lingering power Piaf’s song retains (both within and beyond the narrative world of the film).

For all the discussion of Inception, technologically, as the ultimate immersive experience, I find it interesting that Nolan’s script and visualization and Zimmer’s score seem adept at refusing us the satisfaction of full and easy submersion. While I would stop short of making comparisons between Nolan and filmmakers such as Hitchcock and Kubrick, Inception appears to make explicit reference to films like Vertigo and 2001 that make brilliant use of spectacle laden labyrinths to reveal a destabilizing image of our lived reality. As in those earlier films, we are constantly slipping in and out of self-conscious awareness in Inception, tipping between the layers of dreams the onscreen architects weave, and momentary realizations of our own status as movie viewers. The numerous intertextual references, the relentless push of the score, and the familiarity of the rich ensemble cast in Inception guarantee a degree of self-consciousness. I’d see this less as a shortcoming than as a deeply engaging exploration of the pleasures and pitfalls of collective dreaming.

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Amy Herzog can be reached at amy.herzog@qc.cuny.edu.

Learn more about her book, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film.

Photos used in this post can be found at The Movie Mash and Screen Crave.

Then and Now: Art deco treasures in the Twin Cities

2010-08-02T09:26:00.019-05:00

"Then and Now" is a monthlong series by Alan K. Lathrop, curator of the Manuscripts Division at the University of Minnesota Libraries from 1970 to 2008. He is author of Minnesota Architects and Churches of Minnesota.

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The Twin Cities are a rich lode of art deco architecture, compared with other American cities of equal size. Despite having many art deco structures disappear in decades past, a number of examples (including some very good ones) still remain scattered about, mostly in downtown areas.

Art deco began as a post-World War I rejuvenation of art nouveau. This was expressed in the exuberant and highly exaggerated vegetable and animal forms that became — and still are — popular in architectural ornament, pottery, jewelry, and stained glass in Europe around 1900. Art nouveau was rooted in the Vienna Secessionist and similar movements of the late 1890s. The movement lasted under a decade before being absorbed into other art and architectural expressions. In the U.S., one of these was the Prairie School, popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Henri Sullivan, and their followers, including William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie in the Twin Cities.

The Prairie School, or “progressive” architecture (a term preferred by its adherents), faded in the late 1910s and was replaced by an olio of styles that, by and large, harkened back to previous centuries. Art deco emerged in a show held in Paris in 1925, “art decoratif,” which featured forms that seemed to be minimally simplified modifications of those of art nouveau. But art deco in the U.S. quickly evolved into forms that were sleek and smooth and shiny, as architects created “streamlined” shapes incorporating sweeping curves to evoke the new age’s love of speed and that utilized new kinds of building materials, such as pressed nickel-based “monel metal,” plastic, and glass block.

Early on, the Twin Cities saw the construction of several outstanding examples of art deco and streamline moderne, into which the former morphed late in the 1930s. The area was fortunate in having a handful of architects who quickly adopted the style: Harry Firminger, Holabird & Root, Liebenberg and Kaplan, Myrtus Wright, and Werner Wittkamp. These men brought art deco to Minneapolis and St. Paul around 1930, and fortunately, a number of their works are extant today.

The best examples are:

• The St. Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Court House (1932; pictured above), designed by Holabird & Root of Chicago with Ellerbe & Company of St. Paul. Its cool, glossy lobby features the statue God of Peace (at left), carved in onyx by Carl Milles in 1936.
• The Dain Tower (also known as the Rand Tower) in Minneapolis (1929-30), by Holabird & Root. Its lobby is on a much smaller scale than the St. Paul City Hall, but is a masterpiece of quiet dignity and sleekness in marble, frosted glass, and monel metal. The sculpture Wings, by Oskar Hansen, stands in the lobby.
• The bar at the Commodore Hotel, St. Paul (1930). It's no stretch of the imagination to picture Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald hanging out there in its heyday. The compact but comfortable bar was designed in glass and mirrors by Werner Wittkamp, a former Hollywood set designer who drifted into architecture.
• The Hollywood, Varsity, Uptown, and Grandview theaters (1933-39), the former three of which were designed by Jack Liebenberg, a master at art deco and streamline moderne eye candy, to lift people dragged down by the cares of the Depression into the escapist world of the movies for a couple hours. The Grandview (1933, 1937), in St. Paul, was created by an unknown named Myrtus Wright. Both of the existing art deco theaters in the city, the other being the Highland, were designed by Wright.
• The Forum Cafeteria (1930), by George Franklin who worked for the headquarters of the Forum Cafeteria chain out of Kansas City, assisted by local architects Magney and Tusler. Its interior is a masterpiece of black glass, mirrors, and some monel metal light fixtures which, despite being dismantled and reinstalled in City Center, is basically intact.

To walk into any of these marvelous spaces is to go back to a time that appreciated quiet exuberance and escape from the cares and worries of the everyday. To enter them is to enjoy them.

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Alan K. Lathrop is author of Minnesota Architects (2010) and Churches of Minnesota (2003).

Also in the series:
-The Guthrie Theater(s).
-The Metropolitan Building.
-The Hollywood, Uptown, and Varsity theaters in Minneapolis.

Want to know the architectural history of your favorite Minnesota building? E-mail suggestions about content you would like to see here to sattl014@umn.edu.

Images in this post are from Creative Commons.

Three years after the I-35W bridge collapse, and still three questions not (yet) answered.

2010-07-28T08:21:00.001-05:00

Today's post is by Patrick Nunnally, coordinator of the River Life Program in the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. Nunnally is editor of the forthcoming collection The City, the River, the Bridge: Before and after the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse, which will be available in January 2011.

Three years ago this Sunday, the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 and seriously injuring more than 100. After 13 hectic months, a new bridge was opened on the alignment of the older one, a new bridge that is bigger, safer, and has direct connections to the university’s Civil Engineering Department for purposes of research and monitoring.

Most of us have put the new bridge out of our minds, perhaps whipping over it as thoughtlessly as we did the old one. Of course, families of victims still face the aftermath of that horrible evening every day, but the new bridge is simply background to our lives for most of us, an unquestioned part of our urban environment.

But I would like to argue that there remain three (at least three) questions that should not be out of our minds, that should be addressed by policymakers, scholars, community leaders, and neighbors who are concerned with the future of our city. My reflections are based on work colleagues and I did for a symposium in October 2008, “The City, the River, the Bridge,” which is the basis for a book forthcoming from U of M Press.

My questions, in no particular order of importance and scale:

Whatever happened to the plans to memorialize the victims, and to create suitable public space underneath the new bridge for bikes and pedestrian trails and for river overlooks?

There was a very schematic sketch of a memorial, which was to have been constructed in Gold Medal Park, near the Guthrie, but those plans dropped from sight almost immediately. Nothing further has been said about bike and pedestrian planning, or public space either, to my knowledge. I’ll grant that the economy has been in the tank for two years, but it looks like instead of the promised elegant public space we simply got another bridge.

What is the state of our public infrastructure, which includes hundreds of miles of water pipes, gas and electric mains, and thousands of miles of streets, in addition to bridges?

Immediately after the collapse, state departments of transportation all over the country rushed to examine bridges similar in structure to the one that fell. A lot of people paid attention to questions about bridges for a little while. I’ve not seen any systematic study of water pipes or other infrastructure components at the local, state, or national scale. Well, I guess we can hope it all works, eh?

When (or will?) we stop building our cities and lives around automobile transportation?

It seems the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico brings this question home more forcefully than ever, but there does not seem to be serious change in the offing. After years of unnecessary political delays, it looks like there will be another leg of the regional light rail system coming online soon, but the vast majority of us still buzz around in cars, racking up hundreds of miles a week and pouring dollars into our gas tank.

All of which leaves me wondering:
Did we really, ultimately, learn anything at all?

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Read more about Nunnally's edited collection The City, the River, the Bridge.

Image on this post is from Wikimedia Commons.

Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state of Minnesota on MPR

2010-07-27T13:51:00.008-05:00

Historian Mary Lethert Wingerd, associate professor of history at St. Cloud State University and author of North Country: The Making of Minnesota, appeared on MPR's Midday today to talk about the complex origins of Minnesota and the relationships between indigenous peoples and European settlers. Wingerd answers questions and helps unlock truths about Minnesota's formative years, truths that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange.

Then and Now: The Guthrie — A Tale of Two Theaters

2010-07-26T09:24:00.020-05:00

"Then and Now" is a monthlong series by Alan K. Lathrop, curator of the Manuscripts Division at the University of Minnesota Libraries from 1970 to 2008. He is author of Minnesota Architects and Churches of Minnesota.

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Sir Tyrone Guthrie brought Broadway-caliber theater to the Twin Cities, and for that a host of theater lovers, past and present, are forever in his debt. He spent years searching for a suitable location for his repertory theater and selected Minneapolis in 1960.

A site was found adjacent to the Walker Art Center, on Vineland Place, across the street from Parade Stadium. (Parade Stadium, and the Parade Ground before it, was the former site of the first Minneapolis Armory. The land under it was marshy and soon after the Armory was finished in 1888, it began sinking, causing so many structural weaknesses that the building finally had to be abandoned in 1929. A new Armory was constructed on South Sixth Street in 1935 on firmer ground. It still stands today.) The Walker had built a model house on the site (model homes were popular in the 1950s), then demolished it. Noted local architect Ralph Rapson, head of architecture at the University of Minnesota for many years, was chosen as architect of the theater. He produced a classy, graceful, intimate structure that opened in 1963.

Rapson’s design proved workable and attracted audiences. Its biggest failure was a screen punctuated with random openings through which the theater behind it peeked out seductively at the world. Rapson and Sir Tyrone clashed on several issues concerning the design, the climax coming over a disagreement about the color of the fabric on the seats. Rapson wanted multiple colors that would add warmth and variety to the matte black of the theater interior; Sir Tyrone argued for one color. When he made a trip back to Ireland, Rapson ordered multi-colored fabrics and the seats were installed by the time Sir Tyrone returned. He is reported to have blown his top and fumed for days afterwards. In retrospect, Rapson’s choice was absolutely correct. However, for the rest of his life, he would find a way to work a drawing he made of Sir Tyrone with Devil’s horns protruding from the sides of his head into slide presentations of the Guthrie Theater.

The new theater, designed by Jean Nouvel of France, has had both high praise and sharp criticism heaped on it by admirers and detractors. Admittedly, it was built to be iconic, and the building’s huge scale is more in keeping with the historic industrial landscape of the riverfront. The dark skin evokes the night when playhouses come to life, its interior subtly lit through yellow glass windows, as if it were illuminated by candle light. It presents mainly a blank wall to the outside world, punctuated with a few windows, as if it wants to keep its activities secret and away from the general public. The large walls are quietly illustrated by images of past productions and playwrights, and the building and its nearby parking ramp (housing the scene shop) are surmounted by two light towers that advertise current plays, all in an effort to break the monotony of the big blue block.

Present-day theater architecture is going the other way. The Lincoln Center, for example, has recently remodeled and replaced its solid walls with glass in an attempt to give the sense of activities invitingly flowing from outside to inside. Only in the Guthrie’s street-level bar and restaurant area does one feel this kind of transition. Interior lobby spaces are unnecessarily dim and gloomy even though lighting has been upgraded, and traffic flow continues to be confusing. “Postcard view” yellow glass windows offer intriguing peeks at the Falls of St. Anthony, an intriguing idea that (intentionally or unintentionally) serves to isolate the viewer from the scene, leaving it remote and unattainable as if one were watching a play in which participation is impossible. Seat colors in the theaters are monochrome. A parking ramp across the street is connected to the theater by a skyway, but it is not a public skyway; it serves to shuttle sets from the design shop to the shallow backstage areas.

As an icon, the building works, but the overall feeling is one of oppressive heaviness. The old Guthrie always felt light, airy, comfortable, and inviting. Unfortunately, the new one does not convey those sensations, although a deeper concern is whether the new building will stand the test of time. It might need to undergo major alterations and adaptations, as did the old one, to make it continue to be attractive and functional. Time will tell.

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Alan K. Lathrop is author of Minnesota Architects (2010) and Churches of Minnesota (2003).

Also in the series:
-The Metropolitan Building.
-The Hollywood, Uptown, and Varsity theaters in Minneapolis.

Want to know the architectural history of your favorite Minnesota building? E-mail suggestions about content you would like to see here to sattl014@umn.edu.

Photos on this post are from Wikimedia Commons.

In The New Yorker — this image look familiar?

2010-07-23T11:08:00.019-05:00

The New Yorker's Frames from Fiction blog this week features a brief slideshow on the publication's research of recent work in photography in relation to Karen Russell's fiction story, "The Dredgeman's Revelation."

Of the 8 photos featured and discussed, one—the second—is the photo that appears on the cover of What Is Posthumanism? by Cary Wolfe, the eighth installment in UMP's Posthumanities Series. See what photographer Allison Hunter had to say here.

Same as it Ever Was: Rebranding the YMCA

2010-07-22T12:26:00.022-05:00

Today's post is by architectural historian Paula Lupkin, who is in the American Culture Studies department at Washington University in St. Louis. Lupkin is author of Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture.

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It isn’t often that conservative Christians and the Village People find themselves in agreement, but marketing strategies can make for strange bedfellows. Both groups have objected to the YMCA of the USA’s recent announcement that it was dropping the M, C, and A from its corporate name. Henceforth the social service organization, best known for its gym and swim facilities, will be called “The Y.” This shortened name, as well as an extensive rebranding campaign complete with new logo, typeface, and a bright colorful palette, is meant to help the public re-imagine the organization’s identity as a modern, dynamic institution for the 21st century.

For most people this change is no big deal; after all, people have been calling it "The Y" for decades. Others feel that quite a lot is at stake. Left behind is the Y’s historical commitment to the C, which displeases religious groups like the American Family Association. For the Village People the suppression of the M is a repudiation of the gay culture that once flourished in YMCA buildings. Both groups are suffering from nostalgia. Their wildly divergent perceptions are longings for earlier iterations of an organization that is moving, as it has always done, inexorably towards the future. Ever since its founding more than one hundred and fifty years ago the YMCA has nimbly retained its social relevance by adapting its mission and methods to contemporary conditions. This re-naming is just the latest in a long line of market-driven strategies the organization has employed over the years.

"The Y" was first founded in the United States in 1854 to meet the needs of a new and growing population: young, single, urban white-collar workers. The mass migration of young men from countryside search of jobs in growing industrial cities resulted in social dislocation and active concern among evangelical Christians like John Wanamaker and J.P. Morgan. Young men, adrift from the moral oversight of their families and footloose in the city’s saloons and theaters, were in need of guidance and education. The YMCA stepped in to help produce an ethical and efficient workforce for modern America. At first this was accomplished through traditional evangelical methods, including bible classes, tract distribution, and attempts to pass laws against the sale of pornographic literature. It quickly became apparent that these means were not winning over enough young men and the group was quick to try new approaches. To remain competitive in the age of vaudeville, movie theatres, burlesque, and other new urban attractions they were forced to change their methods of persuasion.

Central to this adaptation was the development of the YMCA building as a “manhood factory” that incorporated popular activities like sports and vocational training. Up through the Depression the Y constantly made adjustments in their equipment and programming to maintain a competitive advantage with commercial mass culture for the souls of young men, adding swimming pools, basketball courts, dormitory rooms, and even (gasp!) billiards tables. The organization used the latest advertising techniques, including billboards and electric signs, to attract members, and pioneered the short-term fund-raising campaign (best known through NPR’s regular on-air appeals) to raise money for new buildings. Seeking greater societal influence, the Y also evolved in the nineteenth century to serve a much broader constituency. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s it opened special Y buildings for railroad men, university students, factory workers, military men, African-Americans, and young boys. As time went on they admitted non-evangelicals (even Catholics and Jews) to membership and focused less on saving souls and more on building character and physical strength.

The loss of its traditional religious identity, which dates back even into the nineteenth century, was disturbing to many old-time Y leaders, who fought to keep the C in the YMCA. It was, unfortunately, a losing battle. The constant process of negotiation between the traditional Protestant ethic they hoped to uphold and the consumer culture that fueled growth and modernization always resulted in compromises that moved the organization farther from its religious roots and toward a more ecumenical role as a provider of social services and facilities.

The mission of the organization and its role in American life continued to evolve throughout the twentieth century, often in ways unanticipated by its leaders. During the First World War it provided recreational facilities and canteen service to soldiers of all faiths in the European theater. This reinforced the Y’s increasingly ecumenical role into the interwar years. At about this time gay men grew increasingly attracted to the Y precisely because it was an all-male environment and sheltered a homosocial lifestyle. Leaders attempted to leave this unsavory identity behind in the 1950s by moving away from its traditional mission to single urban men to serve families, including women and children, in new suburban community centers. Since then the focus has been a more general, secular mission of building strong bodies and minds and serving communities, both urban and suburban.

The result of the Y’s extended process of secularization and constant investment in new facilities is its contemporary identity as a building, not an organization. Research suggests that most people only think of the YMCA as a gym, even though many of its branches had extensive programs in daycare for working parents, education for new citizens, and public health programs. Thus the need for a new name and a new logo—to highlight dedication to its newly reformulated goals: “commitment to nurturing the potential of kids, promoting healthy living, and fostering a sense of social responsibility.”

In a pragmatic and inclusive move, Y leaders do acknowledge the importance of heritage in their new identity. The redesigned logo incorporates the organization’s original triangular symbol of mind, body, and spirit into its “Y." New marketing materials include a highly sanitized reference to the Village People’s song and dance. Perhaps the best-known thing about the YMCA, it is regularly performed at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and sporting events even thirty years after its release. The sly double entendre of the song is probably lost on most of those who do the dance today, including the fresh faced, athletically dressed young men and women who pose in the shape of the four letters on the Y’s new website.

The decision to incorporate the popular dance into its new identity simultaneously acknowledges the song’s potency and suppresses the original meaning in favor of a perky and wholesome image. I think of it as a canny and bold role reversal for the organization. No longer is it passively responding to popular culture to remain relevant. Instead, it is coopting the phenomenon for its own purposes. The Y’s use of contemporary advertising strategies like rebranding and the soi-disant hipness of a shortened name (like KFC) is not a repudiation of its heritage. It is in keeping with the Y’s history as an institution that evolves, changes, and embraces new ways to accomplish its goals.

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Paula Lupkin is author of Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture. She can be reached at plupkin@artsci.wustl.edu.

MN Senate Recount (aka Indecision 2008?): Controversy over felon votes shows GOP to be fast and loose with facts.

2010-07-16T08:46:00.022-05:00

Today's post is by Jay Weiner, who reported on the 2008 U.S. Senate recount and election contest for MinnPost.com. For his coverage, he received Minnesota’s prestigious Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award.

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I have watched from afar — and with lots of bemusement — the recent dustup over the alleged number of supposed felons who maybe registered and perhaps voted on November 4, 2008, in the U.S. Senate race.

After all, my life has been immersed in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman recount for nearly two years, and my book, This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount, is completed and going to be released in a few months. Had I the chance, I would have made this current controversy a tiny footnote in my conclusions. One point I make in the book is that various panels of judges and even former Sen. Coleman’s lawyer in court said there was no widespread fraud in the election.

Still, Minnesota Majority, a very conservative “watchdog” group, released a report on June 28 that claims a lot of things. But when you get to the bottom line, the group seems to be saying that according to its research, 341 felons in Hennepin and Ramsey counties who should have been ineligible to vote actually cast votes in the Franken-Coleman election.

The report, flawed in the opinion of most legal analysts, got legs and wings and Internet echo chamber reverberations from — who else? — Fox News earlier this week, and then other news organizations chased it, and right-wing blogs jumped on it, and the Minnesota Republican Party called for a statewide investigation and Coleman called Franken “an accidental senator” and Gov. Tim Pawlenty said there was “credible evidence” that the alleged felons who maybe voted possibly could have flipped the election’s final result. Breathless.

Franken, if you remember, won by 312 votes.

Let’s drill down a little bit. First, let’s look at the reporting. Fox News, which has its agenda, of course, topped its online story with this screaming headline: Felons Voting Illegally May Have Put Franken Over the Top in Minnesota, Study Finds. Fox News also quoted Ramsey County prosecutor Phil Carruthers as saying that as his office looks into the matter, “There is a good chance we may match or even exceed their numbers."

But days later, Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Kevin Diaz — a former colleague whom I tend to trust more than Faux News — quoted Carruthers as saying of the Minnesota Majority investigation: "Overwhelmingly, their statistics were not accurate.” Hmmm. Something changed.

Now, let’s take one key stat that Minnesota Majority focuses on, that 341 alleged felons from heavily Democratic Hennepin and Ramsey counties voted. For the moment, take that at face value.

That would mean, based on voter turnout numbers, about 70% of them (240) would be from Hennepin and 30% (101) would be from Ramsey. Taking into account the percentages for Franken, Coleman and others in each of those counties, Franken would net 51 votes.

Remember, he won by 312. Let’s take away those 51 in this silly game. That still isn’t enough to switch the result.

The report has been the stuff of high-level discussion at The Election Law Blog run by respected Prof. Rick Hasen at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. There, Prof. Michael P. McDonald of George Mason University shoots down the Minnesota Majority report when answering Hasen’s opening question: “Did enough illegal felons vote in Minnesota to tip the balance to Al Franken?”

A few other things: What makes anyone think felons would only vote for Franken? Indeed, it was Franken’s legal team during the recount’s election contest trial that raised the prospect that felons voted in the election; Franken’s lawyers found one such voter in a northern Minnesota county who voted for Coleman. Dare I ask, if Franken opened the door on such an avenue, why didn’t Coleman’s lawyers pursue this felon-voting issue then? They had their chance. And why does the Minnesota Majority report focus on the core city counties?

When you read my book, you will see a handful of flubs made by both sides in the recount legal battle.

A couple of other things gnaw at me in this story.

1. First is the implication that if voter ID cards were used on Election Day, felons wouldn’t be able to vote. This is a longstanding Republican issue to limit voting among the disenfranchised. Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer has used this controversy to call for picture IDs for voters. But guess what? Convicted felons have driver licenses. They have photo IDs. Voter photo IDs wouldn’t halt felons from voting. This Minnesota Majority report is being used for other political reasons.

2. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, just instructive, but I’d like to comment on the comments of Sen. Coleman and Gov. Pawlenty. As we know, Coleman won the 2002 Senate election 11 days after incumbent Sen. Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash. Polls showed Wellstone was going to win that election. For Coleman to call Franken “an accidental senator” is tragically ironic, for there are some who believe Coleman was the original accidental senator.

As for the governor, he has spoken three times about the recount and he’s been a bit fast and loose with his facts. First, in the early days of the recount, he spread — on Fox News — the completely untrue story about Minneapolis ballots that were supposedly being driven around in the alleged trunk of an unknown and non-existent elections official. He spoke of this days after it was reported that the story was a fable.

Later, in a call with reporters, he overstated by thousands of percentage points the increase of absentee voters in 2008, trying to say that Franken won the election because of that.

In fact, Franken won the recount by 49 votes BEFORE absentee ballots were counted.

Now, there are his comments — on Fox News — about the Minnesota Majority report and how it’s “quite possible” felon voting tipped the election. The facts aren’t there.

3. The central fact that real felons whose voting rights were legally taken away and not restored might have voted in 2008 — that is serious. That matter should be examined closely by state and county officials. There’s no argument there.

4. If there is any doubt that the 2014 Franken re-election campaign against anyone — Pawlenty? — is going to be nasty and heated and ugly, this latest scuffle confirms it. Sen. Franken will forever be a target for the Republicans, and if it is close again, be certain that Republican recount strategies and legal tactics will be different from 2008-09.

You can read how they did this time 'round in This Is Not Florida. But be assured the Coleman-Franken recount and legal fight — a huge defeat for the Republicans — will be a rallying cry for the GOP in any future recount tussle.

Then and Now: The Metropolitan Building

2010-07-19T09:22:00.021-05:00

Today we begin a monthlong series about popular Minnesota landmarks, their architectural histories, little-known details, and their present situations. Each anecdote will be published on Mondays throughout the next few weeks. This series is written by Alan K. Lathrop, curator of the Manuscripts Division at the University of Minnesota Libraries from 1970 to 2008. You can find more details about the buildings and architects discussed in brief here in Lathrop's book Minnesota Architects.

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At one time, the tallest office building between Chicago and the West Coast stood in downtown Minneapolis. It was the Guaranty Loan Building, erected at the corner of 2nd Avenue South and 3rd Street South in 1889-90 by the local entrepreneur, Louis Menage. More commonly known as the Metropolitan Building (renamed after Menage's financial shenanigans forced the bankruptcy of his firm and sale of the building to Metropolitan Life Insurance Company), the magnificent structure was designed by Edward Townsend Mix of Milwaukee. Mix had previously designed the grand William Washburn residence (1883) near the present location of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, as well as Temple Court (1886) and the Globe Printing Company buildings in Minneapolis and St. Paul (1888 and 1887 respectively).

All of Mix's office buildings featured a central light court, but that of the Metropolitan Building was the most spectacular. Daylight was brought in through a skylight over an atrium which extended virtually the entire 10-story height of the building. To further enhance the effect, the floors ringing the atrium were made of thick translucent glass to both convey and diffuse light into otherwise dimly lit hallways.

Today, not one of Mix's Twin Cities structures survives (although his Dodge County Courthouse in Mantorville [1871], the oldest of his Minnesota Commissions, is still standing). The Metropolitan Building was, sadly, demolished in 1962, the victim of the urban renewal zeal that gripped the Twin Cities and many other areas. Ever since its demise, historic preservationists, architectural historians, and members of the general public have mourned its loss. Its replacement, the Galaxy Building (and now the Towle Building), is a far cry from the charm and stateliness of the Metropolitan, which is considered by some to be the city's first skyscraper.

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Alan K. Lathrop is author of Minnesota Architects (2010) and Churches of Minnesota (2003). Read more of his blog posts here.

Want to know the architectural history of your favorite Minnesota building? E-mail suggestions about content you would like to see here to sattl014@umn.edu.

Meet the architect behind several Midwestern landmarks -- including the Hollywood, Uptown, and Varsity Theaters in Minneapolis.

2010-06-30T09:08:00.027-05:00

Today's post is by Alan K. Lathrop, who was curator of the Manuscripts Division at the University of Minnesota Libraries from 1970 to 2008. He is the author of Churches of Minnesota (2003) and more recently, Minnesota Architects (May 2010).

The Fourth of July will mark the 117th anniversary of the birth of Jacob “Jack” Liebenberg, one of Minnesota’s most prolific and successful architects. Jack was born in Milwaukee on July 4th, 1893, and came to Minneapolis as a teenager to attend the University of Minnesota. He graduated in the first class from the School of Architecture in 1917 and went on to serve for two years in the fledgling Army Air Corps during World War I.

Following his military service, he established a successful partnership with Robert Martin and his brother-in-law, Seeman Kaplan, in 1919. Martin left the firm after a few years and Liebenberg and Kaplan went on to generate more than 4,000 commissions. Chief among them are a number of movie theaters in Minneapolis and the Upper Midwest designed in the Art Deco or Streamlined Moderne style, for which they are best known today. These include such masterpieces as the Hollywood (pictured above in Minneapolis, 1935, and is currently eligible for a place on the National Register of Historic Places), Uptown, and Varsity Theaters in Minneapolis, the NorShor in Duluth, the Fargo in the city of the same name, and the Maco in Virginia. All were built between 1935 and 1940.

Jack was a special friend of mine for the better part of a decade. I first became acquainted with him in 1975 when I worked with him to rescue his office records literally from the bulldozer. The story goes like this: Late one afternoon in 1975, I was contacted by Jack, whom I had known only by reputation, who was desperately worried because a storage shed and his office building on South 13th Street were about to be demolished to make way for the Loring Greenway (a bike and pedestrian parklike mall that would extend from Nicollet to Harmon Place, linking several then-planned apartment and condominium projects). A large number of Jack's building plans were stored in the shed. He said the wrecking crew was on the site and that they were starting to tear down the shed and wondered if I could help get the records out of it before it was destroyed.

I raced down to meet with Jack and with the wreckers, who argued that they could not delay. “Every hour of delay costs us money” was the argument. I told them I had powerful friends in City Hall (something of an exaggeration) and “heads would roll” if the contents of the shed were lost. The wreckers stopped work for the day but said they would be back in the morning. Meantime, I phoned Lee Munnich, alderman of the ward in which Jack’s office was located, and spoke to his aide about the situation. The aide agreed to help out and I went home, hoping the collection would be there long enough to get a truck from the University of Minnesota Libraries to haul the records away.

Next morning, I called the libraries’ shipping department and arranged for a truck to arrive at the site at noon. I raced back to the site where I learned from the foreman that he would delay the demolition until we could empty the shed. At 12:30, the truck and two student workers arrived and we worked furiously to get the records out of the shed, a portion of which had already been carved away by the bulldozer leaving the roof hanging precariously over the entrance. Nowadays, we would not have been allowed inside the building (at least not without hard hats). An hour later, we had it emptied. The foreman, who had obviously been given a stern message from Munnich’s office, now was very cooperative and asked repeatedly if we had everything we wanted out of the shed. When I assured him that we did, we left. As I drove off the lot, I looked back and saw the bulldozer, which had been idling next to the building, its driver anxious to get to work, tear into the one-story concrete block structure and level it in one pass in a cloud of dust.

Jack’s collection was very important because it contained documentation for all of the movie theaters as well as many of his other building commissions and became a significant part of the Northwest Architectural Archives. About five years later, when Jack retired, he offered me another large collection of drawings that he had moved to his home in Edina, including photographs and specifications for many of his works which were not included in the collection I rescued from the shed.

Jack was a good friend as well as an invaluable source of information about other architects of his generation and was always cheerfully willing to answer my questions whenever I called on him. He would always answer the phone in a quiet, unassuming voice: “Liebenberg’s office,” and would unfailingly thank me for performing a “wonderful service” for architects by preserving their records.

About 1979, I conducted an oral history with Jack and his former business associate, Al Wilwerding, which is preserved in the Archives. It contains many stories, some humorous, others poignant, of colleagues and clients he knew throughout his long career. By then, Jack was working alone in a small office across the street from Loring Park, still coming in every day to draw plans at his large drafting board for a steady stream of clients. He retired in 1980 and died in 1985 at the age of 92. Yet today, 25 years later, I miss him for his friendliness, knowledge of the “old days,” and unwavering courtesy. He was always a gentleman.

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Find more details about Jack Liebenberg's life and career in Minnesota Architects.

Twin Cities Pride: Then and Now

2010-06-25T13:57:00.019-05:00

In honor of this weekend's annual Twin Cities Pride festivities, we wanted to share an excerpt from the forthcoming book Queer Twin Cities, compiled by the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project. In this excerpt from the chapter “Gay Was Good: Progress, Homonormativity, and Oral History,” Kevin P. Murphy analyzes testimony from Twin Cities interviewees about changes in Pride events and local LGBT activism over the past four decades.

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Many respondents, while recognizing positive changes associated with the gay and lesbian movement of the 1970s, resisted a characterization of the preceding period as “repressive.” For example, like many of those we interviewed, Lynda, a sixty-year-old white lesbian, looked back with nostalgic longing to the 1950s and 1960s: “Well, I think it’s unfair to just say that was a repressive time. I mean, I lived in that time and I know it was a warm and sweet and tender time.” Others spoke of some perceived losses that attended the “post-Stonewall” period. Tom, a fifty-nine-year-old white gay man, referred to some of the costs of gay visibility and the negative consequences of a politics of “coming out”:

When you’re known and you’re out you can also be an easier target for people’s homophobia, whereas in years gone by when people were closeted, maybe they could sneak through without getting the homophobic reaction. I mean, look at all the born-again Christians that are much more hostile to homosexuals than maybe they ever would have been in the past. Don’t you think that’s a part of what we’re dealing with now?

Judy, a fifty-nine-year-old lesbian, spoke about positive changes that emerged from identifying as lesbian and as a feminist, but also ruminated with some ambivalence about the consequences of the gay liberation and women’s movements. When asked about the challenges for younger generations, she responded:

Well, I think there are many, many more choices and life is consequently much more difficult because there are more choices to make. I followed a path that I thought I didn’t have any choice about and so I didn’t agonize about whether to have kids or not. They happened to me. And then I took care of them. And I loved them. So it’s a blessing and a curse to be nineteen now. More choices and more choices to make.

This ambivalence about the past was even more pronounced in testimony that dealt with changes in queer politics and culture over the past several decades. Some interviewees spoke of a decline in community feeling and politics. Judy, for example, answered a question about changes in the “lesbian community” over the previous twenty-five years as follows:

I don’t know that there really is much of a community anymore. I think people are scattered and integrated more. The whole idea, we were very downwardly mobile at the time. It was not okay to be middle-class or above. You were to be working-class. You were not to be making a lot of money. That has changed dramatically. People are allowed to make a lot of money. It’s valued. People are allowed to dress in a variety of costumes. People are allowed to be feminine or not. People are allowed to change genders, for that matter. People are well regarded if they raise children, if they stay together. This is all different. People are home. And family is important where before it was dancing and drinking and politics. Political action. There isn’t a lot of political action now.

For Judy, the stakes of losing a coherent community politics are high: “It’ll be too bad if we let our community splinter. You know, if it happens that our freedom start[s] being taken from us, we’re not going to have a way to fight that. And it could happen. It’s happened before.”

...

For her part, Claire identifies commercialization and corporatism as the engines of declension, as evinced by her comparison of early Twin Cities “Pride” events with those that took place decades earlier:

Of course, now it’s [Twin Cities Pride] just a mega-event. I think much too orchestrated, and much too commercial, in my opinion. In the early ’70s, there still was a sense of this kind of special, secret community, and there was something about the secrecy that was actually kind of appealing because it was—it was like a family, in kind of a way. And the other interesting thing is that you were thrown in with people of different socioeconomic groups than yourself, people with different interests than yourself, different professional areas, different races—in a way that you might not have been elsewhere.

Claire is not alone in recalling the excitement of secrecy and of claiming an outsider status. In a 2004 newspaper interview about early Pride events, for example, gay activist Gregg White recalled, “Back then, being out was scandalous and exciting, and walking into a gay club was almost revolutionary.”[i]

[i] Dylan Hicks, “Pride: How the Twin Cities Pride Fest Helped Turn Minneapolis into the San Francisco of the Wheat Belt,” City Pages, June 23, 2004.

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Queer Twin Cities is forthcoming this fall from University of Minnesota Press.

Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America

2009-09-30T09:40:00.001-05:00

Karin Aguilar-San Juan is associate professor of American studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.

With a comparative and race-cognizant approach, Karin Aguilar-San Juan explores how Vietnamese refugees and immigrants retain their identities in the U.S. in her new book, Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. She agreed to answer a few questions with regard to her book's content, its cover image (which was taken by her), and thoughts about Vietnamese American communities today and their popular-culture depictions (The O.C., The Real Housewives of Orange County, etc.).

Q: What's the story behind your book's compelling cover photo? Where was it taken and who does it feature?

I took this photo in January 1999. It was during the time of the protests in Orange County’s Little Saigon, sparked by a storeowner and a poster image of Ho Chi Minh. Many days before, the storeowner had been escorted out of his Hi-Tek video shop by a SWAT team in full riot gear. He had made several incendiary statements about “freedom” (timed with Martin Luther King Day) that did not sit well with certain groups of Vietnamese -- particularly those who are ex-political prisoners. Many of those men spent up to 15 years in political detention in Viet Nam; for good reasons, their rage constantly simmers.

In addition to fully armed police from several surrounding cities, the Hi-Tek riots brought dozens or maybe hundreds of ordinary Vietnamese people to the area. They filled the parking lot with speeches, rallies, flags, banners, and exhibits. It seemed to be both angry and also festive, as any large gathering might become over time. There are two people visible in my photograph. I don’t know them. They were standing near a booth where people were making small paper versions of the South Vietnamese flag.

Q: What are the most striking differences between the Vietnamese American communities in Orange County and in Boston? You have lived in each community at some point; what were your reasons for choosing to study and compare these two locations?

I was born in Boston and I lived there for over a decade. Things there seem “normal” to me. My first impressions of Orange County were shock and morbid fascination. It was like stepping into a bad TV show. The sun always shines, the palm trees sway in the breeze, and every visible person is white and very rich. Every lawn looks like a golf course. It reminded me of the kids' book A Wrinkle in Time, in which suburbs are terrifying for reasons no one can explain.

Sociologically, it made perfect sense [for this book] compare these two places. They are so different. But Vietnamese Americans seem to like each place well enough to call each one “home.” There was a puzzle about place and community, and that was a good impulse to follow.

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