On a cool sunny Saturday morning we drove downtown to take advantage of the Doors Open festival, a program designed to make it easy to visit a variety of businesses and institutions free of charge, just for the hell of it. In previous years we’d joined tours of the Federal Reserve, Open Book, City Hall, the Ivy Hotel, the Lakeview Cemetery Chapel, and a low-slung building that was once home to a Ry Krisp factory. This year we studied the maps and came up with an even wider range of options.
We parked on the brief unmetered stretch of River Road
between Plymouth Avenue and the lock and dam—a two-hour limit. How much money
did we save? I don’t know. But matters of cost aside, the walk itself was delightful. This is an attractive and interesting part of town, though
it’s changed a lot since I worked in that neighborhood. In those days it was
home to the International Design Center, Moose and Sadie’s Coffeeshop, J.D.
Hoyt’s, Origami, a bicycle supply warehouse, a Caribou Coffee warehouse,
Rykodisc CD distributor, an Asian import shop called Indigo, a restaurant
supply warehouse, etc. The few people who lived in the vicinity were squatting
in genuine lofts accessed by freight elevators, perhaps illegally.
The warehouse I worked at was heated by coal, which was
delivered by rail and dropped down a wooden chute into a bin in the basement,
from which point it was fed into the furnace by a conveyor screw. That building
has long since been converted to expensive loft/apartments.
The owner of Indigo, a kindly man named John, told me before
they moved out that they’d been given a sweetheart ten-year lease back when the
neighbor was struggling. The lease was up, not to be renewed, and besides, as
John put it, “There’s no longer anywhere for customers to park down here!”
The day was bright, windy, and cool. We zigzagged through the Near Northside, intoxicated by the towering urban-ness of our surroundings, past the Yamasaki Building (soon to reopen as a luxury hotel, so they say) and a variety of other buildings, both flashy and non-descript.
It took us forty minutes to reach our first destination, the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Our tour guide, a realtor by trade, took us through the classy, old-fashioned rooms, up and down stairs, through the observation galleries of the squash courts, into and through the weight rooms, ballrooms, a tap room, and a “reading room.” with its overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, Persian carpets, and mahogany paneling.
“So, this is a reading room …” I asked him. “But I don’t see a single book.”
“It’s the same with my real estate clients,” he said. “I
used to examine their books, their CDs, and the contents of the refrigerator,
to get a better feel for who they are. Now, the only thing of interest is the
refrigerator.”
Our walk back to the car took us down Nicollet Mall, which
was far drearier than I’d expected. Most of the shops are gone. Pedestrian
traffic is almost nonexistent. Along the way we did have the good fortune to
come upon some public works employees who were showcasing the city’s sewer
system. We looked down a manhole to the pipes eighteen feet below. And one of
the men let me drive his mechanical exploratory mouse back and forth through a
foot-wide plexiglass tube.
A few blocks to the west we stopped briefly into a small digital advertising agency called Shinebox equipped with a bar and lounge on the first floor and eight or ten cubical work stations in the basement. We chatted briefly with a young woman from England.
Back at the car, we headed to Northeast, where we tossed around several ideas for lunch—Anchor Fish and Chops, Aki’s, Sample Room—before settling on Mayslack’s, a Polish dive bar that’s been around since 1956. I heard about it often back in my days on the loading dock, but had never been there. The waitress was friendly, the atmosphere authentic, the sandwiches huge.
Our next stop, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, is housed in a low-slung modern building on the river just north of Lowry. There’s a motor boat parked out back. The task here is to monitor the river for phosphorus, chlorine, and other chemicals, but they send most of the samples to a lab off-site. It seems the place is mostly used as an educational facility, and various exhibits were attended by cordial and well-informed high school kids.
From there it was on to the U of MN off-site book storage facility, located In an obscure corner of the Como neighborhood, a few blocks south of the Newgate car donation center. The doors are 12 feet high—the tallest in the university, so we were told. But they’re dwarfed by the shelving area itself, which is fitted with seemingly endless rows of shelving that are 32 feet tall.
The building is equipped with numerous eco-friendly features. I was not aware of any volcanic activity in the area and asked our tour guide about the geothermal heating system. She told me they collect rainwater in the summer and pipe it deep underground. In the winter they heat the place with the water, which is now much warmer than the surrounding air.
The building is designed to hold 3.7 million books. The storage
is based on nothing but the dimensions of the book; putting books of the same
height in the same box saves space. Each book is given a bar code. Also, each
box. Beyond that, it’s all just a matter of sliding the boxes in and using the
reference system to retrieve whichever book a patron requests.
Retrieving a book that’s 30 feet off the ground isn’t all
that easy, however.
Part of the fun of Doors Open is cooking up a route from one
site to the next. From the library mega-stacks we took an interesting route
down Como, past Van Cleve Park, then south across the 10th Street Bridge
to the KFAI radio studios at Cedar-Riverside.
I don’t listen to the radio much, but I thoroughly appreciate and admire the social commitment and musical range of this mostly volunteer broadcast endeavor. Inside the second-floor studio, equipped with offices and three or four broadcast rooms, we spoke at some length with program manager Miguel Vargas about the standards and methods of the station, the methods they use to store and organize new releases and antique collections. In the next room, a volunteer told us about a show he’s planning to produce about some local punk bands—high school kids mostly. “I’ll be taking classes this summer to get my license.” He looked to be at least 50 himself.
As we were leaving, we met up with another visitor, who said. “I love this place! Look at it. Paper-clips, compact discs, Scotch tape, and not a video screen in sight. It’s like the 70s!”
The next morning we set out for Northeast again. Our first stop was a custom tile manufacturer. Down the hall, his wife was hand-shaping beads and buttons for a class she was going to teach soon.
Our second stop was the Groveland Galley, up on the hill behind the Walker. Lots of nice landscapes and prints, but a little out of our range.
A short dash on the freeway took us to the Russian Museum, where we wandered an extensive show of Cold War American and Russian toys, posters, comic books, and other kitsch. The collectors themselves were present, and not hard to identify.
"Is that an official NASA spacesuit?" I asked one of them.
"How should I know?" he said. "I got it on eBay."
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