Sidewalk of the Week: North Sixth Avenue

What do you call a sidewalk that's not a sidewalk? Here's a sidewalk that seems at first to delight. It runs through canyons of ancient warehouses, forgotten gods lurking high overhead, the path leading around quiet corners and alleys and my feet reading the bricks in the street like a lost language.

I guess you call it the warehouse district. And unlike the "warehouse district," North Sixth Avenue is the real thing, filled with alleys and large imposing buildings, some warehouses still housing wares, like the big C. J. Duffey paper buildings that seems to still be somehow humming, and surrounding on all sides are the nicest of condominiums, chock full of architects and lawyers and all the pretty horses that struggle vainly to keep Minnesota labeled correctly on the maps. Filled with people in hiding, packing trucks and BMW's in equal proportion.

[The sidewalk rises and fractures, posing problems for the distracted.]

You walk along the sidewalks here and are immediately lost as they start to rise and fall like waves, jagged edges high over the street laying in wait for the proverbial truck, then disappearing, throwing the walker into the middle of unmarked streets. Sidewalk becomes street, street becomes sidewalk, and allatonce there is a truck coming at you and which way do you turn?

[Here the sidewalk takes a dip down, a split second San Francisco.]

North Sixth Avenue asks whether or not, sometimes, less is more. These streets have no yellow lines, no well-meaning paint pointing at when and where cars can turn. Here, place is a jumble. No curbs, no lamp posts, neither bench nor flower pot nor prettifying amenity. And yet, their silence and sunshadows and feeling of closure make walking almost holy. Here lie the last remnants of Minneapolis' history, the workers who filled railcars with grain and lumber and whatever else came through town . . . commodities of all stripes bound for farms across the horizons of prairie to the West.

[Where is the sidewalk? Do we walk on the side?
Or follow the shadows of lampposts, betwixt brick and ice?]

If this sidewalk had been anywhere else, it would have been paved over and improved into submission. If this sidewalk had any sense, it wouldn't bounce up and down like a bear on a trampoline. But it's here, on the other side of the tracks, beneath the overpass, the forgotten ground.

I love that you can still find places like this in the city, little sidewalk terrains, distinct sidewalk landscapes, alone and illegible. It's like going from earth to moon, and here I am on the sidewalk moon, walking aimlessly lost amid in a concrete funhouse, a brick kaleidoscope, a maze of warehouses where you don't know where you will next find your feet.

So, here's to you, North Sixth Avenue. May your long lost sidewalks lie forever in the shadow of the city, behind and beyond and beneath the gaze.

[The sun shines through an ageless scene, and for a moment it doesn't matter . . . sidewalk and street, past and present . . . it only matters that we're here, walking along the last bricks of Minneapolis.]