St. Paul had poetry running in the gutters. Its neighborhoods – Irvine Park, Crocus Hill, Mac-Groveland, Ramsey Hill, West Seventh – were marked by the illogic of the city’s fierce begetting as a French and Indian fur-trading river town originally named by a half-blind whiskey runner: Pig’s Eye. Leo the Lion loved that – we started as a bar. Numbered streets crossed each other fecklessly, as if the city planners has used a scribble rather than a grid as a template. This was nothing like the tidy squaring of numbered avenues and alphabetical street names that Scandinavian Minneapolis laid like a crosshatched veil over the flat features of its city. The St. Paul streetlights dissipated their flow rather than truly shed it on the crusted snowbanks. This was strangely beguiling – that light could be conscripted into the service of obscurity, a St. Paul trick.
[Saint Paul's Wheelock Parkway bike lanes under construction.]
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Within only a few weeks, a remarkable suite of fauna including echidnas, wallabies, possums and goannas had found and used the ledges. But most exciting of all were the numerous koalas captured on the monitoring cameras and tracked by various technologies. These otherwise arboreal marsupials, whose main proclivity is climbing trees or walking – quickly – to the next tree, had somehow discovered a way of avoiding the great risks of the traffic above by travelling below on an artificial ledge over water in a dark tunnel!
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Spiders in Vienna are evolving to build their webs near moth-attracting streetlights. In some cities, moths, in turn, are developing a resistance to the lure of light bulbs. Certain Puerto Rican city lizards are evolving feet that better grip urban surfaces like concrete. Some grass is adapting to the relentless regime of the lawn mower by acquiring a shorter stature.
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The concepts in use remind me of what the famous German sociologist Ulrich Beck has labeled “zombie concepts,” with reference to the social sciences. They are concepts that still are very much in use, but actually no longer fit the reality they intend to describe. As such the concepts are like the living dead, they are alive in our heads and our language, but not any longer useful for making precise propositions about the reality of the city.
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“I was always struck by the extraordinary and moving attachment people had to places. They would wrangle over whether a street sign should be placed at an intersection or not.” Case in point: During his tenure, after a prolonged community debate, a semaphore was installed at an intersection on Carter Avenue in St. Anthony Park and Latimer was invited to attend and turn on the switch for the first time.
“That’s what mayors do,” he says with a laugh, adding that the ceremonial event included a performance by a three-piece string ensemble, followed by a brief talk by the head of neighboring Luther Seminary on the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard and his ode to walking. “I would know that I’m in St. Anthony Park when they tell me a red light reminds them of Kierkegaard,” Latimer quipped.
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