Notable Quotes #23: Samuel Delany Predicts the Future of Downtown Minneapolis c. 1999

A friend clued me in to sci-fi writer and New York City social critic Samuel Delany dismissal of Downtown Minneapolis the other day, as it appears in his Jane Jacobs'-fueled memoir, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Here's the part where he plunks Minneapolis next to Springfield:

Business are supposed to move in when vice is at its peak -- not ten years after the wave has crested and is a decade into its ebb. What this may just sign is that those four planned office towers, if not the rest of the brave new mall, could suffer the fate of so many of the country's artificially built-=up downtown areas over the last decade or two -- Minneapolis, Minnesota; Springfield, Massachusetts -- where no one wants to live or work, so that, as Jane Jacobs warned in her 1961 volume The Death and Life of Great American Cities, because there's not enough intertwined commercial and residential variety to create a vial and lively street life, the neighborhood becomes a glass and aluminum graveyard, on its way to a postmodern superslum, without even going through the process of overcrowding -- abandoned before it's ever really used.

Seems a bit bleak, but you can't argue with it. That said, downtown has improved thanks to more people living there.