The Hexagon Bar was unique, a small weird oasis on the concrete streets of the Seward neighborhood. Its loss marks another minor absence for the city’s music scene, and the disappearance of small weird venues like the nearby Triple Rock and the 400 Bar.
For music, the Hexagon Bar was always cover-free. It was the kind of place you could just pop your head into as you were passing through South Minneapolis, to see who was playing, with little commitment, and whether it sucked or not. There was often a flock of hipsters, crusty punks, U students, and/or random South Minneapolis bozos hanging around outside the door. Late at night, the fenced-in patio was like a petting zoo where people fed each other American Spirit cigarettes.
At other times, the Hexagon Bar was a classic dive, if there wasn’t a show, you’d find a maybe a dozen regulars drinking out of plastic cups, staring blankly at the claw machine, passing time in a place that slowly changed around them.
The gritty wedding of dives and music is perfectly suited to another dive characteristic, the daily pattern of regulars, drunks, workers, and the late-night young. Any good dive in an urban area will have a distinct rhythm to the day, a stride and pace of alcoholic progression that mirrors its social reach and the neighborhood around it. In a way, this is like how Jane Jacobs described the “urban ballet,” the passage of a New York sidewalk through the hours, of streets through the day and night. Some dives begin their days in old age, with the retired or hopeless, weary men escaping loneliness, reading the paper, complaining. As the night wears on, years fall off the faces, a time-lapse in reverse. The old man in the olive jacket is replaced by a 30-something in plaid, then again by a black shirted groupie straight out of college. Midnight is for the young and restless and the music takes over the bar, pouring out of the adjacent room like a spilled Grain Belt, impossible to ignore. If you’re here, why would you want to?
It's also wroth pointing out that the Hexagon Bar was the last real remnant of the hub of hell, along with the Schooner Bar a few blocks away. …
The Hub of Hell, also known as Hell’s Half-Acre, was its own special place, where the Puffer-Hubbard gang (from the nearby foundry) was just as likely to police social norms as the actual Minneapolis police.
…
The Hexagon Bar sat on the seam that separated the factories and warehouses of Seward from the working-class homes to the north and east. In those days, there were a lot of industrial facilities in the area, like the Milwaukee Road rail yards, which employed hundreds of working stiffs; Minneapolis-Moline, a farm implement factory; or Flour City Ornamental Iron Works Company, a foundry that crafted large, decorative railings, gates, and doorways. The railroad tracks through the neighborhood were lined with smokestacks and the streets full of men roving around and looking for work and fun.
Heck I’ve been writing odes to the Hexagon Bar for almost ten years now. I think the second ever dive bar bike tour wound up there, back in 2013. Since then, I wrote about the Hexagon Bar in my South Minneapolis Dive guide booklet, researched it as part of work I did on the history of the Seward Neighborhood, and then again included it in my book Closing Time.
I didn’t know it when I was going to shows, but music at the Hexagon Bar was part of a long tradition. Researching the bar book, I dug into an audio history archive from the 1990s that included a colorful interview with the bar’s long-time owner, Aurelea Hupp. Her story is fascinating, but includes this description of the bar in mid-century:
It was mostly truck drivers. . . . There would be fights in the bar, because we had a hexagon-shaped bar and there only was the one room. We had the oom-pa band there in the corner, three fellas playing, and they’d be four deep at the bar on a Friday or Saturday. The fellas would be arguing, you know, and my husband, who was a friendly guy, he and Jack Reilly would have to stop these fights.
Hupp’s husband inherited the place from his stepdad, who had opened it up after prohibition in 1935. She passed it along to her kids, and apart from losing the original hexagonal shaped bar, it didn’t change all that much. (I put an extended rough transcription of the Hupp interview below.)
The bar was torched during the unrest this summer. The demolition of the ruins this week mark the end of the real Hub of Hell bars that once defined the Seward neighborhood.. Most of them were demolished intentionally through city-led projects, aimed at changing the area, reducing crime, and getting rid of the old bars. While the bowling alley and the Eagles club remain, and though I love them both, neither is really a traditional bar. It’s a bit sad to see the Hex go this way, because I think it had made it through the hardest years of the 1990s and early 2000s.
RIP Hexagon Bar. You had a good run.
[Rough Exerpts from an interview with Aurelia Ann Marie Hupp, long-time proprietor of the Hexagon from the 1950s-1990s.]
I started singing at the Tempo Bar, owned by Roy [???] at the time. Charles Mathews was one of our regular customers, [???] Eckberg was the owner, he was a very regular customer. He was in the Tempo every day in the 1940s, I started singing at the age of 2.
Somebody had coxed me to enter a contest at the Café Exceptionale. I didn’t take the [waitressing] job be a singer, so I was scared.
One night we stopped in the Tempo they got me up to sing, Roy Eckberg was there and said, I want you to come and work for me.
I was a singing waitress. All popular songs of the 40s, and everything that was popular semi-classics. There was a piano player and a violin player and my brothers made a little stage for the waitresses, and they used to be packed every night [with people] from the university. Just packed.
Night and Day, Paper Moon, Summertime, Chattanooga Choo Choo. Bernie Bane Hanson was the piano player.
The band would be on 20 minutes and the girl would be on 20 minutes, and the girl only lasted two weeks.
So he sez, You want to come down and try it?
I don’t mind, I sez. I might not last very long. What was she getting? I asked.
I was getting 40 dollars a week at the Tempo, so we went down to start it, and the fellow asked me what I expected to get.
I expect to get 60 dollars a week, I sez.
If you last more than two weeks, I’ll see that ya get it, he sez.
The third week came, I got 40 dollars. I said to him, remember me?
You got it, he sez.
I worked there about two years. It was after the Tempo, that was like in ’45, [owned by] Gus Nelson. Roy Eckberg had sold it to Gus Nelson and then there was another bar, the Minnesota Bar, I’m pretty sure it was called the Minnesota bar on Franklin. It was a beer parlor. Beer parlor, liquor and beer, 3.2 and liquor, as opposed to hard liquor.
Then I got the job downtown at the Casablanca, when it was owned by White/ Mitch from Mendota was one of the owners, [???] went to jail because of the murder that was there. And Tommy Banks. Shetsky took the rap for Tommy Banks, who was the guy that killed him at the time I was singing downtown.
I was also Rosie the riveter at the St Paul airport because I was working on a specials crew. And when the new B24s came into the St. Paul airport you had to go all over them to see where the rivets were missing.
My husband’s stepdad started the Hexagon at the end of prohibition. It was a beer bar, where you make beer, a Schlitz brewery was there, in the building. That was the building and my husband’s stepdad stared a bar right there and that was in about ’36,
It had been Schlitz before prohibition. After, it was a natural place for a bar. It had the right smell. So we started a bar there, and when he decided to retire, he gave the bar to his own son and my husband who was his stepson, he was married to my husband’s mother, turned the place over to the two boys in 1945. And they worked there. They were partners, and they added on, and they were partners until his son died. That was Riley, our name was Riley. Our telephone is still listed as William Riley he’s been dead since…
Riley married Hupp, and that was where the two boys came from. One boy in each family, that was the extent of the family.
He died when he was about 59 years old, my husband had along in about 77, my husband got Alzheimer's and he had Alzheimer's until he passed away. And my son will help him run it and when he died, I stepped in and did it. And now the boys are running it, the one boy is the manager now, and we’re on the corner.
When we were first in here it was The Magic. The bar where emerge is, and meet to us there, where you the city bought it you, it had been formally Duffys. It was Genes, and then Pearsons was always there, and Pearson Bustard his name was, he and his wife both had Cadillacs and beanies and he had a ring on his finger that was a big diamond.
And he was held up, they said give me that diamond.
I can’t, he sez. I haven’t had that off my hand in 20 years.
And [the robber] says, cut it off or I’ll cut the damn finger off.
And so it came right off. Heck, you don’t want to get too scared because that what can happen, your fingers shrink.
There are just as many [bars] now, in fact, they gave all ways was the ones that’s owned by the what’s the one a block down from Pearson’s well anyway it's Franky… name of the bar down there that…
The Eagles', I know it well, they do sell liquor there. One they gave a license to. The FOI / VFW. They gave a liquor license to the Stardust, then Henna’s became Differs, then Duffy’s became an insurance man, Foster. Then Foster became Norma Jeans, then the city took it back. Mr Nib’s was after the Magic Bar, Magic Bar then Mr. Nibs, then it was go right to Mirage called it … now its not any more.
Gone by the wayside, and Norma Jeans has gone by the wayside and Pearson’s has gone by the wayside.
[INSTRUCTIONS: PLAY BOTH VIDEOS AT THE BOTTOM SIMULTANEOUSLY AND SING ALONG]
Yeah, I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more
I got the groceries in the back Carbucks latté in my lap SUV is matte black Got the boots that's black to match Drivin' in a trench, ha You can whip your Porsche I been in the valley You stuck in trash alleys, now
Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin' Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin'
Drivin' on some potholes Lean all in my bladder Cheated on my freeway Gonna drive right past it
My speed is fairly piddly
Valley driving's groovy Heading out to Fridley Jeep Wrangler on my booty
Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin' Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin'
Yeah, I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more I'm gonna take my car to the Ayd Mill Road I'm gonna drive 'til I can't no more
The ticket price includes admission to the Somali Museum of Minnesota, a worthy endeavor is ever there was...
As always, Patreon patrons get a discounted price, so sign up there if you'd like to get advance notice of tours and events, and discounted price for ticketed tours.
There is limited space available, so get your ticket today if you'd like this private tour of the Somali Museum and two other obscure spots of Minneapolis lore.
I was first struck by this part of the city when I first came across it many years ago, around the year 2000. I remember walking into the "Market BBQ", a self-proclaimed legendary Minneapolis restaurant for 40 years...
Well, if it was so famous, how come I'd never heard of it?
Since then I've always been curious about this part of the city that seems so off-the-radar of the mainstream, so full of old remnants of the built environment, despite being a stone's throw from downtown.
With that idea in mind, I put together a tour. The Old Nicollet Walk (defined as between Grant Street and Franklin Avenue) this sprinter was a fun time for me, and more than most of the tours I put together, an exploration. I didn't quite know the story of this part of the street, and I hoped that in doing research for the walk and bringing a group of people together, I might learn about this part of the city that had always intrigued me.
Here are some themes that emerged. Thanks to everyone who came out and joined me on this exploration of a fast-vanishing and often misunderstood Minneapolis neighborhood.
Tourists and hostility
[The Convention Center is a wall around the neighborhood.]
One theme that came out of the walk was how "tourist downtown" was actively hostile to this part of the city, in both subtle passive design and active ways.
During the tour, introducing "Old Nicollet," I shared my theory why so many of the restaurants here seemed to me to be lost in time and off the radar. Eat Street, the north Loop, hell lots of other parts of south Minneapolis all seemed like places that I heard about regularly in conversation, that made lists of "places to go," but this stretch of Nicollet was never mentioned by anyone I knew. It was almost like a blind spot, Minneapolis downtown lacunae, the very essence of a marginal space crammed between the freeway and the edge of downtown.
My theory had been that it catered primarily to downtown tourists, and that's why I didn't know much about it. Thus the weird old restaurants like Pings, the (now shuttered) Japanese-Canadian place, Market BBQ, (shuttered) Jerusalem, etc.
But then one of the participants described a story they’d heard about downtown. At the big tourist hotels, the concierge explicitly tell visitors not to walk south on Nicollet Avenue, to go instead north along the “mall” area. As a result, this strange segment of Old Nicollet received relatively few downtown visitors, Jay Leno excepted.
Theory debunked.
Similarly, the massive multi-super-block Convention Center offers huge featureless blank walls along its south and western sides. All the doorways, public spaces, and activity are focused on the north, and instead of serving as an amenity for the Old Nicollet area, it detracts from the public spaces and social life of the neighborhood.
Jarring Disjunctures
[There's a massive metered parking lot here b/c of a street expansion / realignment.]
The "edge of downtown" is a strange concept, because if you go back and look at the photos and maps of the mid-century Minneapolis, there were no "edges" to downtown. Instead of hard lines, downtown slowly dissolved, transforming into a residential area as you got a few miles out. Back then, the city decreased in density gradually like a classic gradient -- often called the "urban transect." A hundred years ago, if you walked from the center of downtown into one of the residential neighborhoods around it you would find a gradual decrease in density and intensity.
Today, most of the middle ground along that spectrum has been demolished and replaced with vacant, freeway, or low-density spaces. (Stephens Square and Elliot Park are notable exceptions.) The vacant lots, apartment buildings, freeways, huge walls, and parking lots form a strange landscape within which oddities like the old Music Box Theater (formerly Loring Theater, currently a weird church from Eden Prairie) and 80s-era faded restaurants like Ping’s still cling on within the Minneapolis landscape.
[Bollards and freeways.]
Cultural Margins as Refuge
At the same time, the very isolation and marginalization of this part of the city has been, for many people over the years , a feature and not a bug. Because it is so isolated and economically neglected, what’s left of this part of the city has remained affordable and fine grained. Lots of important urban communities thrive in the margins in neighborhoods like this.
Most notably for this part of town, so close to Loring Park, Minneapolis’ crucial GBLT community has been centered here for generations. The 19 Bar, Minneapolis’ finest dingy gay bar, is a block away.
And two women who came on the tour shared a story of how they’d moved to the area in the 1970s and discovered a DIY lesbian-centered “coffee house” that began in a space in the Plymouth Congregational Church. It was a heart of the Minneapolis lesbian scene for many years, and one woman described an ongoing play about a fictional town called Toklas, Minnesota that had been performed in the coffee house for years.
[The Very Best of Fancy Ray.]
I personally recall how the massive Nicollet Village Video store served as a place for punk and queer kids to hang out all day and night, while also offering one of the two or three best selections of obscure videos anywhere in town. Similarly, the old Flame Bar and Grill, a strange country-western / R&B hybrid joint, once offered refuge for kids from all over the region.
Here’s a story about a girl from the North End who became a Flame fixture for years:
“Mr. Torp of Torp’s Music Store (also on Rice Street in St Paul) was a friend of my parents; he said country singer Ardis Wells was looking for a lead musician who could sing. I wasn’t 21, so we went over and met with her and Mr. Perkins who owned The Flame and they said ‘We don’t care if she’s not 21 as long as she doesn’t drink, we’ll take care of her, don’t worry about it’.””
Ardis was a female wrestler who rode elephants in the circus. “The floor would rise up with the push of a button and become a stage. Ardis Wells and The Rhythm Ranch Girls worked the front lounge of The Flame, our stage was up high above the bottles (see photos). Ardis would perform a trapeze act in The Flame while we sang, but the City Of Minneapolis shut that down because it was too dangerous. The Flame was the home of the $3.25 16-ounce steak. I still have their menus!”“
Similarly, the one or two old blocks of the southern stretch of Old Nicollet has some of the most diverse and eclectic restaurants anywhere int he city, including East African, West African, and Tibetan restaurants, all of them solid. (There used to be Vietnamese and African-American food here too.)
[At the Flame, they were playing and dancing ON TOP of the bar.]
Changing Quickly
[Old Nicollet vacant lot; note the old hospital in the background.]
Over the years, this part o the city has been under severe pressure from city planners, civic boosters, and entropy. The freeway, Convention Center, road re-design, big government housing projects, and parking lots have taken their toll. But in the midst of it, a stretch of the old urban fabric has remained in tact.
But it doesn’t seem like it will last long. After a half-century of benign neglect, the real estate market on the fringe of downtown has begun to overpower the past, and when the 1940s-era Market BBQ building comes down, the remaining continuity of the old city is going to erode beyond recognition. There will still be an old building or two, but I fear the idea of the old street, visible in the historic photos, will be impossible to conjure.
So tour it while you can!
[50s-era office building updated for the modern age.]
[The all-night diner with new construction in the background.]
[The elective early 20th century buildings (note the weird roof!) along Old Nicollet.]
[Construction, formerly the site of Jerusalem Restaurant.]
[Old Nicollet Village Video, now a Spanish-language daycare.]
[Old clock at Market BBQ.]
[Door handle at Market BBQ.]
[Tin ceiling at Market BBQ. The ceiling along with the massive wood bar (shipped from San Francisco) will be saved and replaced into the new building.]
[Market BBQ booth.]
[The old building, not long for this world.]
[The old and new housing stock along Old Nicollet.]
[Already shuttered, and forgettable, Ryan's Pub.]
[Subsidized affordable housing on the north end of Old Nicollet.]
There’s a reciprocal relationship between people and a place that, every once in a while, come together to create a great cultural scene. Every once in a while, the people and the place fit each other so well, it's seamless.
Both sides of the relationship are vital. You need the people: the fashion, the vibe, the crowd, the affect, the regulars, the giant bouncer that remains on his stool for a decade.
But you also need the spaces where the people can feel at home and flourish. Without the lived-in walls, the room, the booths, the bar, and the sidewalk on the corner where people smoke and stare at the dull freeway, what do you have? What is a player without a stage?
Sometimes the place and the people come together in harmony, each seems like it was made for the other, and the people and the place become almost interchangeable. That’s what the Triple Rock Social Club was like, and the loss of the Cedar Avenue bar and venue on the fringe of West Bank seems right now like it’ll displace an entire scene.
I made it over there for one last show a little while ago, to see a young rock band from L.A. called Girl Pool. The whole place was full of Radio K twenty-somethings, which is perfect, because that’s how old I was when I formed some of my favorite memories of the Triple Rock.
For example, the Triple Rock bar used to have a great juke box by the back door, the old-school kind with buttons and labels full of punk songs. I didn’t know anything about punk, but I remember really liking the scene inside the bar. So much so that I once took fifty of my precious cents over to the juke box and searched around for a song. Not knowing anything, choosing purely by the names, when I saw “The Descendents — I Like Food” I thought, that’s the one!
I hit the buttons and as the song started to play, sat down on the bar with a smile on my face and turned to my friends to listen.
The song turned out to be 15 seconds long, and was over before I could say anything. I got punked!
Speaking of food, the Triple Rock was unique in the Twin Cities for having the weirdest mix of crusty-punk-vibe yet-often-meat-laden huge-portion’d staple food. The kitchen at the place was a tiny hole in the wall by the bathroom, and I have no idea how they got so much food out of there.
The Triple Rock was famous for their po’boys, which were these mammoth vehicles for potatoes and were nothing like a New Orleans po’boy. A half order was enough for two people, and eating a full "sandwich" would literally put you on your back for 24 hours. It was the kind of food that you’d want after a week of camping. Their poutine was the same way, and their $7 happy hour burger special was an amazing deal.
The place was vegetarian friendly, and yet I remember when they had a brief foray into an “all-you-can-eat bacon night,” where if you sat down the would keep bringing you baskets of the world’s worst bacon until you cried “uncle” and screamed for it all to end. They had huge starchy breakfasts on weekends, which along with a bloody mary, would cure any possible hangover.
There was nothing like it.
[Girl Pool.]
Once you walked out of the old bar and into the back, the music space seemed like a paradise for punk, metal, and rock music. It’s as if someone gave a punk nerd permission to design their ideal world, and then the fanciful fever dream came true.
The entire room was black, and large noise-deadening cloth things hung on the wall that served to make the room great for music while also allowing unruly musicians to bounce off them without fear of injury. The bowl in front of the stage was depressed, and ringed with little ledges, and in the back the aloof could loiter by the bar and merch table. The place was perfectly designed, and there’s not another stage in town with better sight lines or acoustics.
[Not only does the Triple Rock have a vending machine for guitar strings, cords, and drumsticks, but it only takes $1 bills.]
[Cedar Avenue, 1890s and today.]
Finally, the geography of the venue was a perfect fit for the music. The Triple Rock was literally next to the freeway onramp. Before the freeway, Cedar Avenue had a contiguous row of bars and shops running from seven corners all the way to Franklin (where the railyard used to be).
But the freeways obliterated this old street, and left the remnants of the old bars and buildings in tatters. In fact, little amputated bits of Cedar like the Cabooze and the Joint are still floating around, offering refuge to bikers and other small scenes, and the Triple Rock was one of these, like a lighthouse of punk on the edge of an ocean of cars.
I’m thankful for the owners, who created such a harmonious place in which to tell the world to fuck off. Running the joint for twenty years is quite a gift to the city, and according to the articles, they just ran out of energy and (presumably) got a retirement offer they couldn’t refuse.
The building is slated to become a restaurant and banquet hall / event center. I am sure it won’t be anything like what it was, and I hate to see a perfect scene disappear. Check it out one last time before it closes for good.
[The bar scene.]
[Bathroom graffiti.]
[Soup of the day is whiskey.]
[A pre-war photo, BOTC awards, Lando Calrissian, a Colt .45 ad, and the Triple Rock's first dollar.]
Morris Hayes (keyboard player; Prince's longest-serving band member, 1992–2012): I took him to the bike store and I bought him a bike because he said he wanted a bicycle. I got him all sized up for it, and then I told him, "Okay, Prince, I'm only buying this bike if you get a helmet." And he said, "I don't want a helmet." I said, "Well, I'm not buying this bike, sir, if you don't get a helmet—you have to ride with a helmet or else I can't be responsible for you being on this bike." He says, "Well, I don't want a helmet." I said, "I'll get you a cool one—and I'll get one, too." So we got the helmets, but I found out later that he was riding the bike and he didn't wear it.
Corey Tollefson (Minneapolis-based entrepreneur and fan; attended events at Paisley Park for over 20 years): There's an arboretum, literally down the street from Paisley. And during the day he'd ride his mountain bike around town, and nobody would bother him.
Keith Lowers (longtime fan): Once the lights turned on [after a Paisley Park event in September 2015], I left quick because I'm super claustrophobic and can't take the cattle-exit style of most rock shows. So I'm walking real fast in the parking lot, trying to get to my car quick when—zoooom!—I see this dude on a bike ripping around the parking lot coming at me. I was ignoring him, trying not to engage, when he circled me and slyly said, "Where you goin'? The party's just getting started." WTF. It's Prince...on a white mountain bike, wearing his full rock-star outfit—white, to match the bike, of course, with a multicolor print on it. So I returned to the doorman at the advice of Prince—only to be schooled that Prince plays this joke often and that the party was indeed over.
Christina Terrones (longtime fan and Paisley Park regular): That was his thing: He liked to roller-skate and he liked to bike.
Lowers: I recently heard they found a fully custom-painted BMX bike in his vault with videos of competitive BMX riding. I don't doubt it. He was not only quick on the bike but nimble.
Kandace Springs (singer; befriended by Prince via Twitter after he discovered her cover of a Sam Smith song online in 2014): After the show—it was maybe like 10, 11—everybody was leaving, and Prince grabs me and says, "Hey, let's go bike riding." He had four bikes—two white cruisers and two dark blue or black mountain bikes. So I got on a cruiser, he got on a mountain bike, and we rode past everybody with our Afros, and everybody's like, "Oh my God! Prince!" He lives in a kinda rural area. We rode down Audubon Road, then there's a park right across the street and there's a path, so we rode down there a little bit.
Maya Washington (photographer; befriended by Prince after he discovered her online in 2014): First, when you go on the bike rides, you're like, "Wow! I went on a bike ride with Prince down to Lake Minnetonka!" It's fun. And you think you're special. Then I stayed there long enough that I'm like, "Oh—this is his thing." This is what he does. He has the movie theater where you go to watch a movie—he'll buy out the theater. He has his routine with all these young girls who come in: movies, bike ride, possibly a jam session. That sounds about right.
This is an interview based on a website I found over five years ago featuring systematic recordings of the "caution car approaching" sounds coming from the parking lots of downtown Minneapolis. Intrigued by the project, I reached out to its creator and found Dan Ibarra, a well-known graphic designer, artist, and musician.
This interview was recorded over three years ago, was lost on my
computer hard drive, but recently resurfaced. Apologies for the delay.
As a result, the website with the recordings is no longer up on the internet. I have tried to recreate some of them with my own recordings of parking lots. The sounds have not changed much in the last five years.
[Transcript begins.]
Dan Ibarra (DB): My name is Dan Ibarra, I'm the principal designer at Aesthetic Apparatus. We're a commercial art and printmaking studio. We are mostly graphic designers, but also do illustration and printmaking, sometimes even audio.
For me most of what inspires me and what partially inspired this audio recording project was that I enjoy the culturally ephemeral, the small moments that we don’t see as anything important, but actually become the daily places that we walk through and experience.
So much of my work is literally constructed from print ephemera. I’ve also published a book that’s photo documentation of misplaced groceries in a grocery store. And I feel like this is kind of along those same lines. This is a thing that you wouldn't t really give any thought to, but once you start paying attention to sounds to downtown Minneapolis you start noticing those “Caution, car approaching" sounds everywhere.
Twin City Sidewalks (TCS): I can't wait to hear about it. But first, tell me about the posters. What kind of posters?
DI: We still do posters on weekly, daily, monthly, or annual basis. We’ve done a lot of art shows. Printmaking has really become much more of a prominent discipline, for example Artcrank. You see one hundred bike posters, you’d think well that’s just all the possible bike posters there could be. But no, it’s not. There are one hundred the next year, and one hundred more the year after that.
I’ve never been one for the fetish of the bike, it’s always been about the experience of biking. Last year our art crank composition was a poster of trash collected from the Greenway, then put into a collage composition and reprinted.
TCS: So some detritus!
DI: Yeah. On one hand, we were cleaning up the Greenway, then collecting a cultural core sample of the Greenway. For example, there’s always Swisher Sweets and flaming hot Cheetos. We have so many different iterations of the flaming hot Cheetos bags. It’s a good measure of who’s on the Greenway and why.
TCS: So let's talk about this project in downtown Minneapolis. Tell me where this project came from.
DI: The project began when our studio used to be Downtown at Nate’s clothing company.
TCS: Hey, I bought my only suit at Nate's! [Note: I've since bought another suit.] DI: I think all men of our generation bought their only suit at Nate’s Clothing Company. It was a great building, great location. … It was one of the last of those buildings where it was really hands off. Scott Seekins was in there, too, another person who had lived there for 30 years.
So I was working downtown, driving downtown, walking downtown, and this perception I have of my world, about what’s ephemeral and what's the trash, what’s the leftover of the things we think are important. Well I kept taking note of these car warning. I found it was interesting that a lot of them in a literal sense shared the same voice. Some times it was a worn out recording.
[Parking lot klaxon from Portland Avenue and 6th Street.]
[A car approaching sign, klaxon embedded.]
Yes, that’s the original caution car approaching,
[Note: Since I have inserted my own recordings, they will not be the original ones and will not match perfectly with the transcript.]
I began recording as many of these as I could. I got obsessed with it, and I wanted to find out the background.
I did discover that Minneapolis is the only city that has this. I assumed there was some guy in the Northeast that did all this, and there may be other approaches to this idea, but this "caution car approaching" voice is the sound of downtown Minneapolis alone.
So I reached out to the Minneapolis "ramps and lots manager" Tim Belezing [Note: spelling is unclear.] and he informed me that it as an ADA issue. They wanted to make something that gave warning to people that couldn't t see that there was a car coming.
For a long time they had buzzers and bells which I imagine are universal to any downtown city. But they wanted something that had a bit more of a direct input as to what was happening if you were walking down the street and if you were blind. A buzzer could be a fearful sound to hear. They wanted something that was calm, but let you know what was happening around you.
For a while they were working with a recording that simply said “car coming.” When he said that I couldn't help but think of Wayne's World where they just yell “car!”… That’s what it seemed like to me. Just yell “car coming!”
DI: So through a process of elimination, they came to this idea that it would say "caution car approaching", and that seemed to meet the needs of ADA requirements as well as being something that was social enough, something that’s... To me it means it's not yelling at you, but it’s a gentle warning. “Car coming” to me seems like there’s not a kindness to it
[Parking lot klaxon at 3rd Street and S 3rd Avenue.]
TCS: Then what happened?
DI: There was an even mix of some people who really like how casual it was, very simple and succinct. Other people felt like the warning was backwards, and they wanted the cars to get the warning that a person was coming.
I liked that idea and I liked the shift in perception. This warning is also about us making way for the car, as opposed to the car making way for the pedestrian. At some point it had to have been a decision of someone one that they thought about, as opposed to the cars, that the people are here.
TCS: So to me the tone, and the way that the language is used reminds me of Robocop. That scene where Robocop is interrogating a criminal, or that scene with the giant other Robocop, where he says "WARNING you have five seconds to comply." That's what this sounds like for me walking down the street. It's almost threatening to me sometimes.
DI: Yes, it's the idea that there's this disembodied voice commanding you. Tim Belezing said they brought in a Japanese engineer to come in and study the technology of the ticket machine, the one that that says “please take the ticket.” They were working on that technology. And they had a Japanese engineer some in and say, "well where do you want the voice to come out?"
"Well maybe just this box, a speaker." They didn’t understand the question. In Japan it’s offensive to have a disembodied voice. You put a person there, or some sort of animatronic being,
DI: Just something so that there is a thing, a person, an animal talking to you. Although we don’t have the kind of cultural offense there, we still have this weird relationship to technology talking to us in a human voice. Who is talking? This building? Who is telling us to approach with caution? Is it the door or the car itself that we’re supposed to hear? TCS: It’s the system. It's the skyway system with the retail activity and all its interior spaces. If you're actually walking down the street, you’re faced with a lot of blank walls and giant grey slabs. And its very inhuman. And on top of that, there's this sound, this voice you hear that will give you a verbal assault. It produces an affect of melancholy that's almost militaristic … Sometimes it gives me the jeebees.
DI: I know what you’re saying, the sense when you’re walking down the street you don’t interact with those buildings at all except when you’re warned about them shooting cars at you. That’s your only interaction with public space in any sense.
TCS: Then there's parking ramps that extend extend out over the sidewalk, and you’re forced to walk in these dark tunnels. Walking around can be unpleasant to say the least... So how many of these parking ramps did you go to?
DI: I think I got about 20. That was a week’s worth of taking an afternoon and biking around and recording, and it was this logistic nightmare. I had to go during rush hour, because that was my best chance to get a car coming out.
You can go at any any time of day, but then you sit and wait. I spent a good amount of time biking around at rush hour, waiting until a car came, and recording. And sometimes recording again it it wasn’t right.
[Parking lot klaxon at the IDS center, Marquette Avenue.]
TCS: It's like going fishing or hunting! DI: Yes! I was fishing for cars. I started in a geographic location at what I considered was the most northern portion of downtown, the parking ramps like the 2nd Avenue ramps. And then I slowly worked my way back block by block.
It's interesting when you start looking for the ramps how many you come across, and ramps you didn’t even notice were there. They all have their own audio signature.
And I think its also beautiful in a sense. I find beauty in really a lot of ugly things. What i think is beautiful is typically what the normal person thinks is ugly, and so those audio recordings, the awkwardness, the blemishes and bad recordings... Those are beautiful in their own weird sense of music. It's all we've got for sounds downtown now that there's no horrible opera music coming out of Block E an more…
TCS: The sonic landscape, mostly it's the sound of cars, and an almost space like vacuum of air rushing through.
DI: Yeah the wind of Nicollet. TCS: So convince me these are beautiful sounds. Is there one you think of that is particularly beautiful?
DI: Let me see if i can find one. There’s one that’s awkward. "Caution vehicle exiting." It sounds like maybe an intern did it or something. They’re a little bit…
DI: There’s... You’re almost convinced. What I like about that one is that for some reason someone felt that "caution car approaching" was not appropriate for their needs, or ended up trying to do it a little bit different. Maybe they wanted a signature style for their caution announcement.
There’s an institutional thing to it. This it the US Bank parking ramp. You can tell he’s a little bit nervous about having to do it. There’s something human, flawed about this awkward voice being the voice of this institutional parking ramp.
It gets to the idea of trying to humanize a parking ramp in some way. I collected them not for their consistencies but for their inconsistencies. I think that those more interesting, to think about the hows and the whys of what’s happening, what they say and how they say it.
TCS: The sonic architecture of a parking ramp, it's all hard spaces. There's a lot of space and it's all so echo-y, rigid, sharp. You get this cathedral-like murkily lost-ness, and inside there's this tiny attempt to convey a message, but it's getting swallowed up by the vastness of parking ramp space. It almost makes me feel bad for the person.
DI: I intentionally didn't try and sweeten the audio. You want to get the noise of the city, the background white noise. Hearing that echo, that white noise, you can tell it's city. It’s not …
TCS: It's a vacuum sucking sound.
DI: I equate it to the white noise of an ocean, but it has its own little signature to it, in a sense. It's that great sound where you would never really listen to it, and if you’re in a recording, you think "oh, that’s the sound of a city, the buildings, the air of a city." I don’t know what that is, the echoes the near cars and the distant cars and the white hiss of whatever is going on.
[Parking lot klaxon at 3rd Street and N 2nd Avenue.]
TCS: That’s what your project is generally. Most people walking around downtown will filter all that out, filter out the white noise, the honking of a horn. Filter out the sound of the parking ramp. Our perceptions are filtered through our habits and our routines, so that if we walk the same six blocks from the parking lot every day, we go on autopilot and don’t notice them. I like your project in that way because you're revealing these things again to us for the first time.
DI: Well said. That’s kind of a creative meaning for anything that I do, taking these things we gloss over and forget about, but are around us on a daily basis. Trying to see them again, hear them again, smell them again, to experience those small moments of our life.
I want these recordings to be kind of funny too. When you start getting them again and again... I'm laughing to myself as I'm thinking about this idea, these eccentricities. They get funnier in the context of the other parking ramps, like they’re all talking together.
TCS: They’re having a conversation, but it’s a really boring conversation.
DI: It's a horrible conversation. Yeah. But it’s like bird calls or something. We don’t really know what they’re saying to each other. Maybe they’re just warning each other that there’s a car approaching.
[The Brooklyn Heights promenade.]
TCS: I used to live in New York City. Have you ever been to the Brooklyn Heights promenade? It's part of Brooklyn just south of downtown. There’s this beautiful walkway pedestrian overhang, over a freeway, right on the river, with a great view of the lower Manhattan / Wall Street area. It's directly across the river from Wall Street, and a lot of people like to go there and look at the city.
I was there at night walking along this promenade. Then all of a sudden one of the office buildings, all the lights in the building started going on and off at random. This is like a 40-story building On an off at random for a good 30 seconds. Then it went back to the way it was before.
I thought it was trying to send a message to me. This is a building trying to tell me something, that there’s this secret code in there that means something, and I’m never going to understand it. But that there was a message.
So sometimes I feel that way about cities in general. You’re walking down the sidewalk, and there’s a piece of paper there, and then you just make your bus by a split second, and on that bus you meet somebody that you hadn’t remembered them from years ago, and you have this interesting conversation, and it feels like the city is trying to tell you something.
I don’t know if you try to decode these messagesin that way.
[Termite mound architecture.]
DI: I don’t decode it, but I try to see the city as just as much an organic existence as a forest. In that we have these variations in a single downtown of climate and culture and smell and people. I was thinking a lot about where we draw the line between nature and industry and how we would never really think about a downtown as nature. Or as environment in the most political sense of the word something environmental.
A city is not environmental really, but in a sense it's not that different than an ant colony. An ant colony in a sense, an ant colony, is very much a natural occurrence, and a city is a much larger scale example of that. But because we are human we have our own abilities and the constraints of our own nature, of course We make cities that go way beyond what I would consider a standard human existence, but the city is still made by humans and controlled by humans in some way.
TCS: And it reflects our social nature, our emergent social understanding in some way. We don’t understand it individually, but together..
DI: And we, our humanity comes out in strange spaces and in strange ways. And these parking ramp recordings are a way that humanity finds a way, in something as large as a downtown in the city space.
TCS: Is there another one you want to play for us
DI: Let’s see? What other ones. Its tough just having them transcribed.
TCS: Let’s listen to one of these beeps. That’s a municipal parking ramp.
DI: Yup. That’s it. That really is... it sound almost like you’ve just come back from a concert. It’s that level of beep.
Let’s play another one here. There’s different beeps as well. [sound plays]
TCS: It does sound like a bird doesn't it?
DI: I like that one a lot. I never really figured out if that was the intention of that sound, or if it was some kind of technological malfunction in that. it was really kind of an interesting sound.
TCS: It's like it’s a tape trying to play.
DI: Or its lopsided or something. But I feel obviously those beeping and chirping, it isn’t as human as a voice. But I do still enjoy those because, at some point someone had to decide on that balance, about what’s warning enough and what’s too much warning, and what is the audio equiavelnt of that.
I was thinking just yesterday about the FCC warning test sound.
TCS: The EAS the emergency alert system...
DI:The emergency alert system sound. The grating... you can’t even... We all hear it in our head but it's an amazing grating sound. I hope someone got paid a lot of money for that sound, because it is the perfect, most horrible sound that you can possible imagine. And i love that someone somewhere got paid to figure out what is the most atrocious sound you can make for us, and how they came up with that.
TCS: Another one that jumps to mind is the tornado warning siren, which is actually kind of pleasant one a month. In a way
[Tornado siren.]
DI: Yep. And here...
TCS: It’s exciting like there’s fireworks going off all over the city.
DI: I guess it's not a city, Its anywhere that the culture of the industry that provides for us, where we become so large that there's not a person any more to tell us, there’s a machine to tell us now, and how we anthropomorphize that machine or don’t... I feel like the emergency broadcast system could have chosen a human voice, but for some reason they do not. And they also chose the most grating sound possible.
But the huge spectrum between the most horrible sound in existence and the most beautiful song, the most beautiful singing voice, and everything in between... It's interesting how we react to those sounds and how they move things in us.
TCS: There's a way in which the city... When I moved to New York and I didn't know at the time that the apartment I was getting into was a block away form the New York City trash truck washing facility.
DI: [laughing] Now you know why you got such a good price.
TCS: Well, it wasn't that good a price... But so what this meant was that we had all our windows open because it was hot in the summertime, and each night between midnight and 4:30 in the morning there were these big trucks idling outside our window. And for the first week or two it really annoyed me, but then I just got used to it. You sort of filter it out. Don’t even hear it any more
DI: Yep and when you start really looking at something seeing, re-seeing it, re-hearing it...
I always say that I can feel a physical shift in my brain between the point where I’m trying to impose my direction on how something should be versus listening to something or being open to something. And for me in terms of art making, that’s a huge shift, for me to think about "ok oh i’m not going to really pursue an idea, I’m going to keep myself open to what comes to me, what ideas come to me and make themselves known."
And I feel like living in a city can be a lot of that. You can thrust yourself into a city, or you can let the city come into you, and be part of that city. And it’s a very different dynamic of how you walk down the street. If you are open to the city and what’s happening in the city, you can find those beauties in the small moments of things, the institutional, or things that aren’t meant to be.
TCS: You discover a new place. DI: But if you just pursue your life with a single-minded agenda, you don't ever get to really let those things come in that you wouldn't have anticipated happening. That’s something that's important to me to experience on a daily basis, opening myself to those experiences those ideas, those sounds, those objects, those people. Whatever...
TCS: There's one more I wanted to play, a really fast one.
[Parking lot klaxon from the lot across from the new Guthrie Theater.]
[The lot by the Guthrie, on 2nd Street.]
DI: I like that one a lot, because its almost stuck on "car." He’s barking it, but he’s also singing it. Like "caution ca-ar approaching." There’s almost two beats. TCS: It almost sounds like a vendor at a Twins game.
DI: Right. And I always wonder if its intentional. How many takes they did with that? The more you listen to it, the more you hear those little things that happen in it. Especially once it repeats itself again and again. That one is just, again it's just... What I’m left with is a lot of questions about why it sounds that way. TCS: That’s the city again. Maybe its someone you see on the bus, and you come up with a fantasy of who they are and why they’re there. You live with the uncertainty. DI: Yeah and I think that when we think about cities, and these huge institutions, we think about certainty, and we think about rules and organization and the amount of energy that’s put forth to keep a city moving forward. We never think that someone just kind of did something unintentionally.
But the truth of it is with these downtown recordings, they really were done with this "we’ll just do this" attitude. There were not done with any thorough analysis about how to say it or what it sounds like.
That's Something that Belezing said. He kept saying, "Well, what can I say, I just park cars." That’s how he saw his job. He just parks cars, and this was not really an important thing for him. This was a thing that just happened. I like that it was so unintentional I like that they let the thing just seed.
The Hexagon Bar was unique, a small weird oasis on the concrete streets of the Seward neighborhood. Its loss marks another minor absence for the city’s music scene, and the disappearance of small weird venues like the nearby Triple Rock and the 400 Bar. 
It's also wroth pointing out that the Hexagon Bar was the last real remnant of the hub of hell, along with the Schooner Bar a few blocks away. …
The bar was torched during the unrest this summer. The demolition of the ruins this week mark the end of the real Hub of Hell bars that once defined the Seward neighborhood.. Most of them were demolished intentionally through city-led projects, aimed at changing the area, reducing crime, and getting rid of the old bars. While the bowling alley and the Eagles club remain, and though I love them both, neither is really a traditional bar. It’s a bit sad to see the Hex go this way, because I think it had made it through the hardest years of the 1990s and early 2000s.
I started singing at the Tempo Bar, owned by Roy [???] at the time. Charles Mathews was one of our regular customers, [???] Eckberg was the owner, he was a very regular customer. He was in the Tempo every day in the 1940s, I started singing at the age of 2. 
