Twin City Bike Parking #10

 [Grand Avenue, Saint Paul.]

[Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis.]

[34th Avenue South, Minneapolis.]

 [Hastings. (see pool on the lower right.)]

 [Selby Avenue, Saint Paul.]

[1st Avenue North, Minneapolis.]

[Rice Park, Saint Paul.]

[Rice Park, Saint Paul (Detail.)]

Twin City Street Musicians #6

[Harmonica player. 1st Avenue, Minneapolis.]


[Accordion player. University of Washington campus, Seattle.]

[Flautist. Target Field, Minneapolis.]

[Guitar player. Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland OR.]

[One man band. Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland OR.]

[Guitar player. Northrup Mall, University of Minnesota campus, Minneapolis.]

[Saxophonist. Bridge, Portland OR.]

[Fiddler. Washington Avenue Bridge, University of Minnesota Campus, Minneapolis.]

[Guitar player. Bar patio, Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis.]

[Guitar player. Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland OR.]

Target Plaza's Surprising Sidewalk (The Sidewalks of Target Field Part 4)

[Target Plaza. Click to enlarge.]

If you’ve been to one architectural presentation, you’ve been to them all. They typically have flashy graphic design and lots of catch phrases. They for sure have those ‘architectural renderings’ that have those fully-grown green trees and happy looking racially-diverse middle-class fakepeople walking around in family groups. They’re typically filled with carefully thought out pleasant-sounding phrases like “promenade” and “tectonics” and “esplinade” and “façade” and “[insert latest trendy jargon here]”. If architects are good at anything (besides building buildings), its giving a good powerpoint presentation.

Well, I happened to be at a number of these presentations when the stadium was first being pitched to the state and county governments, and I distinctly remember rolling my eyes and tuning out when the stadium architectural firm started talking about the stadium plaza. It would connect the entrance to the street and create community space and blah blah blah snooze. Really, they always say something like that. And, as any fan of William Whyte’s wonderful work will know, most large building’s plazas end up being completely vacant, soul-sucking spaces devoid of life that only look good from a large distance or in an pretty architectural sketch.

Well, I’m happy to eat crow on this one. Because Target Field Plaza is one of the best (newly) designed spaces I’ve ever experienced. Let me tell you why.

The Tale of the Entrancing Entrance

The first time you go to Target Field, I really, really hope you get to enter through Gate 34. It’s the gate that’s oriented towards 1^st Avenue North. If you got to the statdium on foot, from the general vicinity of Downtown Minneapolis, this is probably how you got there.

You see, because of the small footprint and inconspicuous siting of Target Field, the stadium is quite hidden. It doesn’t ‘loom’ above anything, really. Instead, it sits low down behind the Target Center on the very periphery of the city, wedged between huge rows of parking lots and a bunch of industrial and freeway-oriented spaces. As a result, you can’t even glimpse it from anywhere downtown. The first time you go there, you won’t even know where it is.

In fact, the first sign that you’re entering the vicinity of the stadium will be, not a giant looming white marshmallow bubble poking up over the nearby parking lots, but a gradual increase in Twins shirts density, first one then two then three scalpers asking for tickets, someone slowly turning up the volume of street life, families getting out of trains, folks crowding bars. But you won’t see the stadium.

[This is the view of Target Field from 4 blocks away.]

[This vague corner is the main entrance to Target Field.]

Walking down 1^st Avenue from the warehouse district area, you’ll eventually a little tiny marker with an arrow on it pointing towards “target field”. And, rather than a huge stadium concourse, you’ll find yourself walking down the sidewalk in between the (looming) Target Center and the historic Butler Square building.

It’s an odd sidewalk that gradually slopes upward toward a skyway that runs between the two giant parking lots. It funnels people a bit narrowly into this strange space, past a hideously ugly Joe Mauer statue, around the corner of the newly-relocated Hubert’s Bar, and over the 2^nd Avenue North streetcorner.

All this while, the excitement level builds. Your sense of anticipation starts to jump all over the place as the crowd becomes ever-so-slightly denser and more excited. You can feel that the stadium is nearby, you can hear the sounds of many voices, but, still you can’t see it.

[You ask, into what sort of post-industrial wasteland have I wandered?]

[At this point, you're know you're getting warm. The ballpark is somewhere very close by.]

Finally, you end up going past a bronze statue of Harmon Killebrew hitting a home run and pointing his bat at a skyscraper, and proceed underneath a low skyway bridge between the two massive parking lots and then - WHAM!- the full impact of Target Field hits you.

All at once, you’re in the middle of a large open space filled with baseball. In front of you are the stadium lights and the sight of thousands of fans in the seats that arc behind home plate. All around you are stadium barkers calling out, selling peanuts and cracker jacks and everything else. You’re in Target Plaza, and the place is filled with excitement. Its almost as if the main gate (where they take all your money) doesn’t exist. It’s almost (almost, but definitely not) as if the sidewalk leads right into the seats, as if the stadium is a seamless part of the city, as if the field’s green grass is just another city park and the concourse is another block of Minneapolis sidewalk.

[The pre-game hurly-burly hurdy-gurdy hustle-bustle hullaballo.]

[The field beckons like a sidewalk siren.]

What I’m trying to describe is the elegant way that the space in Target Plaza connects the stadium to the streets of Minneapolis. The low bleachers in Right Field open up right into the street, bringing a little bit of the city right into the stadium. During games, I’ve seen folks without tickets hang out near the metal fence for innings, just to be part of the action. You can’t see any of the field of play from there, but you do get a sense of the camaraderie that makes baseball so good at building community.

And after the game, the process seems to work pretty smoothly in reverse. People flow out of the stadium. Even if there are concerns about whether or not the space is truly ‘public’*, Target Plaza is a wonderful addition to the interface between the new Target Field. The way the plaza connects the 1^st Avenue sidewalk and the stadium is an architectural masterpiece. Let’s just say I was pleasantly surprised.

[A pleasant green buffer between the parking lots points toward the city, and provides a nice place for sittin'.]

[The Plaza opens up space in what was previously the creepy crappy land behind the Target Center.]

[There are benches and waste bins.]

[This long, low skyway connecting the two parking lots predates the stadium, but provides an excellent 'contrast point' demarcating where baseball excitement truly begins and ends.]

[Even when the Twins are out of town, people can hang out on the Target Plaza.]

PS. This is it, by the way. The end of the road. I'm not writing anything more about this stupid stadium.

PPS. It's not stupid. I like it.

*This is surely something that we need to keep our eyes on. It should be a public space, with all the freedom of speech that entails.

Target Field's Economic Boon (The Sidewalks of Target Field Part 3)

[Fans outside the Loon Cafe on gameday.]

For a long time during the 80s and 90s, sports stadiums were billed as the crucial big ‘megaproject’ that would resurrect downtowns. For planners, politicians, construction companies, the media, and sports team owners (and that’s a large chunk of any city’s local power base), stadiums were shiny silver bullets with silver linings and silver tongues. They could bring people back to downtown, increase economic activity, attract tall buildings in a single bound, etc.

In an argument that will be familiar to anyone whose ever attended a public/private partnership powerpoint presentation, stadium boosters attempted to undermine critics by talking about how stadiums would increase local economic activity, and therefore boost a city's and region's tax revenue. Stadiums would "revitalize neighborhoods", bring in tax dollars, return people and their wallets to the city, lead to an avalanche of new sports apparel shops, sports bars, and local giant-foam-#1-hand factories. Shiny, large, and ribbon-cuttable, plus they practically pay for themselves? They were the ultimate in ‘win-win’ projects.*

Well, as the vacant lots surrounding the Metrodome will testify, it turned out that stadiums were not necessarily supercharged economic magnets. Beginning with Baade and Dye’s influential 1988 article “Sports stadiums and economic development: a critical review” (which suggested stadiums might not have actualy have a positive impact) and then their subsequent 1990 expansion of the argument, (which suggested that stadiums were not only neutral, but had "possibly negative impact" on the surrounding area) the urban economic planning world began to turn on the idea of stadiums as economic development tools. Since the good old days of the 80s, urban economists have systematically debunked the slick claims and magic bullets and of the stadium's snake oil lobbyists. As it turned out, stadiums weren’t that great. Nobody really wanted to be near them. They were uncomfortably large and looming. They caused tremendous amounts of traffic congestion whenever they were in use. Any economic activity that they did generate was probably just shifted from some other place nearby, cannibalizing other retail or entertainment dollars spent in the city.

But, on top of that, there was a basic paradox at the heart of the economics of stadiums. For city planners and local boosters, the goal was to have the stadium’s activity ‘trickle down’ and spread out, having ‘multiplier effects’ that cascaded through the local entertainment and hospitality industries. But, for the owner of the sports team, the goal was to keep as many of those entertainment dollars as possible within the team’s income stream. Stadiums were built with an ever-expanding suite of team-controlled revenue streams. Stadiums were built to include their own bars, restaurants, sporting apparel stores, parking lots, and even hotels. Stadium owners attempted to design places where every last dollar spent on the day’s outing went directly to the team. So, when it came to having local economic impact, teams and cities were very much at odds.

[Wrigley Field is surrounded by a neighborhood filled with buildings not owned and operated by the team owner.]

The economic paradox at the heart of stadium economics means that there is a lot of variability when you look around the country when it comes to how economically friendly each stadium is designed to be. At one pole, you have the classic old stadiums: Fenway Park in Boston, Wrigley Field in Chicago, or (old) Yankee stadium in New York. These were built on small footprints, without a lot of internal amenities and entertainment revenue streams. And, surrounding any of these places, you will find whole neighborhoods of small businesses and bars that have sprung up nearby. On gamedays, these places fill up with fans who hang out somewhere a few blocks away, having pre- or post-game drinks or food, happily spending a portion of their ‘sports dollars’ at someplace out in the city.

[From a local economic development perspective, Dodger Stadium sucks.]

On the other hand, you have the ‘stadium complex’, a la the old Metropolitan stadium, LA’s Dodger stadium (somehow now the 3 oldest stadium in the majors), or (worst of all) the new Dallas Cowboys ‘complex’ (though anything in Arlington TX would qualify). These stadiums aren’t in neighborhoods. Rather, they surrounded by a vast moat of surface parking lots, and the only thing they’re ‘close to’ is a highway exit ramp. Among other consequences, this allows the team to keep something close to 100% of the revenue from the sports fan. There simply isn’t any alternative to spending money with the team’s organization. And, the double-edged result is that the team owner makes off like a bandit, while the ‘local economic impact’ of the stadium is reduced to a minimum of income and business taxes.

There are various iterations of this concept, lots of stadiums that, even when they’re located in downtowns, are still try to keep all the dollars ‘within’ the stadium. Cincinnati is a good example: the stadium is surrounded by a big freeway and a much bigger river, too far from any other ‘neighborhood’ to have a great deal of impact. The Metrodome is another good example, even though its revenue streams were very small. The only businesses that received any benefit from the dome being there were surface parking businesses, Hubert’s, and that crappy “Twins and Vikings museum” that nobody ever went inside.

[The city of Cincinnati has systematically placed its stadia where they will have the least amount of local economic impact.]

Well, for a number of reasons, Target Field seems to be doing really well on this spectrum. It’s small footprint, located in the heart of a neighborhood that is already filled with activity, buildings, bars and restaurants, means that there are many ways that the economic activity of the stadium on game day spills out and trickles into other areas of Minneapolis. In fact, a while back the Strib had a column which is pretty much the best-case scenario for a sports stadium booster:

Not only are 40,000 people showing up night after night during home stands, but they're showing up with smiles on their faces and money in their wallets and a new desire to actually stay a while.

"The crowds are happy; they're not too drunk, and they hang out," Ober confirmed. "It's been great."

Of course, you're going to hear all about Target Field's ripple effect from Twins officials and the mayor and especially the Hennepin County commissioners who put up the tax money for the ballpark. But take it from the people who were on the battle lines, or tap lines: The mania for the Twins' new home has vicariously turned into something of a love affair -- or at least a rekindled likeship -- with downtown Minneapolis.

On top of that, hotel occupancy rates are up, and transit ridership has gotten a boost.

In short, unlike a great many new stadiums built in the US, the location of Target Field seems to be having lots of positive economic consequences for Minneapolis. Because the stadium is right smack dab in the middle of the area’s ‘entertainment’ district, places that usually rely on the weekend party crowd now seem to have a completely different set of customers and traffic from which to draw business. (Even the naked lady industry tried to get in on the action.)

It's impossible to say for sure. Studies of this stuff are notoriously unreliable. But judging from the anecdotal evidence of my own two eyes, its no small thing that the servers at both Pizza Lucé and Cuzzy's are now dressed in Twins garb throughout the summer. And, while it probably means that the teams revenue strem isn’t as full as Jerry Jones’ wallet, it’s a good thing for Pizza Lucé. And, if you ask me, what's good for Pizza Lucé is good for America.

[Even when they lose, there's a party on 1st Avenue after a Twinkie game.]

*Any time you see this phrase, squint your eyes and look suspicious.

Target Field’s delicate LULU dance [The Sidewalks of Target Field Part 2]

[Click for Part One of this series on Target Field. The image at Right illustrates how Target Field's elevated sidewalk takes fans over and through the previously impenetrable moat of parking garages just to the West of 2nd Avenue N in Downtown Minneapolis.]

During the long debate over the funding and construction of Target Field, one of the most common and most compelling criticisms was that it made no sense to place a $350 million baseball stadium directly next to the HERC plant, the county’s huge industrial facility solely devoted to generating electricity by burning foul-smelling garbage.

Indeed, Target Field sits at a vortex of different parts of downtown Minneapolis. It borders the night club-centric 1^st Avenue/Warehouse district area on the East, touches the residential / riverfront North Loop on the North, and, on the South and West sides, rubs up against the city’s neglected and overlooked LULU zone.

[An angle of Target Field you'll never see in the brochure, emphasizing its proximity to the elevated 394 freeway and the Hennepin County garbage burner.]

LULUs is urban planning lingo* for Locally Unwanted Land Uses, which includes homeless shelters, halfway houses, garbage burners, and other loud light industrial businesses like metal smashing and car crushing and whatever else comes with ultra low property values. LULUs are the logical consequences of NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard), as every time property value laden homeowners get outraged over some zoning change, cities tend to place unwanted or politically difficult projects in places that already have politically difficult projects. So, the end result is that all the homeless shelters in the city tend to get clustered together, and placed next to the garbage burner and the bus depot. And so Target Field is next to the garbage burners and the homeless shelters and a bunch of other ‘interesting’ places in ‘near North’ Minneapolis that you’ve probably never been to or heard of.

[You can still see what the stadium site used to look like on Google Maps. The field lies within a section of town cut off by 3 or 4 freeways, train tracks, and other impenetrable infrastructural barriers.]

As a result, the stadium’s design performs a delicate land use dance, opening itself up to the neighborhoods on the South and East, and shielding itself off from areas to the North and West. In fact, compared to any other contemporary stadium, Target Field’s site is incredibly compact. (I’ve heard a little as 8 acres, so this seems ridiculously small to me.) It was built on a site that was once a surface parking lot, just on the on the non-downtown side of the mid-90s I-394 & parking lot project. The (misguided) 394 project erected an elevated 8-lane freeway leading directly from downtown to the wealthy Western suburbs, which placed a huge barrier between the now-gentrifying North Loop area from the LULU zone. And, on the South Side, placed a giant complex of city-owned five-story parking garages that essentially formed a fortified wall between the downtown office buildings and the LULU zone. Target Field is on the ‘wrong’ side of both of these large barriers, but manages to bring people over the divides in very elegant ways.

And, through a few design tricks, the stadium does this without really seeming to. Most of the fans are encouraged to enter via entrances that link up to the light rail stop or the 1^st Avenue / Warehouse district area. Particularly with its connection to East, the stadium uses an elevated sidewalk and plaza to make this transition fairly seamless, so that you don’t really notice that you’re next to a freeway or going through an area surrounded by large parking garages. Fans can enter without really even seeing or noticing the extensive freeway and parking infrastructure.

[An elevated sidewalk and plaza, and a clever "Chino Latino" mask for the pre-existing parking lot, is one way that Target Field manages to disguise its infrastructural surroundings.]

At the same time, the stadium places a scrim wall all along its Northwest-facing ‘backside’, ostensibly featuring the history of Minnesota Twins greats (including my favorite, Ron Davis), but actually preventing people from seeing the industrial land uses directly adjacent to the stadium. Only with close careful inspection and no little amount of peering can you tell that there are power transformers, homeless shelters, scrapyards, and a HUGE garbage burner directly next to the stadium.

[The scrim on the Northwest side of the stadium, shielding baseball fan's eyes from the unsightly smokestacks and homeless shelters of the city's LULU zone.]

In this way, the stadium connects a little section of real estate that was previously unconnected to the downtown street life, including a number of wonderful (and large) historic buildings, like the huge 10 story warehouse across 5^th Avenue from the stadium. When the stadium was built, there was (and still is) a lot of concern about how the ballpark land use would fit with the industrial and social service land uses nearby. For example, how will homeless people be treated if they hang out in the ‘public’ plaza in front of the stadium? Will the huge county investment in the garbage burner next door to the stadium be limited by the fan’s or the team’s intolerance of any unusual odors? Will industrial businesses near the stadium, like Shapco or Northern Auto Parts be able to stand the disruption of baseball games 82 times a year, or will they flee to the suburbs and take their increasingly endangered urban industrial jobs with them?

At any rate, when compared to a sparsely-settled site out in the suburbs, or a depopulated site surrounded by surface parking lots (like the old Metrodome), the site of Target Field is a very interesting place, surrounded by a diverse set of land uses. The stadium does a very interesting architectural dance, managing to draw people in from the active areas of downtown across some majorly disruptive infrastructural barriers, while keeping people and stadium street life away from the industrial areas of the city. For fans of the both the Twins and the city of Minneapolis, seeing how this area changes during the next few years will be very interesting.

* 94% of urban planning lingo consists of the Construction and UTilization of Acronymns (CUTA).

[Even on an off day, you can find Twins fans walking next to the previously remote Shapco manufacturing company and historic warehouse building.]

Finally an Real Urban Ballpark! (The Sidewalks of Target Field Part 1)

I’m about as big a baseball fan as they come. And while I’m critical of poor people’s tax money lining the pockets of local bazillionaires, as well as the culture of reactionary homerism that vaguely afflicts the Twins organization, I was dying to see what the new stadium felt like.

Back in 2005, when the stadium bill passed, I was working at the state legislature and got to sit in on a lot of the house committee meetings about the stadium. I saw endless different stadium plans appear on posterboard and powerpoint. I sat through the endless company talking points about “fan friendliness” and “intimacy” and “urban” and “bike trail” and all the other stuff that sounds good to a DFL legislator. The process was heavily charged, and given the constant stream of cuts to education, health care, and everything else under the sun, giving away $350 Million public dollars to what is undeniably a private business is unconscionable. The only saving grace is that the Pohlad family (unlike carpetbagging Zygi) doesn’t seem likely to sell the team after its dramatic increase in value and revenues.

But, be that as it may, I grew up going to lots of Twins games at the horrible Metrodome. My dad would take us to the games and my brother and sister and I would ‘circumnavigate’ the far upper reaches of the upper deck, wandering around the empty seats. The Metrodome, like skyways, giant public housing towers, and Spam canned ham, was a Modernist fantasy whose death (at least for baseball) was long overdue. I’ll miss going to baseball games there only because of childhood nostalgia, plus the occasional moment of excitement when the pressure’d air blew you out of the exit doors.

So, what is Target Field like? I’ve been lucky enough to be there three times so far, and honestly, I can’t find a single negative thing to say. (And that’s despite the fact that two of the three days it rained on me, including that accursed ‘rain suspension’ against the Yankees.) It’s just wonderful, and reminds me of all the best things I love about America’s great baseball parks. It has the Wrigley Field concourse, old Yankee stadium bleachers, Fenway’s small footprint, and that ‘new car smell’ that you find San Fransisco’s Pac Bell Park. It’s a great place to be for baseball.

But, what about for the city of Minneapolis? How does the new stadium fit into the city? Does it catalyze activity downtown? What kind of impacts and effects does it have on its surrounding land uses and neighborhoods?

From a urban planning perspective, there are two things that I absolutely adore about the stadium, and one that I find half intriguing and a half troubling. Over the next few days, I’ll tell you about each of these things in turn.

[Even the inside of Target Field is filled with good sidewalks.]