Notable Quotes #25: Melvin Carter Jr. Describes Riding Bikes in Saint Paul c. 1959

Time to raid, forage, and plunder! Fight with the new guys down on the corner. Race with Charles, Bernie Brooks, and them other guys on bikes. I'd jump on the handlebars with Skeeter pedaling. Bike out of control, we plowed into a fire hydrant at full speed. I rolled around on hard sidewalk pavement in excruciating agony (later in life to learn of broken ribs). But other than that one time, we always won the race.

Bernie Brooks' big baloon-tire Hawthorne bicycle was almost identical to mine, except his was more brownish, mine more reddish. He could ride -- ride fast-fast-fast. Nobody but nobody could ride like Bernie! But the last time I rode on his handlebars, something made me promise myself never to ride with him ever again.

...

We played hard like river otters, worked like army ants at having fun, rode bicycles better than cowboys rode horses, built clubhouses and forts in backyards and vacant lots, then spent the nights in them. We made "chugs," commonly known as go-carts, and skateboards(using roller skate wheels)... A routine heavy-duty day consisted of biking, running, building clubhouses and tree houses, and wrestling.

...

That day the sun was shining as it rained at the same time, almost like an omen. My sister Terrie said that always means that the devil is being his wife. When Momma came home, something special was in her eyes as she looked at me.

She sat down, pulling offer her shoes. "Bernie Brooks was riding his bike and was run over by a truck."

"What hospital is he in?... Momma, let's go see 'em."

Mom sat still stoically, eyes watering. "he's not in the hospital Melvin."

"Then he's at home?"

She sat looking the truth into me, shaking her head.

The word slowly kindled up, whispering from somewhere deep in my throat. "Killed? Bernie's dead?"

Mom nodded.

Bernie and I were nine years old.

I was devastated. He got killed on the exact same bike I used to ride with him, directly in front of the house I had just moved from, right where he and I used to play together. Plus the fact that 'Brooks" just happened to be the name of the only Black funeral home in St. Paul, which just happened to be a couple houses away from where the accident happened. Something had told me never to ride with him again, and I never again did.

For whatever reason, his death earmarked the time, the totality of the year, for me. It was the death of Rondo.

[From Diesel Heart, Melvin Carter Jr.'s lovely autobiography.]

[Rice Street and Rondo Avenue, c. 1954.]

 

Signs of the Times #173

 

RYAN PLBG & HTNG
DOOR ON SIDE
OF BUILDING

[Door. University Avenue, Saint Paul.]

PLEASE
DO NOT
BLOCK WALK!

[Boulevard. Summit-University, Saint Paul.]

MEDICARE
4
ALL

[Freeway bridge. Rondo, Saint Paul.]

CALL FOR TO GO
GHEBRES IS
Open FOR takeout

[Window. University Avenue, Saint Paul.]

ATTN:
NO FUNDING NO SUPPORT
A&A MILLWORK WILL NOT
REOPEN CLOSED
PERMANENTLY

[Door. Grand Avenue, Saint Paul.]

HER ES WORK hERE

[Wall. Rondo, Saint Paul.]

REST in PEACE
GEORGE
FLOYD

[Hydrant. Saint Paul.]

It's
OKAY
to be
BLACK

[Pole. Larpenteur Avenue, Roseville.]

Notable Quotes #24: Oliver Towne describes Downtown Saint Paul traffic c. 1956

The city is a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, a dual personality -- routine, brusque, common as an old shoe during the daylight.

Then the shadows lengthen through the forest of loop buildings, the offices empty one by one, the streets swarm with traffic, and the long lines of pedestrians string out toward the parking lots on the fringes. 

Up from the bowels of the First National Bank, the Pioneer building, the Minnesota and Commerce buildings, the City Hall, Lowry Medical Arts — come the cleaning women and men. 

The surge at the ramp ends, the choking glut of cars flow like thick grease at the near-loop intersections, out Seventh — east and west; down Shepard road, up and down Wabasha, out Como and Rice, into the glens and vales of the residential sections, the rivers of humanity branch off into streams, trickles, ending at last at the front doors. 

And the air is rancid from the exhaust fumes following in their wake.

[from Once Upon a Towne, by Oliver Towne (a.k.a. Gareth Hiebert), "Night Shadows in the City."]

[Seven Corners, Saint Paul, c. 1954.]

Sidewalk Poetry #66: City Number

City Number

The soiled city oblongs stand sprawling.
The blocks and house numbers go miles.

Trucks howl rushing the early morning editions.

Night-club dancers have done their main floor show.

Tavern trios improvise "Show me the way to go home."

Soldiers and sailors look for street corners, house

numbers.

Night watchmen figure halfway between midnight and 

breakfast.

Look out the window now late after the evening that

was.

    On a sough sky of pigeon-egg blue

    Long clouds float in a silver moonbath.

[Carl Sandburg, from Honey and Salt.]

[Chicago's State Street, early 1960s.]

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.