Minneapolis, Saint Paul Separating on Skyways

[The two "skyways to nowhere." File photo.]

When I began dissecting their skyway systems years ago, one of my favorite bizarro details was the existence of a “skyway to nowhere” in both of the Twin Cities. What fun! In each downtown, a skyway lingered over the street linking buildings that didn’t exist, urban appendices dangling uselessly in much the same way that bricks don’t.

[Skyway safety.]

The two skyways — Minneapolis’s over Marquette Avenue, Saint Paul’s over Wabasha Street — reminded me of nothing so much as the Simpsons’ “escalator to nowhere” (part of the coda to the famous monorail episode). I like to imagine downtown skyway strollers walking placidly through the skyway only to fall 20 feet to their doom (or perhaps, landing on a well-placed life-saving trampoline like a drugged bear).

To my eye, the twin amputated skyways symbolized the structural autonomy of the skyway systems themselves. They were the material incarnation of architectural agency, the way that our buildings shape us through time. “No matter how long it takes,” they seemed to say, “we will hang out here until a timely erection.”

But that was years ago, and things change, even things as bound by inertia as downtown Saint Paul…

A little over a year ago, and to little fanfare, the mothballed Minneapolis skyway to nowhere was finally re-attached to a building. After over a decade of abandonment, a new mixed-use residential tower ("the Nic on 5th”) rose up on the parking lot next to the Nicollet Mall light rail station. The skyway was “full” again of “life,” as dozens of people walked its carpeted hall during business hours staring at their phones.

And just last week, change came to Saint Paul. The team remodeling the Saint Paul Macy’s white elephant building announced they would remove the skyway to nowhere as part of the remodeling project for the building. The vacant lot still sits there on the other side, but the facade work on the Gruen-designed modernist parking-lot box means that, instead of waiting for a future building, the designers are opting to just forget about the skyway and focus their attention on the street below.

[Two Skyways Diverged in an Empty Downtown, and I Took the One Less Traveled By… (which is really hard to do because these things are really empty, man]

The divergent fates of the two skyways are no accident. Sure, the two downtowns have vastly different economics. (If Saint Paul’s downtown had demand like Minneapolis’, it’s likely the skyway might have stayed up to meet a new building.) But it’s fitting that the Saint Paul skyway is disappearing, because downtown planners have been more adamant about moving beyond skyways. While they might seem similar on the surface, there are a number of ways that the two skyway systems — one public and one private — are becoming less like each other.

Expansion vs. Contraction

[One of my favorite Minneapolis skwyays, on the Eastern periphery.]

Planners in both cities admit that skyways are bad policy, architecturally and economically, but that doesn’t stop developers from wanting to build more of them. Like the one ring, the totemic allure of transcending public space is difficult to resist. But words are one thing, and buildings quite another. if you look at the actions taking place in both downtowns, they are divergent.

Unofficially, downtown Saint Paul is done building new skyways. (Officially, there was almost a sentence in the last downtown plan stating as much, but at the last minute the plan was changed to say that skyways would be strongly discouraged.) There have been occasional debates I’ve encountered over the years where people suggest a new skyway-attached building outside of the downtown core. For example, there’s a potential debate about the “Gateway” site, the large vacant lot at Kellogg and West 7th, next to the Xcel Center. The city’s aspirational 2014 downtown plan (“Saint Paul: City on the Move!”... yes it actually says this) depicted the potential hotel there as being connected by skyway to the arena and the parking lot behind it.

[Call for skyways (CFS) from a 2014 plan by a downtown Saint Paul task force.]

This would be a big change for an area which is so far skyway-free, and I for one would be against it. I’ve spoken a few people in the West 7th neighborhood group who are also strongly opposed to skyways, making the case that they would strongly impact views and a sense of place along this important street. More importantly, a skyway would run counter to the goals of downtown of increasing street life, which the city has been working on for a while. And even more importantly, a skyway here is not necessary. Ingress and egress at the Xcel Center works just fine as it is, and if any group should know how to dress for a five-block walk to and from their car, it’s hockey fans.

(Instead, a hotel project like the one depicted in the rendering is under construction a block away at the old 7 Corners Hardware site, and it’s blissfully free of sun-blotting skyways.)

Plans for the Gateway site are currently in the works, likely mixed-use residential or office space and, if they’re smart, Saint Paul policymakers will take skyways off the table from the very beginning. It’s not a coincidence that none of the new building projects downtown — CHS Field, the Custom House, the Penfield — are skyway connected. The past and future charm of Saint Paul depend on the old pre-skyway architecture.

[New skyway in Minneapolis.]

Meanwhile, downtown Minneapolis has just completed its largest new skyway in decades, with the giant airlock skyway running through the Wells Fargo offices and docking into the crashed spaceship Vikings stadium. Though Minneapolis’ official downtown plan — the 2025 Plan — makes some strides about admitting there is a “skyway paradox,” the fact on the ground is that the investment is not on the ground. Instead, it’s dangling twenty-five feet in the air, “closes” on weekends and evenings, and is impossible to find the entrance to. (Yes, I know a preposition is dangling on the end of my sentence like a skyway to nowhere…) That’s bad news for Minneapolis, which will continue to struggle to create quality street-level sidewalks in the downtown core.

[From a 2014 downtown Minneapolis plan, by the Downtown Council.]

The skyway link: exception and the rule

[Saint Paul's central station skyway tower.]

The other place to witness the contrast between the two cities is in their skyway connectivity. Though the #1 complaint about downtown skyways is that they are too confusing, for many property owners, the obscure entrances are a feature, not a bug.

Back in the 1980s, and again two years ago, downtown Minneapolis leaders brought in famous architects and urban designers to try and square the skyway circle and “re-think” Nicollet Mall. As I wrote in Minnpost, during both remodeling processes, consultants recommended a high-profile easy-to-navigate link between the skyways and the street. And both times, downtown decision makers nixed the idea.

The problem for building owners was simple. A straightforward connection would run counter to the ugly truth behind the skyway system: skyways are explicitly designed to be private space used by white people wealthy people office workers, and to keep out black people poor people "those people" anyone not spending money. In that way, the downtown skyway system is the perfect symbol of Minnesota’s racist passive-aggressive culture, allowing suburban downtown workers to conveniently ignore the realities of visible poverty and racial segregation, and then blame it on the weather to boot! Skyways become the front lines of the architectural battle for downtown, and an easy-to-use access point on Nicollet Mall would provide a tremendous beachhead.

(Of course, this is all my personal analysis of the situation. Officially, nobody admits that skyways deliberately befuddle.)

[Two failed visions for connecting the skyways to the street in downtown Minneapolis.]

In Saint Paul, on the other hand, the city invested in a very public, very central, easy-to-navigate link between the city and the street. And, just as you’d expect in a segregated city, the new skyway has proven to be a massive headache for building owners, prompting some introspective navel gazing by downtown leaders.

[A bathroom not open to the public in downtown Minneapolis.]

To me, these two proposals — one realized, one rejected — point to the unresolvable tension skyways create between private and public space. At best, the skyways function like a suburban shopping mall. But at worst, this ambiguity explodes into often racist profiling and policing, as happened with the Chris Lolle incident in a Saint Paul downtown skyway last year.

(Side note: according to one study I read, for decades, many police incidents in the Minneapolis skyways have gone unreported, handled by private security to avoid headlines and the potential destabilization of property values that come with them.)

Either way, however, the impossibly blurry lines that skyways create make them very difficult to control or effectively police. And even if skyways are “successful” at achieving their modest nine-to-five goals, their existence leaves the downtown sidewalks out in the cold, greatly reducing the potential for either downtown to have thriving ground-level businesses and diverse, self-regulating street life.


A Bold Prediction about Downtown

[Updated rendering from the 2014 downtown Saint Paul vision document.]

It might seem strange to say so right now, but I’m bullish on downtown Saint Paul’s future as a real urban space, while I fear that the Minneapolis downtown core is going to be more difficult to resuscitate. This is odd to say now because downtown Minneapolis is much “hotter” than Saint Paul; cranes galore, surface parking lots evaporating, and office and residential populations that dwarf its Eastern twin.

But barring a massive increase in density, there’s no reconciling the skyways with thriving street life. In its most recent visioning document, the Minneapolis Downtown Council says a lot of nice things about sidewalks. They write that they want to “deliver a consistently excellent pedestrian experience that inspires people to explore Downtown block after block, no matter the season or time of day—24/7/365” and to “embrace density to build the kind of critical mass required to sustain a successful urban core.”

[Lady gazing wistfully at the Nicollet Mall sidewalk.]

Yet architecture tells a different story. The large new downtown park is nice, but half the people that might use it will simply look down from a distant window like gerbils. As long as skyways suck up street life, the park, like much of downtown’s plazas and “green spaces”, will remain symbolic, used ten times a year on warmer Sundays. The thriving parts of downtown Minneapolis have been and will continue to be outside the skyway system — the North Loop, Warehouse District, and Guthrie riverfront — and the sidewalks in the core, including Nicollet Mall many hours of the day, will remain largely lifeless.

[Saint Paul's skyway to nowhere, not long for this world.]

Meanwhile, if Saint Paul can minimize its skyways, there’s a great deal of street life potential. Ideally, the city would remove skyways from existing buildings, especially those where the steel bridges were retrofit into historic properties. Eventually, this will have to happen, so why not now? In twenty years, particularly if we can build a rail connection along the Riverview corridor, we might be talking about how vital downtown Saint Paul has become, and how walkable, pleasant, and architecturally seamless the downtown streets are compared to its Western twin.

And so we wait for the downtown renaissance. As they remove the skyway to nowhere over Wabasha, one of Saint Paul’s best downtown streets despite the parking lots, it’ll be nice to get a little more sunlight on the sidewalk.

Join me for the Goethe in the Skyway Symposium on Saturday

So, it's a little known fact that for the past calendar year, a group of artists sponsored by the German government have been ensconced in the Minneapolis skyway system creating critical reactions to the space of the Minneapolis second-floor downtown.

Yes, it's true: it's Goethe in the Skyways, the least likely Minnesota cultural mashup since it was revealed that Sisqo lives in Maple Grove.

Anyway, I'm thrilled to be participating in this effort. I'm contributing an essay on the Minneapolis skyway system as part of a publication that the Goethe team is putting out, and I'm also going to be part of a symposium this Saturday, September 28th.

It's titled Passages. Here's the didactics:

Passages: a symposium including film screenings, performances, panel discussions, and many thought-bending lectures in the iconic Minneapolis Skyway System  

–with Jennifer Newsom/Dream the Combine, Elsa Dorlin, Interesting Tactics, Cameron Gainer, Brandon Hundt, Bill Lindeke, Alexandra Midal, Andy Delany/OOIEE, Sarah Petersen, Emilie Pitoiset, Daniel Shinbaum, Emily Stover, Sandra Teitge, Susana Vargas Cervantes, and Ramaya Tegegne. 

Europe-based feminist art and culture magazine Petunia is organizing Passages, a weekend symposium of performances, screenings, readings, and discussions at co. (company projects)/The Third Rail and at the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis Goethe in the Skyways in the city’s iconic skyway system. 

Passages, of course, refers to the skyways as physical passageways. It also, in this case, refers to passing the baton in a relay race. This handoff, or passage, is an apt metaphor for several of the contributing spaces, organizers, and magazines who are participating in the symposium and are themselves transitioning to new manifestations, handing over their own legacy. Finally, Passages refers to a book written by Walter Benjamin dedicated to the famous 19th-century urban Parisian arcades, one of the direct forerunners of Minneapolis’s skyways. Benjamin used those urban features as a pretext to discuss other subjects, just as this symposium will use the skyways to think about legacy, traces, private and public spaces, and more. 

Coinciding with the conclusion of both Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis Goethe in the Skyways and the relocation of co. (company projects), the aim of the two-day symposium is to invite critical feedback while reflecting on the notions of transition, transmission, commitment to the local, as well as reflecting on this peculiar urban space/architectural environment: the Minneapolis Skyway System. 

It's open to anyone. I'll be speaking at 2:30!

@ GOETHE IN THE SKYWAYSCity Center, Skyway Level40 South 7th Street, Suite 208Minneapolis, MN 55402 

2 pm Introduction to the day  

2.15 pm Experiences from Goethe in the Skyways. Shifting perspectives with Sarah Petersen, Sandra Teitge, Daniel Shinbaum. 

2.30 pm Lecture by Bill Lindeke. Skyways, an history. 

3 pm Podium discussion Perspective on the Skyways with Andy Delany /OOIEE, Jennifer Newsom/Dream the combine, Lisa Middag, Brandon Hundt, Mod. Valerie Chartrain  

4.30 pm Lecture by Emily Stover. Tender City: feminist spatial practices in urban commons. 

5.00 pm Guided tour by Interesting Tactics. Who are the future Skyways for? 

5.30 pm Performance by Emilie Pitoiset. It took the night to believe 

7 pm Farewell and conclusion by Valerie Chartrain at Goethe in the Skyways

I hope to see you there. This is the most interesting thing to happen in the Minneapolis skyway system since they shut them down to create a mini golf course.

Notable Quotes #3: Gil Peñalosa Describes Twin Cities Downtown Skyways

[A thriving public space in the Saint Paul skyways.]

From MPR's recent interview of famous urban designer Gil Peñalosa, founder of the 8-80 Cities movement:

Tom Weber: Tell me your thoughts especially here for the Twin Cities, we have a very unique aspect, the skyways.

We have these second floor walkways so that you can walk between buildings, so that in the winter you don't have to go out in the freezing cold in the snow. There's a lot of debate about the effects on the economy if you don't have those street level businesses there. Where do skyways fit into the 8-80 model?

Gil Peñalosa: The skyways are absolutely horrible. They should be ...  The best thing that could happen, if God was generous, is to come up with an earthquake that would only affect skyways and nothing else.

The skyways really work like a gigantic vacuum that sucks the life out of the city. The skyways are like commercial shopping malls, elevated, where they don't want the poor people, the don't want the youth, they don't want anybody who's not going there to shop.

And also you don't have enough people to have them on the skyways and and on the street. You see, I have many many photos of the streets here where there are skyways. On the street level they are empty. They are like ghost towns. There are blank walls. And as soon as you enter the skyways, life flourishes. All of a sudden you start having flower shops, coffee shops, and so on.

Of course I know that there is winter in the Twin Cities. But you only really have about 15 horrible days of the year. And in addition to the 15 horrible days, you have another 60 or 70 pretty lousy days. But you have 250 nice days in the Twin Cities! So when we build the city around the 15 horrible days, we mess up the other 350. My advice to the city is let's build the city around the 250 really nice days, and then the 60 pretty bad or 15 horrible days are not going to be as horrible.

[A vibrant streetscape underneath the Minneapolis skyways.]

[See also William Whyte on Saint Paul's Blank Walls, Jean Baudrillard on "Minneapolis."]

Happy 50th Birthday to the Minneapolis Skyway System!

[Happy birthday!]

Fifty years ago yesterday, the Minneapolis’ skyway system was born. It was August 26th 1962, and over the streets of downtown Minneapolis a ribbon was snipped by a small group of people in an unadorned glass and steel structure bridging Marquette Avenue. That skyway no longer exists, but like an Octomom hydra, dozens more have taken its place, and today the skyways are one of Minneapolis' more unique features.
Most people you'll talk with would say that skyways in Minneapolis make common sense. Hardly anyone gives them a second glance, and they’re taken for granted, blending into the background of our everyday lives. But actually the half-century of the Minneapolis skyway system is an extremely rare occurrence. Of all the similar downtown systems in all of North America, it’s almost the only one that has been anything like successful.

Today Minneapolis is one of increasingly few cities that still touts skyways as a good urban idea. (Caveat: I’m not one of them. I’d gladly see them amputated, shipped out of town, and turned into Brad Pitt-designed FEMA trailers.) So, on the 50th anniversary of their birth, I suppose we could pause for a moment and to celebrate, to recognize the life of our city’s stratifying “gerbil chute” isolation.

Happy birthday, Minneapolis Skyway System! Let’s wander through all the unmarked, confusing, and climate-controlled twists and turns of your half-century of “progress.”


Meet the Parents: The Strange Genesis of Minneapolis Sky Bridges

To really wrap your fingers around the birth of the skyway system, you have to understand the history of American downtowns. As Robert Fogelson’s wonderful book explains, as early as 1915 downtown business and property owners were starting to panic about traffic congestion tied to the rise of the automobile. Back then, the majority of people traveled through the city on streetcars lines that all terminated in the centers of cities. These downtowns all had huge shopping districts with huge department stores and huge sacks of closely guarded retail profits. The conventional wisdom was that the coming of the automobile was going to improve everything, if only city officials could figure out a way to make it travel faster to and from the core.

Even in the '20s large numbers of cars began clogging city streets, honking constantly and getting in the way of streetcars, and even then car drivers protested vociferously if anyone even suggested removing a parking space. Supported by the close-knit construction, oil, and auto lobbies, city officials began to brainstorm ways to increase traffic flow and parking availability. Notable infrastructures that were born in this era included the stoplight, the limited-access freeway, the one-hour parking zone, and the parking meter. The point of all these new technologies was to keep traffic moving as fast as possible through the impossibly congested streets, which had to accommodate not only increasing numbers of space-hogging cars, but clunky streetcars, stinkysweet horse carts, and the kind of pedestrian throngs found today only at the State Fair. It was the kind of thing superlatives were made for.

The idea for skyways came out of this hectic downtown heyday, part of utopian fantasies about multi-level streets. There are lots of great turn-of-the-century illustrations of this dirigible future, and most of them have a healthy dose of bridges in the sky. They even existed back in 1882, as Fogelson explains:

Elevated sidewalks were […] a combined sidewalk and overpass, they were designed to expedite vehicular traffic by removing pedestrians from the streets. Pedestrian 'walks,' bridges that ran over the streets from rooftop to rooftop, were another. although this scheme “is hardly practicable yet,” New York’s Real Estate Record and Builder's Guide wrote in 1882, "it may be worth thinking about seriously a few years from now."

(Fogelson 260)

Drawins sky bridges kicked around the dartboards of city leaders for decades during this period, along with slightly more practical fantasies of subways and freeways and flying cars.

[Flying cars!]

It turned out that all of these ideas were insanely expensive, and anyone who actually tried to build anything quickly discovered the politics of bureaucratic gridlock. At this point, city governments hadn’t figured out how to pay for anything except by hugely unpopular taxes and assessments. It wasn’t until people like Robert Moses began to put together the modern freeway-industrial complex that anything much happened to change downtowns. And by the time the Federal government began footing the bill for big infrastructure projects following World War II, the focus was on freeways, “slum clearance,” and parking lots. (Two must-read accounts of this process are Robert Caro’s riveting biography of Robert Moses, and Dolores Hayden’s highly accessible history of suburbia.)

Meanwhile in post-war Minneapolis, things weren’t going well for downtown business interests. By the time the 1950s had rolled around, an unfortunate series of events had taken place that created a highly romantic atmosphere for the skyway system’s coming conception. The first of these was the exodus of a few of the city’s largest corporations away from the downtown and out to corporate campuses in the suburbs. In 1956, General Mills (practically synonymous with the city’s industry) announced that it would flee downtown in favor of a new office park in Golden Valley. A few years later, agriculture processing giant Cargill leapfrogged them, ejecting themselves all the way to Lake Minnetonka. This was part of a trend all over the country, and it really freaked out anyone who owned property downtown.

[The brand new General Mills headquarters in Golden Valley, 1959.]

[Southdale in Edina, c. 1956.]

Secondly, in that same year (1956 was an important date in Minneapolis history), Dayton’s opened up Southdale, the first indoor automobile-centered mall anywhere in the world. It debuted to pomp and dazzle, and every piece of Edina confetti haunted the sleep of downtown retailers. Faced with the twin exoduses of office space and retail, downtown businessmen hit the big red slum-shaped panic button. There were emergency meetings at the Minneapolis Club, and in 1956 (that same year) The Downtown Council was born. It was a private-controlled politically-involved business association that's still around today. (In fact, it’s still calling many of the shots downtown.)

The first act of the Downtown Council was to tell the city government to form a Planning Department, and to have them hire a planning director whose job would be to figure out how to keep the city’s downtown from kicking the proverbial bucket and retiring to that great Cold Omaha in the sky.

(One final part of this puzzle, the midwife, if you will, was a column that Barbara Flanagan wrote in the Minneapolis paper about navigating through the downtown in wintertime without going outside. I haven’t been able to track down a copy of this column, but it was referred to me by Minneapolis planner Jack Byers, who’s 1998 dissertation on skyways is still the definitive history.)

As ordered, the Planning Department’s first move was to produce a plan for preserving the future of downtown. They published the first draft in 1959, and it’s a comprehensive study of downtown with many chapters. Towards the end of the chapter on transportation, you’ll find the first glimmer of what would become the Minneapolis skyway system.

[Illustrations of the skyways from a 60's era Minneapolis plan.]

Granted, the ‘59 plan has many suggestions about improving transportation and reducing congestion. Many of them are good ideas! For example, there’s a discussion of street furniture, the importance of street trees, and good thoughts about how to improve transit efficiency and experience. But at the very end of the section, the notion of “second-level walks” appears. These were defined as  “any connecting walkway build one or more floors above the ground level.” They were seen to have many advantages over the traditional sidewalks:

[Second level walks] can be built without interfering with vehicular movement, can be easily enclosed and air conditioned […] they could be designed to include sales space and conveniences which would make them function as an integral part of the buildings which they connect. The impression could be given that the structures which are linked together are all a part of one huge whole rather than being separate buildings between which one must travel […] Interesting and dramatic views could be obtained from upper level walks. […] They could increase the variety and interest of street scenes by limiting and framing views […and finally] Some pedestrian traffic would be removed from surface streets thus reducing conflict with vehicular movement and thus reducing congestion.

On the other hand, their main disadvantage was their expense, plus the difficulty of negotiating the complexities of property ownership. But overall, the 1959 plan is sanguine about skyways. Not only would they move faster, they’d lead healthier lives. As the plan states, “persons in the central area will gain a more relaxed attitude which will presumably add to their efficiency and improve their general well-being and attitude toward life. Since there are so many of them, this could have a salutary effect on the whole city.” Second-level walks were the urban equivalent of Prozac.

It was of these fertile circumstances that the skyway was conceived. Into our story enters the father of the skyway system, a downtown property owner named Leslie “Les” Park. According to Kaufman’s Babbit-esque volume on the Minneapolis skyways, Les Park pretty much personified Minneapolis’ protestant ethic WASP elite. He was a devout Methodist who owned a lot of downtown property. (Famously, he claims to have donated all of the liquor profits from his hotels to charity because he believed them impure.) Park had a new downtown office and retail building on the corner of Marquette and 6th Streets, and in the 50s he began pitching the idea of bridging his building with the one on the other side of Marquette. The more that suburbs gained traction, the more people listened to his ideas. And eventually he got agreement from the city and his neighbors, and created his first second-level walk sky bridge. And so, on August 26th 1962, the first skyway was born.

 

Growing Up, Reaching Out, Touching Hands...

[Les Park.]

Park’s first skyway across Marquette proved to be popular, and the next year he followed it up with another one across 6th Street, bridging the Northstar Center with its neighbor.  (This one is still there, the oldest extant skyway. Go ahead, you can walk across it!)

Elsewhere in the downtown, others followed suit, and office buildings began docking with each other like vintage science fiction. The skyway system kept slowly growing, creeping ever outward until it reached a critical mass and became a bona fide entity when the IDS center joined all the skyways together at the architecturally acclaimed Crystal Court atrium. After that, like Skynet, the skyway system took on a life of its own.

[William H. Whyte touting the IDS center's public space.]

During the 80s building boom, most every new office building was designed to feature the skyway system. They became so commonplace that elaborate complexity began to be seen as a huge problem, so the city began regulating them in the late 80s, attempting to mandate certain hours of operation, wayfinding signage, and rules about public space. Still, they were a maze to anyone who didn’t spend most of their lives in a cubicle. Most Minneapolis downtown plans form this era contain oodles of hair-pulling over how to improve and fix the skyways, particularly around issues of accessibility and legibility. Meanwhile one of the key problems has always been that they depopulate the actual public sidewalks, turning the city into a concrete ghost town that wouldn’t be out of place in a post-Zombie apocalypse.

And so it has gone for fifty years, at least until recently. Most 21st century buildings don’t really connect to the skyway system, opting instead for street-level activity. (The skyway-free downtown library is a good example.) Jean Nouvel’s endless bridge seems to me like a big skyway joke, a giant artistic tongue offering a razzberry to the skyline. Today the skyway-laden office core sits alongside and atop the increasingly popular, populated, skyway-free hot spots like the North Loop, the warehouse district, and the mill district. It’s almost as if there are two downtowns overlaid atop each other, ignoring each other like ex-lovers at a cocktail party.


Midlife Crisis?

[A typical skyway today.]

Typically, when you turn fifty you start glimpsing your obsolescence. You begin longing for your youth in ways that make little practical sense, and doing increasingly stupid things. I suppose that skyways are no exception. (Block E, anyone?)

In the last few years, the steel office bridges have become something of a pariah among urbanists. (For example, see the extensive conversation over at Streets.mn.) And, in fact, they are one of the primary issues of disagreement in urban policy circles. At a recent talk featuring the downtown planners of both Minneapolis and St Paul, skyways were one of the key areas of disagreement. The St Paul planners wanted to phase them out, while the Minneapolis planner whole-heartedly defended them.

Have skyways “saved downtown,” as many business people and politicians suggest? Or as others argue, are they one of the main things casting a dark shadow on a potential downtown renaissance?

My personal criticism of the skyways comes down primarily to two things. First, they segregate the downtown into two grade-separated populations. This has a host of troubling consequences, easily revealed by a glance at the demographics of people on the street and in the skyways. In addition, to the extent that some people walk around on the sidewalk, they’re bad for business. Almost all skyway businesses close promptly at 5:00, because after that point skyways desert themselves like the RNC during a hurricane. Entrepreneurs have to decide whether or not to cater to the daytime office crowd, or the after hours sidewalk people. Either way they choose, it comes at an economic cost. Imagine how many more businesses, shops, and bustling street activity there might be if all the city’s passers-by were on the level? (The Marquette Avenue food trucks, which lure people out of the boring, bland skyways and into the bright savory sunshine of public space, are the perfect illustration of this.) The density and diversity of a downtown sidewalk is pretty much what defines a city, and Minneapolis is missing out.

[The tour getting kicked out of the crystal court.]

Second, despite all appearances, skyways are not public spaces. In conjunction with the Soap Factory art gallery, I recently led forty people around downtown Minneapolis on a tour of the skyways. We circled through the skyway system, and saw the skyway’s highlights: the longest skyway, the oldest skyway, the most beautiful skyways, the skyway to nowhere that dangles out over an empty surface parking lot. It was gloriously mundane.

The only problem was that they began to close. Around 7:00, many parts of the skyway system shut their doors. If you should find yourself leading a group of a few dozen art and urban space lovers through the 4th floor of Gaviidae Common, you will get asked to leave by an epauleted man riding a Segway on the carpet. The IDS crystal court closes to the public each night, and the downtown Macy’s shuts its gates like a Medieval fortress. The skyways are no replacement for the sidewalk. They’re not public space, and this simple fact has let to a great many bad planning decisions. (Block E, anyone? No, seriously, I’ll sell it to you.)

Still, people love to talk about how much they love the skyways. And, at this point, they’re not going anywhere. I suppose every half century or so, I can take a moment to grudglingly offer them my half-hearted appreciation.

So, here’s to you, Minneapolis skyway system. Happy birthday, I guess.

[The first ever baby picture of the Minneapolis skyways, c. 1959. Note the lack of climate control!]

Stuck with the Skyways

[Saint Paul's skyway has it worse than Minneapolis, b/c it lacks DT density.]

It’s no secret that the skyway system is one of my favorite topics. I love to think bout them because of they reveal the unintentional nature of our urban fabric, how ideas grow into buildings, and co-evolve with our social ways of life. As Churchill once said, “first we shape our buildings, and then they shape us.”

But the skyway system also throws a spotlight on how our cities always remain capital, private property in search of a profit. There is a common misconception about the skyway system where people seem to think that they’re neutral and altruistic, designed simply to keep people warm in the winter and dry in the rain.

Actually, skyways are all about increasing property values and maintaining control over private and public spaces. I wrote about this in a very wonky article for this blog way a few years ago, calling climate “a proxy for capital.” What that means is that the winter becomes a kind of facade for profit and property. The money quote (pardon the pun) is here, taken from a Geography dissertation all about the skyway system:

As one Minneapolis business owner put it, “if the public thinks they need protection from the weather let them. We’ll give them what they want as long as they keep spending money” (quoted in Byers 1998 160). 

In my earlier piece I compared the skyway to the Haussmannization of Paris in the 1870s, where the city became a space of contest and control aimed at creating spaces for the bourgeoning bourgeois. In other words, the city operated as a ground for class warfare.

[Calling for the end to skyways c. 1980.]

Semi-Public Space and Race

[Policing the street is far worse in downtown L.A.]

In working on today’s Minnpost piece, it started to become clear to me that kind of contestation is still going on. There’s long been a battle over downtown between property owners and the poor, bus riders and suburban commuters. Block E, the skyways, Gateway Park, the BID people, the Occupy movement, and many less visible things like ordinances and codes are all part of this struggle.

It is difficult truth to think through, forcing Minnesotans to confront race and class gap within the very spaces that make us proud. One potential casualty of the struggle for downtown is that it will no longer be a place where everyone feels welcome.

(For the state of downtown c. 2014, see Jim Walsh’s excellent and honest look at the diversity of downtown Minneapolis night life.)

For me, downtown is the only place where black and white, rich and poor, workers and clubbers, suburbanites and the homeless, tourists and locals might cross paths. Because the Twin Cities is so extremely socially and racially segregated, we need our downtown. What else is there?

[The 2012 Common Room "skyway tour" in the IDS Crystal Court.]

[My skyway tour getting kicked out of the IDS Crystal Court in Minneapolis.]

 
Improving the Skyways?

For the Minnpost piece I talked to tow people who have studied the skyway system over the years: Nancy Fischer, a professor of sociology at Augsburg College, and Jennifer Yoos, an architect for VJAA. They shared a few ideas for how to make the skyways more of a public place.
Yoos described the IDS center as the gold standard of how to design a good skyway. (That said, my skyway tour from a few years ago was kicked out of the “Crystal Court”, which closes around 8:00 or so.)

[Inside the Guthrie.]

“One good example is the IDS,” Yoos told me, “where the crystal court space for many years was kept intentionally empty. But they’ve changed it so that architecturally now it has benches and plants and a water feature. They’ve decided it benefits them to have it open to the public.”

“Another good example is the Guthrie,” Yoos continued. “Even though it isn’t ostensibly a skyway, the architect was interested in skyway ideas. It's intended to have space for people to sit whether or not they are going to a play. The whole central core is meant to be for the public and they encourage people to use the space.”

For her part, Fischer and her students, who did a class project on the Saint Paul skyway, thought that the skyway system should include more explicitly public activities and spaces.

“In the recommendations of our [final] report on the skyway, one of the recommendations we make is that skyways should be treated as public places,” Fischer told me. “They need to be places to ‘be in’ and not ‘move through.’ When the students did research on Canadian cities — Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal — from what they read about the concourses, those systems are treated more as places to ‘be in.’ They have fountains, artwork, shopping, and a lot of seating too. Just by marking a place with fountains, artwork, and seating, it’s marking a place as a place to ‘be in’ and not ‘move through.’”

“That was a recommendation,” Fischer told me. “There’s room for a lot of placemaking in the skyways. Our skyways aren’t very exciting for the most part the impressions they gave us was they’re beige or they’re grey with white walls. They are communicating that it’s a place to ;move through.’ It’s hard if I said that to a typical commuter. They’d go, ‘what else should they be?’ It’s hard if you’re in that place to reconceptualize that they might be something different.“

[Montreal's "underground" doesn't exactly seem like a public space utopia, but maybe the boundaries are more clear.]

Can Design Overcome the Private Property Bias?

To me, as nice as the Guthrie is, it’s no replacement for a sidewalk or a public park. But as I said in my Minnpost piece, we’re stuck with the skyways in both cities. So many of the post 1960 office buildings were explicitly designed with the skyways in mind, with interior courts and second-floor retail embedded right into the architecture. Those buildings will never be without skyways, and will be very difficult to “retrofit” to front the surface sidewalks. As long as we’re stuck with the skyways, Yoos’ and Fischer’s ideas seem like good ones.

Finally (and this could be the topic of a whole new conversation), there needs to be political leadership that forces property owners to respect the law and be more welcoming to the public. Technical regulations are useless if they're ignored. Hopefully, Mayor Coleman can take the lead on that in Saint Paul. He's gonna need help.

[The Rival House patio, the best attempt yet to retrofit a Saint Paul skyway-centric building to meet the street.]

TC Sidewalks Live! Downtown Minneapolis Skyway Tour

A week from Saturday, at 2pm on the 20th, I'll be hosting another Downtown Minneapolis skyway tour. Highlights will include the oldest skyway (i.e. the 2nd skyway in Minneapolis history), the longest skyway, the newest skyway (as close as we can get to it), the second newest skyway (formerly the "skyway to nowhere"), some "architecturally noteworthy" skyways, and of course the most soul-sucking skyway (location TBD, could be pictured at right, but I doubt it).
 
[See also Minneapolis Skyway Tour #1 and Minneapolis Skyway Tour #2.]

[2012 Minneapolis Skyway tour getting kicked out of the Crystal Court.]

Skyways are Minneapolis' most unique architectural feature, and are still a key point of contention between place-oriented urban planners, urban and suburban publics, and the business community. I pretty much hate them, but I think they prove a useful point about public and private space, and how those distinctions can be carefully constructed and rely on subtle social relationships.

Feel free to read up on skyways, as I've written a ton on this topic. Here are some highlights:

The Case Against Skyways in 10 Easy Steps
Happy 50th Birthday to the Minneapolis Skyway System
Four Suggested Skyway Improvements
Stuck With Skyways
Climate as Proxy for Capital in the Minneapolis Skyway System

We'll be starting in the IDS Center, right in the middle of the Crystal Court, which is not where the skyways began, but rather where they "peaked" as public space. Everything else is downhill.

[Facebook invite here.]

What: A guided tour of the downtown Minneapolis skyway system
When: Saturday afternoon, the 20th of February
Where: Meet at the IDS Center Crystal Court, and walk around from there
Why: Because the skyways are still there
Who: You can come! Feel free to buy your tour guide a drink afterward.

Here's some food for thought:

The Unwritten Rules of Skyway Etiquette, by Mark McGinty

1) Stay to the right.
2) Move quickly towards your destination in an orderly manner.
3) No zig-zagging.
4) No stopping to gawk at merchandise.
5) No stopping at all.
6) No looking at merchandise.
7) When traveling in groups, stay close together in tight little packs - do not walk side-by-side-by-side-by-side.
8) Keep the luggage to a minimum.
 9) No phone calls unless you're using an earpiece or headset in which case you kind of look like a D-Bag. 
10) By all means if you need to turn around, exit and enter somewhere else - do not just stop, turn around and start walking directly into the coming masses, people! 

Follow these rules and you will live longer!!!

[A William H. Whyte quote on the side of the IDS this winter.]

Please note that we'll be breaking all or most of these rules. (Sorry Mark!)

Did skyways "save downtown", as some people claim? Do skyways "ruin the city"? Should we tear them down or keep building more?

I look forward to seeing you.

I'm guessing the tour might be 90 minutes or so, though you're welcome to leave whenever you like. We'll be ending at one of the few skyway-connected downtown bars for after-walk mingling.

Some illustrative highlights follow:

[First renderings of the downtown Minneapolis skyway system, when they were open-air.]

[The Tri-Tech Office Building skyway under construction, and 32 years later.]

[R.T. Rybak reporting on skyway shade c. 1985.]

[Some friends and I picnicing in the Minneapolis skyway in 2015, which is something only white people can do.]

[Minneapolis bike cop taking his bike up a skyway escalator for some reason.]

[The newest skyways, going the new football stadium, under construction last fall.]