But this man, dressed in a neat suit (finance, likely), was clearly not dancing for anyone but himself. He spun around the pole one way, then the other, crouched to the ground, waved his hands around, wiggled his butt, and lip-synced the words to the silent beat. Those of us around him tried our best not to stare (simple subway etiquette) but we exchanged sly glances of amusement as we caught each others’ eyes. I marveled at his complete lack of self-consciousness.

In an unfortunate timing of events, at one point the dancer happened to let go of the pole at the exact moment the train lurched, throwing him into the lap of a young black man sitting five or six feet behind him. We all held our breath, expecting an angry outburst at the dancer’s carelessness. Instead, the the target of his trajectory doubled over and let out a loud, long belly laugh while the the rest of us joined in with relieved giggles. Aside from a quick “sorry”, the dancing man did not miss a beat; ignoring us all, he leapt right back to his pole and continued in his shimmying and shaking for the rest of the ride.

And here it is in 1920:

Ninety-three years ago, the church was being constructed. My house was built in the same year, so had the photographer turned a bit, he or she could have taken a photo of my house too. No such luck. The church was built by a Danish Lutheran congregation whose building in the nearby Seward neighborhood had burned down. That group has since moved on but the building serves the same purpose as it has since 1920 – as a small neighborhood church.

It isn’t the changes to the building that I find intriguing, but seeing a landscape with which I am so familiar before it was completely encapsulated by concrete and tamed with turf grass. It reminds me that my neighborhood was once a “wild” place with soil and trees and animals. It’s a similar feeling I get when I admire one of the many groves of stately oaks that are scattered throughout the neighborhood. While walking down a street, I sometimes happen to peek down an alley and am occasionally startled out of my thoughts by the sight of a half dozen ancient oaks stretching their branches like buttresses over homely garages and trash cans. I imagine the oaks were there first, providing shelter for deer and fox for centuries before the day that roads and streetcars and houses began to take their place. This is what this rephotograph reminds me: that while concrete may cover the landscape today and while we may have removed most traces of the former woodland or prairie, the seeds and soil are still under there somewhere, sleeping. Like a secret landscape beneath my feet.

I love the results and it really helped me get a better understanding of how the site had changed.

For the past month or so, I’ve been researching and writing about the history of a former industrial area just northeast of the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus – it’s part of a much larger project that the Design Center has been working on for years. More about that later. As I’ve been researching historic photographs, I came across this really fascinating photograph of a different part of campus which shows the Mississippi River and an area historically known as Bohemian Flats. 

If you aren’t familiar with the history of Bohemian Flats, what you are seeing in the bottom righthand corner is a neighborhood that was once home to a large population of immigrants, who began settling along the river flats in the 1860s. The land here was cheap and the residents found work in the nearby breweries and mills. When the river would rise in the spring, the entire neighborhood would flood – residents took it in stride and accessed their homes by boat. The large building on the right is the Heinrich Brewery. Another brewery operated on the north side of Bohemian Flats, behind the photographer in this image. For more historic photographs, including some really amazing ones showing kids rowing boats through the flooded streets, search for “Bohemian Flats” on the Minnesota Historical Society‘s online collection.

I’ve gotten to do some historical research on this area before, for earlier phases in this project and so I’ve seen many images of Bohemian Flats, but this particular one really struck me because it’s taken from a spot I frequently pass, so it’s quite easy to grasp the extreme changes that have taken place. But I wanted to document it. So I went to the Washington Avenue Bridge and re-photographed it.

What was once a dense residential neighborhood is now park land. University buildings currently stand along both river bluffs, including near the former brewery. Far in the distance, Interstate 94 crosses the Mississippi River.

What happened between the two photographs? The two breweries joined forces in 1891 and left the area to build the Grain Belt Brewery in northeast Minneapolis. Around 1900, the city of Minneapolis chose Bohemian Flats as the site for a river terminal. Eviction notices were issued to some residents starting in 1915 and by the 1930s most of the houses were gone. The flats housed a barge terminal and coal storage yard until the 1940s, until the upper locks and dams and the Upper Harbor Terminal were built upstream in the 1960s. In the 1980s, all of the infrastructure associated with the terminal was removed and the West River Parkway was extended along the Flats.

I love the stories these photographs tell. Stories of big ideas like how our relationship with the river has evolved in the past 200 years. I love that seemingly boring everyday landscapes like a riverside park hide secret pasts of immigrant neighborhoods and flooded streets. Re-photographing allows me to understand these stories better, to fix them in my mind, and to share them with others. I hope to do more.

Here are some of my favorites:

Up Helly Aa on Shetland Island, UK: Hundreds of people dressed as Vikings and carrying lighted torches form a procession through the darkened streets, singing Viking songs and following a Viking ship. After burning the ship in the harbor, they then spend the rest of the night singing, dancing, eating, and drinking. Everyone gets the next day off to recover.

Up Helly Aa procession and Viking boat by David Little, flickr

Fire Festival by colemic2006, flickr

Snow Light Path Festival(Yukiakarinomichi) in Otaru, Japan: This one looks particularly beautiful, celebrating the simple but breath-taking beauty of light and snow and ice. This historic city displays thousands of ice and snow lanterns on paths and streets – even floating in the canal – creating a “fantasy world after dark”.

Canal at the Otaru Snow Light Path Festival by LeeLeFever

Otaru Snow Festival by Tony Lin, flickr

Rørosmartnan: In the World Heritage mining town of Røros, Norway, residents celebrate folk cultural traditions on the streets in February with a marketplace, concerts and dances, cultural crafts, storytelling and bonfires in backyards, and horse-drawn sleigh rides. This one sounds particularly fun to me. It just looks so simple and homey and all about having fun outside with your neighbors in winter – and people seem to dress up in a lot of fur. Be sure to check out more photos on the official website. And side note: check out the village’s gorgeous building colors and green roofs in summer!

Horse sleds at Rørosmartnan by Sigmund, flickr

Røros market by Sigmund, flickr

Røros by Randi Hausken, flickr

The last winter festival today is one of the weirder ones I came across…

Frozen Dead Guy Days: In the small mountain town of Nederland, Colorado, this crazy festival was inspired by the strange but true story of a Norwegian man (“Grandpa”) who, when he died in 1989, was cryogenically frozen and shipped to Nederland, where he is still “cared for” (packed in dry ice) in a nearby shed. The festival consists of a series of rather creative competitions including coffin racing, polar plunging, frozen salmon tossing, a frozen t-shirt contest, snowy beach volleyball, and a Rocky Mountain oyster-eating contest. Supposedly some festival-goers even make a special visit to the shed each year to have a drink with Grandpa, (may he RIP).

Coffin Race by Jamie Gulick, flickr

Frozen Dead Guy Days Poster by J. Stephen Conn, flickr

Warehouse district by Ricardo Motti, flickr

Since I get most of my writing done at coffee shops, I can’t resist writing a bit about them when I find a good one. Today I’m writing from a new (for me) coffee shop, Corner Coffee just north of downtown Minneapolis. It’s located in Minneapolis’ Warehouse District, a former industrial area listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The beautiful old brick warehouses, designed predominantly in the Chicago Commercial style, once functioned as wholesale and storage for milling and manufacturing in Minneapolis. It was closely tied to the nearby railroad network that connected Minneapolis to the rest of the country. Now these gorgeous 6-story structures house architecture firms, upscale condos, art studios, and nice restaurants. Corner Coffee is tucked into the first floor of one such building and offers a cozy and friendly atmosphere with lots of nooks in which to work, chat, or read. Today there’s live music, an informal hootenanny with half a dozen musicians doing a decent rendition of “Take a Load Off Annie”. I recommend it as an informal office-away-from-office, especially if you want to get away from the typical residential neighborhood coffee shops and see a beautiful example of adaptive reuse of a historic district.

Corner Coffee

I’m immersing myself in winter right now. Research for the second phase of the park project (mentioned in the last post) is exploring how the neighborhood can embrace winter in the park, activating it year-round to keep out crime. I’ve been looking at how other cities in winter climates embrace – or at least cope with – the season of cold and dark and snow. Do they design buildings/streets/open space differently? How do they plan their public transit or bike infrastructure? What cultural practices are a response to winter’s negative aspects? How do they celebrate the positive aspects?

While reading about various towns in northern climates (and keeping Google maps handy to look up where they are) I came across some beautiful images of Kiruna, the northern-most city in Sweden. Kiruna is the epitome of a winter city. North of the Arctic Circle, the average daily high in January is 12 °F. To give you an idea of how cold that is, the average daily high in January in the Twin Cities is 21.9 °F.

Brr.

Kiruna certainly knows how to design for winter. Their church, or kyrka, has long sloping roofs that are not only lovely, but also handle large amounts of snow quite easily.

Kiruna kyrka by MontanNito, flickr

Months and months of snow and ice mean a landscape of white and grey. While lovely in itself, color becomes an important factor. The warm colors used on the buildings in the city center of Kiruna become even more vibrant in winter.

Kiruna town centre by Jacob Christensen, flickr

Colours of Kiruna by Andriy Baranskyy, flickr

Doors in Kiruna by Arvid Rudling, flickr

Even Stockholm, at the southern end of Sweden, whose winters are not nearly as ruthless, emphasizes color in the city.

Street in Stockholm by Rob de Wit, flickr

The texture and form of a simple stone wall can provide subtle beauty to the landscape, especially in winter.

Stone wall near Kiruna Church by Andriy Baranskyy, flickr

More findings to come….

I began this blog way back in 2007 with a three-fold intention: 1. get to know the Twin Cities better by visiting, and writing about, independent coffee shops in the metro area, 2. practice my writing, and 3. get into graduate school. It worked well for those purposes and I received encouraging feedback about the blog from many readers (thank you!). Obviously it’s been awhile since I’ve written here, again for three reasons: 1. I got into graduate school, 2. I was very busy while in graduate school, 3. I’ve since graduated and my interests in writing have changed. Coffee shops no longer hold my curiosity as a subject matter, but they are certainly great places to get some work and writing done (for example: I’m sitting in Peace Coffee on Minnehaha Avenue – love this place! Also wish they had more evening hours….).

Since graduating with a Masters in Landscape Architecture in 2010, I’ve been working as a research fellow at the Metropolitan Design Center in the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. We function as a small think tank/consulting non-profit, assisting communities and cities in the metro area with research, planning, and conceptual design on urban design projects. We’ve worked on streetscapes, parks, housing, greenway plans, and many other issues. I get to do research, create graphics, design a bit, and help with community workshops. I love what I do and I’d like to keep doing it.

My favorite part, aside from knowing that we are helping communities make good urban design decisions, is the research. I love immersing myself in interesting topics, figuring out how to communicate my findings to other people, and seeing how what I’ve learned can make a difference in real ways. For example, in 2011, we worked with a Minneapolis neighborhood to reduce crime in a nearby park. I got to research how crime evolves in parks and how neighborhoods can fight back. In a nutshell, we discovered that busy parks are safe parks and that neighborhoods need to “take back” their parks by making their presence known and using the space. Since learning this, the neighborhood has started a non-profit dedicated to the park and has programmed weekly events in the park. MPR did a story about the changes the neighborhood has made. I’ve heard that since then, crime has greatly diminished in the park.

This experience convinced me that research does not have to be a frivolous pursuit by a nerdy person sequestered in an academic vacuum that never sees the light of day beyond a library. It can have real and lasting impact on real world problems. And that is what interests me. That is what I’d like to continue doing.

While doing research, I come across many amazing resources, fascinating tidbits of history, and interesting facts or ideas. This collection of articles, photographs, graphics, and ideas about cities, culture, history, and the environment are just gathering digital dust in my computer. So I’d like to share some of what I’m learning here on Cafeapolis, because others might find it equally as interesting – or maybe even life-changing, who knows. In many ways the blog is for me: to help me practice my writing and to have a display case for what I find. If it is successful and evolves into something really worthwhile, I may transport it to a “real” blog with its own name and intent. But in the meantime Cafeapolis will now function as my virtual workspace and fun informal project. You are welcome to follow along with me!