The city

For reasons unknown I feel an almost magnetic allure to the gritty, industrial, smoke stack cities of America. Non tourist traps such as Indianapolis, Cleveland, Billings, Trenton, Gary, Detroit, Cheyenne, Bozeman, Milwaukee, Boise, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia have stories to tell.

Minneapolis (LINK), where we live, has a distinctive whiff of grain, oil, grease and human sweat. Less evident these days for sure but downtown buildings like The Lumber Exchange, The Grain Exchange, the freight railroads that criss-cross Minneapolis like slash marks from the paws of a ferocious bear and the grain elevators that make their home without public protest in the midst of residential neighborhoods all point to a past where human effort and the infrastructure of man’s toil; brutalist architecture, came first, conventional aesthetics and appearance second. But time has rusted the steel, yellowed and cracked the paint, crumbled the bricks and rotted the wood. However, beauty has become the by-product, an accident, of a city that doesn’t concern itself with the maintenance of a once unsullied exterior. Do it once, do it right seems to have been the manifesto.

We’ll not discuss the strip mall and fast food franchise (LINK) epidemic that dooms both rural and urban America to an identically and disorientating future. For now cities like Minneapolis are safe as developers have their eyes set on the suburbs whose population’s insatiable appetite for “stuff” perpetuates a spread outwards, not inwards, leaving the heart of the city beating strong, but slowly decaying (LINK), much to my pleasure.