"Streets, Skyways, and Shopping Malls" essay published in Wildsam Twin Cities Field Guide

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In this new essay I explore how the Minneapolis skyway system (beginning in 1962) was a superimposition of a white, suburban fantasy onto downtown Minneapolis—and how this architecture often failed to serve the city’s residents. I situate the privately-owned skyways as being built in the metaphorical shadow of Southdale, the world’s first indoor, climate-controlled mall that epitomized post-war, white flight-fueled suburbanization. I also look at how the skyways were the implicit antithesis to downtown’s former Gateway District, leveled between 1957 and 1963 with the help of federal “urban renewal” dollars.

Like Southdale, the skyways were implicitly (and sometimes even explicitly) not intended to be for everyone. They were designed primarily for white collar workers, often commuters, and served to buffer them both from nature’s elements as well as the city that existed below, all while contributing to the decline of street-level retail and vibrancy.

Alternating between first-person and omniscient voice, this essay speaks both to my experience growing up in Minneapolis and to my research findings. I ask visitors and residents alike to remember that a privately-owned skyway is not a public sidewalk, and a city is not a shopping mall.

You can read the essay in the new Wildsam Field Guide to the Twin Cities. (To be put on the email list for updates, including when the essay is available online, please visit my contact page.) When you pick up the book you’ll also find stories and interviews from other Twin Citians, including Sean Sherman, Andrea Jenkins, Jana Shortal, Junauda Petrus-Nasah, Kao Kalia Yang, Bill Lindeke, and many more. I am honored to be in the company of the folks featured in this book!