Sidewalk of the Week: Chicago Avenue and 38th Street

If you delve deep enough into south Minneapolis, far  from the leafy green edges and the glittering lakes, if you find a way to bridge the pair of freeways that run like impassible pincers south through the city, you find yourself in a vast yuppie desert. It is a land filled with people of all walks and colors, from all over the world. There in the central swath, cut off from the fancy homes of the waterfronts, Powderhorn Park sits like a gem on old jewelry, the neck in the emerald necklace, a mid-city oasis cloaked in a patina. The sidewalks of Powderhorn run crackling off, and if you follow their paths old streetcar stops fan out before you, each one a character like old men repeating half-remembered stories.

Running just south and east from the park, two main streets come together like shoelaces to form one of the finest of these.  38th Street is key path East and West, joining the far-off river to the Uptown lakes and rose gardens. Chicago Avenue runs South toward a cozy creek lined with green yards, and North straight to downtown past two of the city's biggest hospitals. All those places seem far away. A church steeple rises in the distance, and a classic streetcorner closes in. 

You hear stories told in cities of how artists change things, how they appear one day with paintbrushes and hammers to make new the old buildings and plant seeds of future cities. On the sidewalks of Chicago Avenue, you’ll find such a place, a corner on the very knife edge of creation. Though they're never so simple, such urban legends seem true here. You can literally tell, house by house and building by building,  whether they are part of the before or the after picture. One on side: a bright and fenestrated coffee shop abutting an alley, the city’s most famous street photographer (Wing Yung Hiue’s) art gallery, a boutique "consignment" furniture shop and its eggshell teal sidewalk sign with a bird on it, a large re-used building transformed into a studio for the “fire arts,” which I'm told runs the gamut from glass blowing to blacksmithing.

[Covet Home Consignment, with Hiue's Thirdspace gallery in the background.]

[Blue Ox Coffee and its alley.]

[The window of the Fire Arts Center.]

[Do not sit on produce rack.]

On the other side: a custom T-shirt shop, a barber salon / tattoo parlor, a muraled Mexican restaurant, and Cup Foods, the shop with the best of the city’s typo names (Edna Realty and Super USA being other obvious candidates). Cup Foods is a thing to itself, absolutely covered with signs. To step inside is enter a world of the unexpected, one of those kaleidoscopic chambers that keeps changing, growing, expanding as you walk through it. Racks of dried fruit and nuts stand next to a well-staffed island with glinting and mysterious electronic gadgetry (for some reason), and a decent enough produce section that more often serves as a bench, overlooked almost to the point of expiration.

Between the two sides, pregnant newcomers and patient locals, lie non-profits – the Aliveness Project or Lavender Magazine –  while the Super America sits on the corner pumping its gas, still the only place anyone's likely to notice.

[Dealz tee shirts.]

[The binary building of Tip-Top Haircut and Quality Body Art.]

[An empty red building waiting for a tenant.]

It's remarkably easy to break down the neighborhood like this, to make sides and divide. I imagine those in the area feel the same; nobody frequenting Cup Foods would step into Blue Ox Coffee (and vice versa). But it seems to me there’s a lot in common here too, that the glassblower and the t-shirt printer share a devotion to creation, a white knuckled grip on an uncertain future. I imagine everyone in a five-block radius is their own boss. This is the land of making your own way, bootstrapsburg, and the main difference between the two sides lies in aesthetics – font choice, color palette, attention to detail – the deepness of race and culture, and one’s ability to get grants. (Also, as I write this, another difference appears: no older places have websites.)

The other common thread is the mural. Almost every building sports one, almost every surface bears a pictured imaginary. The Mexican restaurant has a cityscape foregrounding transit and a lake, a transect fading to a rolling countryside. Another seemingly empty building sports an abstract honeycomb’d grid reminding me of a soccer ball. Cup Foods displays a cliché'd rural landscape abutting their alley. Best of all, the auto shop on the corner explodes into a million colors like Van Gogh on LSD.

 [Four murals of Chicago Avenue.]

[The Piping Industry Development Council marks an empty doorway.]

Empty buildings sit here like kindling, waiting to launch into entrepreneurial space. I get the sense that neighborhoods like this overflow with community, albeit of different valences and types. The bonds of being on the edge. I am greeted on the sidewalk more than once, and this feeling seems spurred by its exposure, by the shared excitement of the precipice, the way cold weather fosters tolerance or camping generates memories. These sidewalks tell a tale of low rent and high hopes, the very things that make cities come to life. They are sidewalks of change, and you can read them backward and forward in time.

Sometimes these transitions go badly. But if any place can make just progress, I would bet on this one. Hiue's art has been devoted to recognizing diversity for decades, to bridging difference and starting difficult conversations. 38th and Chicago has a exposure to it, a sincerity that seems to me a good omen, a forgotten place soon remembered.

[A bright grey winter afternoon on Chicago Avenue.]