Hennepin is two-way again and Shinders is gone, so much changes, so much stays the same.
The holidays are past and normalcy has been reestablished. The skyways are quiet. Minneapolis has a second level that becomes the only means of getting around the city in the winter. The extensive skyway system is a fun place to explore; the styles way wildly, over by the government building they are scary modernist things resembling the set design from Kubrick’s 2001. This is the skyway between the Target Center and Block E. It looks like a cantilevered bridge, but the cables are for show: you can see them sag in the summer.
This view from the skyway caught my eye at first because the reflection and small panes of the windows created a foreground layer and clearly separated the viewer from the scene. Then I realized the matching grid in the design of the Target Center facade. The reflection is of the new Target Field so the summer and winter sports are contrasts as well. I then positioned the large pillar in the middle to split the two buildings, the new Target Center and the old Butler Square warehouse.
Back to the streets again for the Parade. Friday night is definitely busier than Thursday. The streets filled up pretty quickly, you can tell that this photo is from before the parade because the lights are still on. Just before the parade begins, they cut the street lights and the bus shelter lights, but the Christmas lights on the trees stay on.
It’s very different with the lights on, the lights on the big buildings light up the low clouds so it almost feels like you are indoors on Nicollet, ‘cept of course for the bitter cold.
A standard winter weekday in my fair city. the last snowfall wasn’t the storybook fluffy stuff, it was more like sugar and in clumped up and stuck to everything. No matter how much they plow, it won’t come up. I like that his part of Minneapolis has several streets that are misaligned. The downtown street grid is actually 45 degrees off-kilter, so off in the corners where it meets the normal grid, the streets don’t line up so good.
