Barbara Lickness wrote:
It would be interesting to hear from some of the small town
transplants. I would like to know what it was
like moving to the big city and what it was that made you decide to stay
in the city versus the suburbs or
another small town.
What an irresistible invitation... thank you, Barb.
There was a time when Eden Prairie was "exurbia." As a young child my
family lived on the east side of Cty. Rd. 4, just south of Glen Lake --
I have no idea what name the road goes by today -- across the road from
the Ed Sidio hog and chicken farm. My older sister was allowed to cross
the road to get freshly dressed chickens and freshly laid eggs from Ed's
place. To the south of our house was a family, the Olsens, who raised
horses. I'd say "right next door" except that their house was almost 1/2
mile away. To the north and east of our house the terrain was completely
wooded as far as you could see. My brother, David, and me, spent many
wonderful hours tramping those woods. Our favorite secret spot was a
small pond, hidden well back in the woods. This is where we'd stretch
out on the ground, stomach side down, heads propped up on our elbows,
and wait for the deer to show up. Rarely were we disappointed.
Kindergarten, a progressive innovation in those days, was a long
bus-ride with my older sister who was in 7th grade. We both attended K-
8 school in a two story-building in Eden Prairie. I can still remember
the smell of the oil and sawdust that the sole janitor used on the wood
floors to keep them gleaming. By the way, this was in the mid-'50's, not
at the turn of the 20th century :)
During mid-childhood my family moved into suburbia, Minnetonka
township. Yes, township. Minnetonka wasn't a "city" until the late
'60's. It was a culture shock from which I've never recovered, in the
sense that it negatively shaped all of my opinions of urban vs. suburban
vs. rural. Though there were marshes to tramp, the wooded areas were too
small to let ones imagination soar with the possibilities of discovery.
The pressure to conform to a status-seeking, consumer-obsessed
mediocrity was suffocating. It was largely a haven for small business
owners -- read: Republican -- who valued respectability more than
justice. After spending some of the best years of my childhood trying to
fit in, I discovered in high schoold that it simply wasn't worth the
effort. I became a political and social rebel. I'll spare you the
details about this other then to say that Mark Dayton and I share one
life detail in common: we both have government files.
In addition to having had several idyllic years in Eden Prairie, I
had the good fortune to have relatives who farmed in North and South
Dakota. Summers were spent with my paternal grandmother on her small
farm southwest of Eureka, SD, as well as with an aunt and uncle on their
farm in ND. I consider it a special blessing that I received a thorough
grounding in where food actually came from, how to reach under a hen
just so in order to get her eggs without getting a painful peck on the
back of my hand, how to behead a chicken as well as dress it, how to
incubate new born chicks, how to help a heffer give birth to her calve,
how to milk a cow (and that wonderful smell of warm sweet milk going
into the pail between my legs), what a separator room was used for, how
milk was pasteurized, how cheese was made, how to cook on a wood stove,
how to make soap from pigs' fat, how delicious it felt to take that
once-a-week bath in the big metal tub in the wash house on Saturday
nights, the importance of having cats in the barns, the importance of
farmer co-ops in order to actually be able to make a living through
farming, the pleasure and excitement of taking the milk, cream, and eggs
to town on a Saturday to the co-op -- a major trip to the "city" and a
much-anticipated break from the solitariness of the farm, a time to meet
with other young people who were often relatives and always with
obviously German surnames like Oberlander, Oppenhiem, Zaulks,
Zimmermann, Brose, and Gretsch.
Knowing this about my history, one might think that I would be
totally averse to urban living; au contraire. During my teen years I'd
skip out of the suburbs as often as I could and either bus or hitchhike
into Minneapolis: to attend Socialist Worker Party meetings at the old
Pick-Nicollet Hotel on Hennepin Avenue, to go to the Cafe Extemp on the
West Bank to hear folk singers and to read the terrific graffitti on the
walls and to play chess, to try to avoid getting carded while attempting
to get into the bars at 7 corners and on the West Bank, to really
splurge by going to dinner at an Italian food restaurant in the lower
level of the Hotel Dyckman whose name escapes me (it was particularly
special because of the light from the candle-dripped bottles of Chianti
and the booths built into the stone walls with privacy curtains). And
yes, even an enchanted evening at the Flame Room in honor of a friend's
16th birthday eating a "fancy" meal and listening to the Golden Strings
-- Cliff Brunzel, founder of that group, had been my violin teacher for
a number of years and I remember turning quite red with an embarassment
peculiar to adolescence when he serenaded me and the rest of our table.
High school graduation was on a Thursday evening in early June. I
skipped the party in order to have all my belongings packed just right
for my move early the next morning from my parent's home in Minnetonka
to Minneapolis. (I've never lived in the suburbs again.) So where was my
first lodging in Minneapolis -- known by my parent's suburban neighbors
as "Sin City"? The Evangeline Residence, a multi-storied boarding
facility for "young ladies" run by the Salvation Army and situated
directly across the street from the NE corner of Loring Park (just a
block from Eitel Hospital to the south, and a block south of Hennepin
Avenue). In exchange for $18 a week I got 1/2 a room, furnished, as well
as breakfast and dinner meals for the entire 7 days, and they would pack
me a lunch Mon.-Fri. for an extra 50 cents/day. There was one hallway
phone to be shared by an entire floor. The ER has been gone for many
years, having been destroyed to make room for the creation of the Mpls.
Jr. college and technical institute.
Too poor as a college student at the U of MN to own a car, I fell in
love with Minneapolis while on foot and by bus -- even though people
were still allowed to smoke on the buses, which on days when the windows
were closed because of rain or cold, the air inside the buses was almost
insufferable. Over the years of being a student and through young
adulthood I lived in many neighborhoods in Minneapolis, learning the
history of each neighborhood where I lived: Dinkytown (especially the
Red School House and the Bijoux), Seward, St. Anthony East in lower NE,
upper NE near Columbia Heights park, Eliot Park, Loring Park (Bert
Berlow & I co-edited the 'Loring Park Crier' neighborhood newspaper;
Barbara Carlson came to our neighborhood meetings in her first bid to
become a Council member and often faced a hostile audience due to the
fact that our rents were being raised regularly with gentrification that
was just starting to take off in an area of town that was best known
because of its high population of gays -- known non-affectionately in
those more homophobic days as "queers" (though today, my gay friends
take perverse pride in calling themselves "queer"), Uptown, Kingfield,
East Harriet, and currently residing in soon-to-be-gentrified East
Phillips. After traveling to a number of major metropolitan cities as an
adult, I still fall in love with Minneapolis every time I return from a
trip. I've watched Minneapolis survive Charlie Stenvig, I've watched as
the NRP was inaugurated despite the fears of incumbent pols who were
certain that only more civic activists would be bred who would want to
assault their power bases by running for city office (some things never
change do they?), I've watched as Patty Hillmeyer, newly elected to the
MPRB, kicked off the reclamation of the Mississippi riverbank areas, I
watched as St. Anthony West came into being after numerous neighborhood
and city interest groups kicked out the sand & gravel operation on Boom
Island that had been there for many years and new housing could be
built, I participated in the neighborhood group in lower NE that was
successful in keeping I-394 from cutting through the lower part of NE
Mpls and thus further ruining our city neighborhoods as the construction
of I-35W had done, I've watched our city grow from having a sleepy small
town air about it -- like the most "exotic" food one could find was at
the Lincoln Del -- to a more cosmopolitan city with more restaurants
from more countries than I would have imagined possible when I first
moved into Minneapolis. Oh, and having restaurants that actually stayed
open past 9pm! When I first moved to Minneapolis at 18 the only late or
all-night restaurants were the Embers and one restaurant on the West
Bank (where the Hard Times Cafe currently resides) that served the best
eggs benedict in town until they were shut down by the city's Health
Department, now of course that distinction belongs to Al's Breakfast in
Dinkytown. (A bit of Dinkytown history trivia: I've eaten breakfast,
sometimes my lunch, at Al's since I was first introduced to it in the
mid-'60's by the college-age older sister of a friend of mine. Perhaps,
if you've never eaten at Al's, you're not aware that this place has been
written up by various regional and national food publications, including
'Gourmet' magazine.At a time when Al Bergstrom still worked the front
grill and Carol worked the back grill -- the garrulous but mostly
good-natured banter went back and forth between the two of them faster
then the food did, or the occasional thrown cooking utensil that Carol
was known for heaving in Al's direction when her temper got the better
of her. Then Carol quit after a particularly bitter dispute with Al; Al
retired and sold the place to Philip, his nephew. When Philip's
wanderlust got the better of him, he attempted to turn Al's into a
worker cooperatively owned operation so that he could more freely travel
the world. This arrangement didn't last all that long before Philip
sold it to three partners, Jim, Doug & Steve, all of whom had worked at
Al's for some time. Just a few years back, Steve sold out his share to
Jim & Doug in order to fnish grad school in a timelier fashion.)
I would be the first to admit that I have engaged, from time to
time, in suburb bashing. I still do not fully comprehend why people
would freely choose to live there -- it's like a netherworld that is
neither here nor there, a state of limbo. I appreciate that for some
people, especially following WWII, that suburbia was the symbol of what
second generation immigrant children held as desirable: it was tidy in
its layout, everything was tamed including one's lawn, the chain stores
and restaurants represented a known quantity - there was nothing
unstable or unpredictable, one always knew what to expect to find on the
menu and they knew that they could pronounce it. It represented safety
from the sometimes chaotic, sometimes noisy, sometimes dirty, sometimes
unruly tumult of the big city. But today, there are third and fourth
generation Americans living in suburbs -- and that is something that
doesn't make sense to me. So I have learned to shrug my shoulders in a
decidedly non-Parisian manner and mutter: se le vie.
In closing, I will also admit that if I do not get out of the city
2-3 times a year to drive west and savor the expanse of the Dakotas, I
get edgy and irritable. I've concluded that while my heart belongs to
Minneapolis, my soul belongs on the prairie. Yet Minneapolis will always
remain the center of what I affectionately call middle earth ala J. R.
R. Tolkien, the midwest, and that's the way I like it to be.
Jenny Heiser
East Phillips/Ward 6-8
With apologies for the length of this posting.
