>David Brauer wrote: > Just the other week, I was biking back from Art-a-Whirl along Marshall > Street and I came by a statue I'd somehow missed before. The base simply > read "Pioneers." It was cool. It caught my eye because of its size, and > because there's a modern rambler behind it whose picture window is > pretty well blocked by the thing (what's it like to see the butts of > Pioneers every day from your picture window? Paging Chuck Haga.).
The Pioneers statue at Marshall and Main streets used to stand in Pioneer Square, where the Churchill Apartments are now and where its monumental scale was surely more at home. Along with the Main Post Office across the street and the old Federal Office Building nearby, Pioneer Square was part of the early (late '30s) block-clearing urban renewal of the Gateway District that the next generation finished off after the war. (Incidentally, Pioneer Square and Gateway Park appear to have been the kind of urban open spaces our downtown now lacks and Block E might have been -- not linear like the riverfront, pastoral like Loring, or stilted like most office plazas.) Not to worry about that Nordeast rambler having a PG-13 view out its picture window. On the monument's backside, a couple of strategic sheafs of wheat shield the rears of the looming pioneers. Below the wheat is a relief with several figures: maybe Father Hennepin, some trapper types, some Indians. You could call the style of the whole thing Nostalgic Capitalist Realist, which maybe describes Mary Richards as well. Speaking of Mary, and while we're bronzing pop culture icons, I have long advocated an equestrian statue of Bob Dylan in Dinkytown (style: Heroic Parochial Dada). I think there is room for it in the Hollywood Video parking lot, near the site of the Scholar, where Dylan played. But if the McKnight Foundation is too tied up in suburban traffic to fund memorials to urban culture, I'd be willing to scour city curbs on trash day for a big brass bed instead. Then Jason MacLean could suspend it inside his Dinkytown Loring Pasta Bar, at the approximate position of Dylan's second-floor room overlooking Positively Fourth Street SE. Chris Steller Nicollet Island-East Bank _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
