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SPEAKER_09: The skyways of course are the glass enclosed above ground tunnels that connect our buildings. Because if you go outside in the winter, you will die. That's right. And they're like a human habit trail.
SPEAKER_08: Habit Trail is the brand name of literal hamster tubes, and that's a pretty good description.
SPEAKER_11: That's reporter and Minneapolis lifer Katie Thornton.
SPEAKER_08: Walk along almost any downtown street in the Twin Cities and you'll see a series of these enclosed glass bridges tying together huge office buildings and shopping centers. Thanks to the skyways, you can park in a heated garage, go into work, run some errands, maybe go to the gym, all in short sleeves on a minus 20 degree day. People legitimately brag about how many weeks they can go without stepping foot outside.
SPEAKER_11: Minnesota Minneapolis has the oldest and largest contiguous skyway network in the world. There are nearly 10 miles of totally enclosed climate-controlled pedestrian bridges, and downtown St. Paul has its own massive system.
SPEAKER_08: The skyways are integral to the Twin Cities sense of self. Amy Klobuchar was made Miss Skyway of March 1988, for which he was awarded a free month's worth of jazzercise glasses and an 8x10 color portrait from a skyway accessible photography studio.
SPEAKER_11: This was also the time the St. Paul Skyway system was turned into a mountain bike racecourse.
SPEAKER_07: The one mile course wound through narrow corridors down staircases around hairpin turns, and you can see participants didn't all face makeup. It's okay, we're told by the way.
SPEAKER_08: And then, as many Minnesotans of a certain generation will remind you, there's the 1992 children's hockey movie masterpiece, The Mighty Ducks. Push!
SPEAKER_03: Keep your knees bent!
SPEAKER_04: Side to side!
SPEAKER_08: Good! Follow me! There's a beloved scene in particular, where coach Emilio Estevez and his ragtag team of kids meet downtown to train on rollerblades, also a Minnesota invention. The kids fly through the busy skyways, struggling to stay upright on their blades, while well-dressed shoppers with arms full of gift-wrapped packages leap out of the way.
SPEAKER_11: After all, whose inner 10-year-old wouldn't want to whiz through a glittering metropolis in the sky?
SPEAKER_03: I think there's an initial love that comes from the skyways of wonderment. People look at them and think, wow, this is so special.
SPEAKER_08: Bill Lindeke is an urban geographer and writer in the Twin Cities. Bill gives architectural tours of the skyways, and he says the visitors on his tours are justifiably impressed. The whole skyway system comes across as a grand civic achievement.
SPEAKER_03: There's something marvelous and futuristic about the best parts of the skyways, where you really feel like we as a society have transcended something. And especially in wintertime, that feels marvelous and triumphant.
SPEAKER_11: Futuristic. Triumphant. It sounds almost utopian. A cozy microcity within the city, where you and other twin citizens can look down at the icy street beneath you, smug in your short sleeves, and collectively laugh in the face of winter.
SPEAKER_08: There's just one problem, at least from Bill's perspective.
SPEAKER_03: Well, I hate them. I think that they make downtown almost unredeemable, and I really wish that we could start taking them down one by one.
SPEAKER_11: A lot of people love the skyways, but others want them gone. In fact, over the years, architects and urban planners from all over the world have said that the Twin Cities need to tear the skyways down.
SPEAKER_08: Bill and other skyway antagonists have plenty of reasons behind their opposition. For them, it has to do with who gets to be in the skyways and who doesn't, and also what the skyways have done to harm the streets below.
SPEAKER_11: The skyways haven't always attracted this kind of criticism. In the beginning, long before people like Bill Lintakee turned against them, they were heralded as the salvation of a struggling downtown.
SPEAKER_08: In the 1950s, Minneapolis, like many cities across the country, was trying to stay lively or even occupied in the post-war era of white flight. Downtown shops suffered as city residents began moving to the quiet expanse of the burbs.
SPEAKER_11: But on top of this national trend away from downtowns, Minneapolis retailers faced another challenge. In 1956, in a fancy new suburb seven miles southwest of downtown Minneapolis, something happened that changed everything about how people shopped.
SPEAKER_12: Minnesota, the Twin Cities, we are literally the birthplace of the enclosed mall. Allison Kaplan is a retail reporter and the editor-in-chief of Twin Cities Business Magazine.
SPEAKER_08: And she says the world's first indoor climate-controlled shopping mall in Edina, Minnesota, took not just the Twin Cities, but the world by storm. It was called Southdale Center.
SPEAKER_12: Let's be honest, we all know it gets cold in Minnesota. And so it was about creating this amazing experience where you could park, go inside, and spend hours.
SPEAKER_11: Southdale had 74 stores across three stories. Plastic foliage promised greenery in all four seasons. There was a center plaza called the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, featuring a 21-foot vertical birdcage.
SPEAKER_08: The place even had its own Christmas jingle.
SPEAKER_00: Everyone's shopping at Southdale for Christmas. Shopping at Southdale is fun. They've got oodles of toys for the girls and boys. At Southdale, there's something for everyone.
SPEAKER_08: Southdale was an instant hit with consumers. And in the years that followed, a ring of indoor malls would come to surround Minneapolis and St. Paul.
SPEAKER_03: They're all called the Dales. So you have Ridgdale, Southdale, Brookdale. There's probably more Dales I'm not remembering.
SPEAKER_11: Over the decades, more and more shoppers and businesses would decamp from the city to the suburban oasis. But in the late 1950s, a loose alliance of Minneapolis developers, business owners, and city officials began formulating plans to lure people back to downtown.
SPEAKER_03: So they kind of threw lots of things at the wall to see what sticks.
SPEAKER_08: And they came up with a bunch of ambitious and sometimes wacky ideas, most of which never happened. One proposal would have installed a bunch of pedestrian underpasses so that shoppers wouldn't have to contend with or contribute to downtown's horrible traffic problem. While an opposite proposal envisioned sinking all the thoroughfares below the ground level so that the surface streets would be just for pedestrians.
SPEAKER_11: But the idea that ended up sticking was arguably the most ambitious and wacky of them all. And it was the brainchild of a far-sighted Minnesotan named Leslie Park.
SPEAKER_03: Park to me epitomizes the waspy business type that Minneapolis was famous for.
SPEAKER_08: Park was one of the city's largest property holders and a strict religious conservative.
SPEAKER_03: For example, he owned hotels and restaurants, but he would set aside all of the income that he got from liquor sales and put them in a separate fund and give that to charity because he felt it was immoral to profit off of vice.
SPEAKER_08: It also appears that he didn't like the kinds of things that cities were associated with, like smells and crowds and street-level chance encounters.
SPEAKER_11: So Park took a cue directly from the family-friendly suburbs in their clean indoor malls and added a twist, an architectural innovation that would allow downtown shoppers to stroll from building to building without ever hitting the pavement.
SPEAKER_08: He got the city to grant him air rights, not just for the building he was constructing, but for the street in front of it. And once the building was finished, like a lot of other places downtown, it had a handful of stores on the first floor. It also has an almost 19th century Parisian arcade style second floor, except with silvery
SPEAKER_03: glass and steel ceilings and walls.
SPEAKER_08: And jutting out of the second floor shopping area was a big, glass-enclosed, climate-controlled bridge, the first Skyway.
SPEAKER_11: A Skyway that conveniently led to the second floor of another building that Leslie Park owned.
SPEAKER_03: And so what had been the second floor, the least valuable part of the building is now more retail corridors that people can walk through and becomes much more valuable than it used to be.
SPEAKER_11: And that transformation of the second floor into a space for pedestrians and workers would itself end up transforming the Twin Cities.
SPEAKER_08: It took a few years for everyone to catch on, but Leslie Park's Skyway eventually proved to be a win-win. Consumers discovered that it provided the indoor shopping experience they were clamoring for, while developers realized it potentially doubled the amount of space buildings could devote to retail.
SPEAKER_11: In the following decade, downtown building owners started making agreements with their neighbors across the street to build their own Skyways, a process that only accelerated in 1972.
SPEAKER_03: I like to think of it as the moment where the Skyway system became sentient, where it achieved its own critical mass.
SPEAKER_11: That year, the IDS Center opened in downtown Minneapolis. Designed by Philip Johnson, it was the tallest building in the state, and soon radiating out in all four directions from its beautiful glass-walled central shopping and dining court were Skyways. It quickly became the city's central hub.
SPEAKER_12: That was kind of the moment that there was hope that, okay, the entire Skyway system is going to come together so that you're not just going to one shopping area. You could go to, you know, five blocks worth of shopping destinations without ever going outside. The suburbs can't compete with that.
SPEAKER_08: In Minneapolis, Skyways became a given in any new construction. And impressed by the new indoor development in their sister city, St. Paul officials started developing their own city-run Skyways system. Everyone wanted to be on the second floor. Even classic downtown mom and pop shops and shoe shines moved to the Skyway level, and customers followed.
SPEAKER_11: Within a few years, the average downtown worker in Minneapolis and St. Paul was spending twice as much money as their counterpart in other cities during their lunch break. In the Skyways, it was just so easy to buy things, uninterrupted. You could walk to the food court for lunch, get your shoes shined along the way, pick up a gift or a new watch, all without stopping for traffic or putting on your coat. The cities had gone upstairs.
SPEAKER_08: But the Skyways offered more than just a hypnotic ability to make workers spend more money.
SPEAKER_10: Everything that you would have on the ground floor was scattered throughout downtown at the Skyway level as well, which was awesome.
SPEAKER_08: James Garrett Jr. is an architect in downtown St. Paul. He lives and works in buildings connected by the Skyways. And as a kid in the 1980s, the Skyways were his happy place.
SPEAKER_11: Or as James would say, his awesome place.
SPEAKER_10: When I was growing up, there was a movie theater on the Skyway, which was awesome. There was a park connected to the Skyway with indoor plants and trees, and you could walk around and go up this ramp. And I mean, it was like a waterfall there, and it was awesome.
SPEAKER_08: In the Skyways, James would go to restaurants and pool halls and record stores, even a mini golf course. And beyond just the shops and parks, James's teenage architect brain was taken with the physical structures themselves. So after all the stores and restaurants had closed for the evening, he and his friends would meet up to explore every nook and cranny, finding the dead ends and the transfer points.
SPEAKER_10: And we're walking around, we're seeing how far we could go before it ends. And then, you know, can you get up and down? Do these doors open? How do you, you know, you're just figuring out the system.
SPEAKER_11: Even today, the Skyways can be hard to navigate, but James and the other kids knew the system better than anyone. So when James was 15, they were actually hired by the director of the Skyway YMCA.
SPEAKER_08: In the summer and on weekends, James and his friends would approach confused looking visitors with maps and pens and help them out. They had a booth. They even served as couriers running packages across downtown through the Skyways with no street lights or icy sidewalks to trip them up.
SPEAKER_10: And there's about 10 of us, another African American kid, a couple white kids from West Seventh Street, three or four Hmong kids. And it was like the best job ever.
SPEAKER_08: When they weren't working or catching a movie, they found secret Skyway spots where they could watch the buses come in from all different directions. And that came in handy, not just in the winter, but whenever they dressed up to go out for a party during the hot, muggy nights of summer. And so you've got your brand new shirt on, you got your little gold herringbone chain
SPEAKER_10: with your name on it, and you've got your feel of sneakers or whatever, and you know, you're doing your thing. And you don't want to be all sweaty and all that kind of stuff when you get to the party. So you knew that if you get in the building, you could go up into the Skyway, it's climate controlled in there. And when the bus that you were trying to get on was close enough, then you could run down the escalator and get outside and get on the bus in time.
SPEAKER_11: James and his friends always showed up to parties looking unseasonably sharp. And it was all thanks to the Skyways.
SPEAKER_08: James left for college in 1990. And he says he honestly didn't give the Skyways too much thought while he was away. After all, it wasn't like they were going anywhere.
SPEAKER_10: But I started to notice that by the time I came back in 1995, after I graduated and I moved back home, that, you know, I would go downtown or whatever to get in the Skyway. It was a different vibe. And there was just fewer people. There was just like a lot fewer people. And you know, it was pretty dead.
SPEAKER_08: James noticed there were a lot more white collar workers than there were kids from nearby neighborhoods. There was also an increased police and security presence, to the point where the Skyways stopped being fun, or even comfortable, especially for young black men like James.
SPEAKER_10: It was more, you know, everybody's kind of watching their back and, you know, looking side to side. And yeah, it just it, it was pretty clear that it was just like, we have to make the Skyways feel safe for suburban people. Because that's what ultimately it was for.
SPEAKER_08: And of course, it's true. That was what the Skyways had always been for. A way for property owners to lure people back from the suburbs by replicating what was working in suburban malls, like Southdale.
SPEAKER_11: But back in the era of white flight, when the Skyways were built, those suburban malls hadn't been for just anyone.
SPEAKER_03: Suburbs would have de facto covenants that made it almost impossible for a person of color to buy a home. And so that was, that sort of set the tone for how suburbs grew in the Twin Cities. In the suburb of Edina, the very same place where the Southdale Mall was located, there
SPEAKER_11: were people who boasted as late as the 1960s that the town did not have a single black resident.
SPEAKER_08: But as the Twin Cities grew more diverse, James says the Skyways were still trying to serve their original white suburban demographic.
SPEAKER_10: And it was really, I think, in the 90s that the crackdown started to happen, maybe the mid 90s, where it was made clear to us by the way that we were policed and by the way that the security followed us around and sort of, you know, profiled a lot of us that we weren't supposed to be there. It wasn't really for us.
SPEAKER_08: Even in the quote unquote good years, James says he and his friends were sometimes followed in stores, questioned by security guards, even shouted at over loudspeakers.
SPEAKER_10: And so there was this tension between knowing that we weren't really wanted, but then, you know, sort of giving a middle finger to that and saying, well, I'm gonna be here anyway because I can be.
SPEAKER_11: And from the Skyways inception, well before James and his friends started feeling unwelcome, the Skyways had been keeping out a long list of other people who didn't fit the white collar suburban mold.
SPEAKER_03: There used to be a really big Skid Row in downtown Minneapolis that was located right by the public library.
SPEAKER_08: Bill Lindeke says that Skid Row was just one part of a historic downtown that's now been largely forgotten. Similar with itinerant workers coming in from surrounding areas, it featured rooming houses, bars, and a large public park. But between 1958 and 1965, the same period when Leslie Park was building the first Skyway just a few blocks away, the city of Minneapolis used federal money earmarked for urban renewal to get rid of Skid Row.
SPEAKER_03: So the Gateway Urban Renewal Project basically leveled all of the buildings from First Street to six or eight blocks to the east. And without exception, every historic building in that area got torn down.
SPEAKER_11: In the end, one third of downtown Minneapolis was demolished, including the park, and replaced with more office buildings. The other thing it was replaced with was lots and lots of parking.
SPEAKER_03: So if you look at photos from this period, you'll see one or two modern office buildings, and then you'll see blocks and blocks of surface parking lots next door.
SPEAKER_08: And a lot of these parking lots were connected to the office buildings by Skyways, meaning commuters never needed to set foot near a rowdy bar or a panhandler if they didn't want to. So the Skyways were a place to escape the weather.
SPEAKER_03: They're also a place to escape the old street life of downtown Minneapolis.
SPEAKER_11: Once it was assumed that new buildings would be connected on the second floor, architects and planners began a long trend of designing away from parks and outdoor areas and toward indoor spaces. They turned their back on the street.
SPEAKER_08: Instead of facing the sidewalk, shops and new skyscrapers opened up on the inside, like at a mall. And since the Minneapolis Skyways were privately owned, the developers had no obligation to be welcoming. The entrances to the system were often obfuscated in high-end hotels or expensive street-level stores.
SPEAKER_03: People complained all the time about how it was hard to get in and out, but this was seen as a feature, not a bug by many people in the Skyways system because it also kept out folks you maybe didn't want to have in your office buildings or in your department stores.
SPEAKER_08: Every now and then, architectural consultants hired by one of the cities would suggest ways to improve Skyway access. But some property owners said easier entrances would bring the so-called wrong element into the Skyways. Others said there just wasn't enough money.
SPEAKER_12: And there are multiple sketches through the years of, you know, staircases coming down to the street from the Skyways that just never materialized.
SPEAKER_11: If you went into downtown Minneapolis, you could see people walking directly above you, but often have no clue how to get up there. And even if you did make it into the Skyways, finding your way around could be an off-putting experience if you weren't a Skyway person.
SPEAKER_12: It could be a maze, and if you didn't know how to get from the interior of one building with stores to another, you know, you could be walking around in that maze for hours.
SPEAKER_03: And there's almost nowhere to stop or pause or rest. There's very few benches, and there are unwritten rules to the Skyways as a result.
SPEAKER_08: Even today, stopping in a Skyway to look out the window or get your bearings can result in the people behind you walking right into you because you aren't really supposed to stop. It just might give you a look, as if you're not supposed to be there.
SPEAKER_11: In Minneapolis, the Skyways have always been privately owned, an agreement between two building's landlords. So lingering too long in the passageway can get you cited for trespassing on private property. St. Paul's system is technically public, but they still mostly connect privately owned office buildings and shopping centers and are monitored by both private security and police. So in practice, the two city systems have both grown to feel like restricted spaces that aren't particularly welcoming to anyone besides the downtown's mostly white, mostly white-collar commuters.
SPEAKER_08: In one infamous incident from recent years, the St. Paul police stopped and tased a black man picking up his two children from their Skyway-connected daycare for sitting on a bench in the lobby of an office building. You know, they literally like followed him and chased him down through like two different
SPEAKER_10: Skyways and he wasn't doing anything.
SPEAKER_03: And that's the fundamental problem with the Skyways. Are they for everyone or are they just for certain people in the city?
SPEAKER_11: And that fundamental problem hasn't just impacted the people being kept out because over time, as the Skyways grew less appealing to anyone who didn't work there, anyone who didn't work there stopped going.
SPEAKER_08: In the early 90s, fewer people began using the Skyways to do weekend shopping or enjoy nighttime entertainment, just as building owners became less inclined to attract non-workday crowds. So James, back from college on school breaks, watched as most of the evening-oriented attractions that he and his friends had loved began to disappear.
SPEAKER_10: The mini golf place closed. The pool hall that used to play cool music, that place closed.
SPEAKER_08: And then the movie theater shuttered. I think for me, that was just the one that I was just like, oh man, I can't, closing
SPEAKER_10: the theater? What? You can't do that.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, and remember the indoor park, the one with the waterfall?
SPEAKER_03: I also went there. I remember it fondly. It's now abandoned and the glass ceiling is leaking and there's a sign that says no trespassing and they've sealed it off with a couple of cones. So it's all gone.
SPEAKER_11: Today the Skyways mostly cater to the nine to five crowd with shops that close by six and restaurants that serve only lunch. In Minneapolis, most of the Skyways themselves closed by early evening. And as for life on the first floor, what's left on the street below, you have your parking
SPEAKER_03: ramps, smokers, bus stops. Not much else to be honest.
SPEAKER_08: This might be the ultimate irony of the Skyways. They were never intended to be equitable spaces, but developers had intended for them to save downtown retail. Only the revitalization never materialized.
SPEAKER_11: Because even if the Skyways weren't popular enough to keep people downtown in the evenings, they were popular enough to keep them away from street level businesses during the day.
SPEAKER_08: Even on sunny days, hundreds of thousands of people would stay inside the Skyways. And as more businesses moved to the second floor, the streets below grew eerily still.
SPEAKER_11: By the mid 1980s, 90% of St. Paul's retail was on the second story, leaving the first floor of the city gutted.
SPEAKER_12: And then the Mall of America opened.
SPEAKER_08: If Southdale Center was a disaster for the downtowns, the opening of the Mall of America in 1992 was like Armageddon. It was one of the largest malls in the world. As of today, it's the largest in North America, and it attracted consumers in record numbers. This time, even Minneapolis's most beloved fictional characters abandoned the Skyways.
SPEAKER_11: When the Mighty Ducks 2 came out, the new film featured a scene of the team rollerblading not through the Skyways, but through the Mall of America, right in front of the mall's very own indoor rollercoaster.
SPEAKER_08: Between the Mall of America and the Moorabund streets, a lot of the high-end shops in downtown Minneapolis couldn't hold on. And the downtown closures have continued through the 90s, the early 2000s, and up to the present.
SPEAKER_12: Brayton Barrell and Polo Ralph Lauren and Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. And they're all gone. They're all gone.
SPEAKER_08: The most recent big one came in 2017, when downtown Minneapolis's last classic department store, Macy's, also closed down.
SPEAKER_12: Which is really a blow to have a downtown without a department store, right? You know, it's just kind of like one of those, you know, pillars of a city.
SPEAKER_11: Losing Macy's was an especially hard hit because it was housed in the building that had once been Minneapolis's premier homegrown department store, Dayton's. The store had anchored downtown shopping since the early 1900s.
SPEAKER_08: Allison was so upset by the store's closure that she actually tried to save it. She publicly asked her friend Eric Dayton, whose family had owned the original store, if they would buy back the building and turn it into a modern mix of retail and restaurants.
SPEAKER_12: And Eric Dayton responded on Twitter and said, I will buy the building, Ali, if you tear down the skyways.
SPEAKER_11: Tearing down the skyways isn't something Allison can do. Technically it's up to all the individual property owners who have skyways connecting their buildings in Minneapolis. In St. Paul, it's up to the city government. But in both cities, the process would be long, hard, and bureaucratic.
SPEAKER_08: But try telling that to Bill Lindecky.
SPEAKER_03: We could flood them all and turn them into aquariums. That would be interesting.
SPEAKER_08: Bill thinks that unless they're removed, the Twin Cities skyways will continue to wreak havoc on their downtowns.
SPEAKER_03: I think the skyways harm the most appealing thing about a downtown, which is its density, its diversity, its connectivity, and the idea that you could go there and discover something new. And it's just so much harder to do any of that with a skyway system in place.
SPEAKER_11: Meanwhile, there are plenty of bustling neighborhoods in the Twin Cities known for their culture, attractions, and street life, even in winter. Proving that Minnesotans will spend time outside in the cold weather if given a chance. They might even spend that time outside in shorts. Those people are crazy.
SPEAKER_08: But for now, people like Bill who want to tear down the skyways system face a steep uphill battle. Because for all their faults, the skyways remain popular.
SPEAKER_03: Very few people agree with me about this. You talk to people who work or live downtown Minneapolis or just visit from time to time and everyone loves the skyways.
SPEAKER_11: The Lonely Life of Bill Lindecky.
SPEAKER_03: I've been trying to talk about it for years and years and years and haven't gotten very far with convincing people that they're bad for the city. So I'm not super optimistic about it.
SPEAKER_12: I'm very practical and so my first thought was, I mean, that's not going to happen.
SPEAKER_08: Allison Kaplan doesn't see the skyways being torn down anytime soon. But she also doesn't personally want to see them go. She does have critiques. But like the overwhelming majority of folks who work downtown, Allison isn't ready to give up the perennial ease of the skyway system.
SPEAKER_12: Let's be honest, through the skyway, I can get to my closest coffee place in like two seconds. If I had to go down to the street level, that would take longer. So it just becomes a convenience that people might understand in the bigger picture overall isn't serving us well. But to give up that convenience, nobody wants to do that.
SPEAKER_08: And for some, it's not just about convenience. For those with limited mobility, it can be a lot easier to walk in the skyways than on the icy sidewalks in the wintertime. So many people within the disability community advocate for more and better access to the skyways instead of tearing them down.
SPEAKER_11: But perhaps the skyways most surprising defender is an architect, St. Paul's own James Garrett Jr.
SPEAKER_10: On one hand, there's the intellectual, urban design trained architect side of me that's like, yes, technically, we're not supposed to like the skyways. And technically, yes, they siphon activity and life off the street and blah, blah, blah. But I think there's a ton of potential.
SPEAKER_08: James knows the skyways maybe better than anyone. He's lived and worked in skyway connected buildings for years. So he knows they're not perfect. He's had white folks stop his sons and ask what they're doing there. But unfortunately, he says that's not a problem that's limited to the skyways.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, that could be we could be in any park and barbecue and have someone do the same thing or I mean, it could be anything in this country in this moment.
SPEAKER_08: Which is why James believes that any solution to downtown's problems should involve the skyway system, not get rid of it. I mean, I would love for for someone to fill those fill those bad boys up with with activities
SPEAKER_10: and with people with senior citizens with teenagers and rethink and reimagine them.
SPEAKER_11: So yes, they might not be the world's best thought out piece of urban planning.
SPEAKER_10: But as someone that grew up with the skyway and who's raised kids that been in the skyway, having their strollers being pushed the skyway or racing each other through the skyway, literally their entire lives, they don't know any different. I see what the potential could be. And you know, I think the skyways are deserving of some love and a second chance to be awesome again.
SPEAKER_08: So whether we're stuck with the skyways, or someday somehow they come down, it looks like we'll only benefit if we try something we've never really done before. Designing the city for the city in all its vibrancy, variety, and splendor.
SPEAKER_11: When we come back from the break, we'll talk about how the segregated architecture of the skyways fits into our present moment of reckoning with police violence and racial injustice. Stay with us.
SPEAKER_04:
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SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So our city has been in really deep grief since the most recent Minneapolis police killing of Delal Id and since the May 2020 murder of George Floyd and far prior to these two. Unfortunately, these lives were part of a long history of police killings in my home city. So before these recent murders and corresponding uprisings and especially after, I wanted to look at how divisive urban designs like the Skyways intersect with policing in the Twin Cities. So I talked to D.A. Bullock. He is a filmmaker and a storyteller, community activist, and he's a police abolitionist. And he moved to Minneapolis 10 years ago.
SPEAKER_02: And you know, I didn't know a lot about Minneapolis prior to it. I may have visited once. You know, I knew about Prince, but there wasn't like a depth of knowledge about Minneapolis and the Twin Cities in general.
SPEAKER_11: I think what most people know about the Twin Cities is Prince and maybe the Skyways if if my email inbox is any indication. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: And, you know, Prince was part of this massively influential Minneapolis sound movement, which was led by a ton of different black musicians, which not everybody talks about as much. A lot of people think that the Twin Cities are really white and homogenous, but that's not true. And D.A. saw that right away when he moved here.
SPEAKER_02: So what struck me first was that there was great diversity amongst the people, but I didn't see that reflected in the downtown. Like you didn't see the multiple Somali restaurants or the multiple Hmong restaurants or, you know, those kind of things, the touchstones we use when we think about culture.
SPEAKER_08: But the lack of diversity and vibrance downtown also has to do with security and policing and not just in the Skyways. The problems totally extend to the streets as well. So D.A. and I talked about how there's this sort of boogeyman of downtown crime. Like in a lot of the metro areas imagination, downtown is a particularly dangerous place to be just walking around.
SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, politically, that's always one of the red meat talking points is our downtown is not safe, even though the data really doesn't back that up at all. Like it's been the safest that it's ever been and it's been declining for years. And so every instance that they're treating as the norm is really the exception.
SPEAKER_11: And this is the case for a lot of American cities. I mean, stats don't support the idea of cities and downtowns being particularly dangerous places at all.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, absolutely. And I do think it's important to acknowledge that there has been a recent uptick in crime here in the past year, just as there's been in a lot of cities. And I don't want to minimize the crime that does take place. But up until relatively recently, crime had been on a steady decline for years and years in the Twin Cities. Like in 2018, many types of crime were at a 30-year low in Minneapolis.
SPEAKER_11: So why do you think that people continue to believe that these are particularly dangerous places?
SPEAKER_08: Well, I think it's largely because of how the streets are policed. So that same year that a lot of crime was at a 30-year low, the Minneapolis Police Department started cracking down on things like loitering and spitting, like loud music and low-level drug possessions, things that happen all the time that can be very selectively enforced.
SPEAKER_11: Right, like a speed trap. Like they could point to citations and arrests and fines of minor offenses and kind of create this narrative that the downtown was unsafe and that these actions were making it safer.
SPEAKER_08: Right, exactly. Even though in the first place, there wasn't really a problem that they were trying to address. And so sort of in the same way that the debunked idea of broken windows policing in places like New York City opened the door for really discriminatory stop-and-frisk policies, something similar happened in Minneapolis. So for example, when this crackdown started, they did a series of almost like stings to bust people for low-level marijuana possession. And 46 out of the 47 people arrested were black.
SPEAKER_11: Oh my God. I would say that's unbelievable, but it is totally believable to me.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I mean, that's the painful thing about it. When you had those possession arrests downtown, not only did it give the false impression that crime was rising at the time, it also gave the impression that the people responsible for the supposed runaway crime were people of color and black folks in particular.
SPEAKER_11: So how did the Skyways fit into this picture of how downtown is policed? I mean, do we see that the Skyways are something extension of what's happening on the surface streets?
SPEAKER_08: Well, yes, but I also think that the Skyways add to the fantasy and fear of imagined downtown crime because if someone is already afraid of the street, they can avoid them and they don't have to walk on the sidewalks where they might have conversations and get to know people and have their real life experience prove the racist fantasy otherwise. And people are worried that they're going to get mugged on the streets. And that's ironic because one of the things that people in the Skyways say is that the streets are too empty to feel safe. And it's like, well, yes, in part because the Skyways have made them that way. So I think never going down to the street reinforces this cycle of unfounded fear, which is then even made worse by biased and violent policing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: So it's like this vicious cycle between the built environment and policing. They just make a positive feedback loop that no one can break out of.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Or like a negative feedback loop. Like we see segregation ingrained in our built environment by things like the Skyways, as well as things like the redlining that we mentioned in the story. And when police forces have been charged in part with safeguarding infrastructure and private property, that means they're safeguarding that structural racism. And that sort of cooperation between urban planning and policing also plays out in another problem with downtown and Minneapolis's urban planning. It's something that DA and I talked about. And that's the fact that for DA and his neighbors, it's still really hard to even get downtown. So DA lives in North Minneapolis, which is where a lot of Minneapolis's black community lives.
SPEAKER_02: And geographically, North Minneapolis and downtown Minneapolis are extremely close within walking, biking distance close. So that's one thing that really makes the other thing stand out, which is how difficult it actually is to get downtown 10 times more difficult than the actual geographic space.
SPEAKER_08: So like in a lot of other larger black neighborhoods in the U.S., the North Side has been cut off from downtown by physical barriers and also really highly polluting barriers, like an interstate and an impound lot and a trash incinerator.
SPEAKER_11: So despite that it's really close, there's no straight shot downtown from the North Side. It's all divided by something.
SPEAKER_08: Exactly. These big pieces of infrastructure. But in my conversation with DA, we also talked about something hopeful, which is that people still do make their way to downtown Minneapolis because even though it might be pretty sleepy, people want to be in a downtown. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: I remember James saying something similar like back in the 80s, like he and his friends just wanted to be downtown no matter how difficult somebody made it. You know, they were going to be downtown.
SPEAKER_08: Absolutely. And DA sees the same thing happening today, especially with youth and younger people.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I mean, think about it. When you were young, you still found a way to do what you wanted to do. Like if all the action was happening somewhere else, you found a way to get there. And I think it's still like the bane of the city's design is how do we deal with these young people or these houseless people and, you know, all these kinds of things that they don't necessarily say explicitly because often those people are predominantly people of color.
SPEAKER_11: So you mentioned that DA is for abolishing the police in Minneapolis, but where does he land when it comes to Skyways? Like is he like James Garrett Jr. where he thinks they can be reformed or more with Bill Lindecky where he thinks they should be filled with water and turn into aquariums? I mean, does he think that Skyways should be abolished too?
SPEAKER_08: You know, he didn't have any hot takes on the aquarium question, but DA generally speaking is more with Bill on this one. He thinks that there are some Skyways like in hospitals that could stay up, but he finds the rest troubling, not just from a planning perspective, but from a symbolic perspective. Because when he came here 10 years ago, another thing he noticed right away was the Skyways and this is what he had to say about them.
SPEAKER_02: Just physically, it's such a intimidating disinvitation, right? Like you immediately look up over your head and you see people literally walking above you. That's not just a metaphor. That's like a real thing that seeps into your psyche of who belongs there and who doesn't.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah. I mean, that's the symbolism for almost the entire story in a nutshell.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, totally. That is like the whole thesis. So thank you, DA.
SPEAKER_11: Well, Katie, this has been really eye-opening. Thank you so much for bringing us the story and for talking with me.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you, Roman.
SPEAKER_11: You can learn more about Katie Thornton's work, including her original long form essay about the history of Skyways on Instagram at itskatithorton or at our website, itskatithorton.com. So we're sharing pictures and stories of specific Skyways, including Minneapolis' only used Skyway, which got moved from its original location to its present day one in a 1981 parade led by a vintage Rolls Royce with a jazz band playing atop the moving structure. No, seriously, you cannot make this stuff up. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Thornton, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mixed by Bryson Barnes, music by Sean Rial. Delaney Hall is our senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Katie Mingle, Christopher Johnson, Abby Madone, Chris Berube, Vivian Leigh, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which exists all around North America right now, but in its heart, it will always be in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Discover, listen, and support them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too, but we have pictures of skyways and clips of the Mighty Ducks and the Replacements. I know about the Replacements song. You can hold onto that email. I know all about it. That's all at 99pi.org.
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