Green Space:
A Journal of the
Minneapolis City Parks
preface
Wind makes sound
in tree tops
like
express trains like city
machinery
-Allen Ginsberg
In Minneapolis, as in many cities, one of the aspects most important to the city is the presence of parks and green spaces, scattered like leaves throughout the busy streets and cluttered houses. From my house, I can walk to at least six parks in under twenty minutes. The experience of Minneapolis is inclusive of the experience of parks—over 150 of them. Lakes, rivers, and creeks become not obstacles to urbanization but desirable refuges from it. Neighborhoods deliberately and routinely plan parks into their layouts as they expand, and an enormous part of the city budget (as well as the budgets of surrounding suburbs) is spent in creating and maintaining parks. On any given day, even in the winter, a significant portion of the population retreats to neighborhood parks to jog, walk, or even just sit. The Minneapolis Police have a considerable department devoted solely to keeping parks and their patrons safe.
And yet, despite their role in urban escapism, parks are intimately intertwined with the city in a number of ways. From the shores of any Minneapolis lake, the downtown skyline rises in the distance, both near and far away, omnipresent but removed, inevitable but welcoming. Just yards away cars speed along parkways, people going about their daily business—yet they choose to take the scenic, indirect, longer way (as any winding road through a gridded city will be). They move about still connected to the city, still participating in their urban tasks, but their choice of parkway over avenue indicates a desire—possibly a need—to reconnect with the natural, even if briefly. In this way parks are physically connected to and purposefully removed from the city.
More importantly, parks are connected to the consciousness of Minneapolitans; indeed, they are connected to, and they respond to, an aspect of human nature that rises from living in an urban environment: the need to escape it, without removing oneself from it.
In this project I have undertaken an examination of city parks in Minneapolis and how they connect, physically and emotionally, to the city and its collective human consciousness. I have taken on this project using a number of different texts. First, I took a series of field trips to park locations across the city, including Lakes Harriet, Calhoun, and Lake of the Isles, a long chain of parks in the southwestern part of the city; Loring Park, which is practically in downtown; the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (a part of the Walker Art Museum); and newly improved Theodore Wirth Park in west Minneapolis. At these sites I composed journals of my experiences and feelings, taking into account my surroundings, what I can see of the city, what kinds of people I encounter, if and how their mood changes from being in an urban environment to being in a natural/urban environment, and what ideas and texts are brought to mind.
Secondly, I compiled “traditional” texts—prose, nonfiction, poetry, photography—of other artists, who may or may not be from Minneapolis, and who are not necessarily contemporaries, who seek to understand urbanity in relation to the natural and the human experience that results from this dichotomy.
Of course I cannot propose any definitive answers to the question of man and nature; it is something that has haunted writers and thinkers since the rise of the city itself. I only hope that from this project a full and interesting portrait of the natural/urban environment and our place in it can be created and shown to be integral to the experiences of city life.
the journal
Journal entries were compiled during the winter and spring of this year. Here I will not introduce them chronologically, but in such a way that, hopefully, certain elements resonate with each other from one entry to the next.
Theodore Wirth Park, northwest Minneapolis,
2 PM, 3/14/03
It’s late afternoon. The park is quiet; the afternoon joggers have not yet emerged, they’re still in office buildings downtown. The wind is brisk, cold; flowers and leaves are beginning to emerge, thankful for an early Spring. As I walk further into the interior of the park—it’s the largest in the city—along Wirth Lake, the sounds of the city fade away—most notably the sounds of Highway 55, which in an improbable piece of city planning actually cuts through the top half of the park. The highway bothers me, now that I mention it. Of all the noisy elements of the city, surely the busy highway is the noisiest, especially cutting through residential side-streets. Although it is not a freeway, cars still rush by at 50 mph, and it disturbs me that city officials felt it was okay to run it through Theodore Wirth.
Now I’ve walked into the center of the park, which is marshy, with cat-tails and willow trees and tall marsh grass all around. I’m far enough away from houses and highway that the sounds of the city are reduced to a low, quiet hum. I’m all alone too—it seems like no one else has found this trail for years. The only discernible sounds are nesting sparrows and rustling trees. It seems almost impossible, but in a city of 300,000 I’ve found a spot that is completely secluded. I smile; there is a sense of freedom in escaping what surrounds you constantly. I take a drink from my water bottle and sit on a bench and enjoy my solitude.
I walk back out again, towards my car parked at the south end of the park. As I emerge from the forest in the middle of the park, I walk through a sunny meadow. People have arrived; come home from work, they’re running, taking their dogs for walks, sitting and reading the newspaper. I bet that, for many of them, this meadow is the farthest they’ve ever gone into the park. I look off to the east; close by are small houses, far off, a couple miles away, are the downtown skyscrapers, just peeking over the horizon of trees. Somehow, now, that sight is disappointing.
Loring Park, central Minneapolis, 12 PM, 5/5/03
The
park during the noon hours is constantly busy. Businessmen walk home to their
apartment buildings for lunch, joggers run quickly from one end of the park to
the other. Being downtown, its space is severely limited; the park is a small
box of nature within a typical urban landscape—streets surround the park on all
sides, and two of four sides are dominated by brownstone and redbrick apartment
buildings, the third giving way to smallish houses, and the fourth open, a green,
tree-lined boulevard leading to the Walker Art Center and its Sculpture Garden.
Even within the park the green space is limited; paths crisscross all over,
there are fountains and drinking fountains scattered across the park’s small
area. It seems that the intent of this park is not intended to give the same
sort of natural solitude that a larger park does; Loring
Park has an express and pragmatic purpose, which is to provide a place for
people to run or sit or walk their dog for 20 minutes. It is a product not of the
desire to escape from urbanity, but rather a simple product of need—need for
some exercise, or a little fresh air on the way to or from the office.
Lake Calhoun, southwest Minneapolis, 9 AM, 5/3/03
Standing on the southern shore, looking north, the sky is dominated by towers. The lake is almost downtown, and in the morning the paths circling it are filled with spandexed joggers and walkers. A bum sleeps soundly on a bench 20 yards from me. A couple small sailboats catch wind across the lake. Cars whip around the parkway, heading to work or wherever. It is telling, though, that so many people chose to take the parkway to work—it is a longer drive, going all the way around the lake, than simply going straight up France Avenue or Lyndale or Lake Street—yet people make this choice. Can the experience of nature, even from a car window for ten minutes, make that much of a difference in a person’s day? It must, or people wouldn’t do it—the parkways themselves wouldn’t even exist.
Lake Calhoun, southwest Minneapolis, 10:30 AM, 1/12/03
The wind is bitter cold and strong, lake and shore are covered with a foot or so of fresh snow that’s still falling—“falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling,” as Joyce says. On the far shore there is a makeshift skating rink in front of the beach club, but it’s just too cold for anyone to skate. Two lonely icehouses dot the expanse of white—the only remnant of humanity in a place that now seems forgotten. Through the clouds I can’t even see the skyscrapers. Very few cars come around the parkway—it’s a Sunday morning—and certainly no one is jogging in this wind. I’m not even sure what I’m doing out here! It makes me wonder, being alone out here in the park, is our wish to reconnect with nature purely conditional then? Only if the weather’s right and happy, only if nature is inviting—is this the only time we want to be out in the natural element, away from the urban vanities of heating and warm food? It begs another question—do the boundaries of nature move in extreme conditions? During spring months the separation between urban and natural takes place at the park’s edge, but during the very cold and very hot weather, it seems like the separation takes place between inside—with food, entertainment, heating/air conditioning, comfort—and outside—without any amenities, naked to the harshness of our world. Nature becomes in our minds everything that isn’t specifically modern/civilized/urban—it is “everything else.”
Lake Harriet, southwest Minneapolis, 3 PM, 5/5/03
Walking around the lake I’m reminded constantly of my childhood. Here is where we’d swim, my sister and I, every other day in the summertime, here’s where I crashed my bike riding too fast, here, at the bandstand, is where we’d buy ice cream for us and popcorn for the seagulls. This is probably my favorite and most familiar park in the city. Because of its familiarity it doesn’t feel natural to me—the lake is moved from the context of natural to the context of urban simply because I feel comfortable there. I guess what is natural is what is unfamiliar, which seems an apt definition.
Lake Harriet Arboretum, southwest
Minneapolis, 2 PM, 5/6/03
I’m intrigued by this place, because
it seems like an example of humanity trying to be more natural than nature,
which seems paradoxical. Here there are many varieties of trees and flowers
arranged to look like an actual meadow or forest edge. There are few indicators
that this is manmade: a tag in front of each plant, stating its name in English
and Latin, some gravel paths, and a fountain in the distance. I think of people
who live in big cities, like New York, where a park like Central Park is all
they ever know of nature—Central Park is what they think nature looks like,
smells like, sounds like, and feels like. But it’s constructed by people—it’s
not natural in the truest sense of the word, just like this arboretum.
Right next to the arboretum is the Rose Garden, where rose planters/breeders show off their creations. Like the arboretum, these hybrid roses are natural but not—they are creations of meticulous craftsmanship, and they exist only here and in other similar gardens.
Are parks too symbols of the same artificiality, by virtue of the fact that they are deliberately set aside and maintained by cities? Can a park be both natural and artificial?
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, central
Minneapolis, 2 PM, 4/28/03
This park is surely one of the most unique in the country. Owned and operated by the Walker Art Center, this large park is home to a great collection of outdoor sculptures, the most famous of which is “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” by Claes Oldenburg. Here the park serves a function other than just being Nature—it serves both as a medium for art and, as a collection of works, a piece of art itself—much like a short story collection is also a work of art.
I walk to the center of the park, near the Spoonbridge. There I find one of my favorite works in the whole garden: a large wooden frame, painted black, supported by a tripod of thick tree branches, also painted black. It stands about ten feet tall, and the frame itself is about four feet square. If you stand back from it and look through, you can see the dome and spire of the Minneapolis Basilica—the sculpture seems to have been built for this exact purpose. Through this the city, represented by the Basilica, and the park become intertwined. Seeing the spire through a lens creates the illusion of distance—this despite the fact that the Basilica is a five-minute walk from the Garden. From this distance I feel separated from the city—it looks so far away from where I am right now. I feel like I’m not in an urban environment and that urbanity and modernity are far away. There are senses of both longing and freedom in that—longing to return to the city, accompanied by the feeling that, once I leave the park, returning to the city is inevitable; and freedom, albeit temporary, from the city and all its implications.
additional texts
Allen Ginsberg
Wind makes sound
in
tree tops
like express trains like city
machinery
slow dances high up, huge
branches wave back &
forth sensitive
needlechairs bob their heads
—it’s too human, it’s not
human
it’s treetops, whatever they think
it’s me, whatever I think,
it’s the wind talking.
William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and
Reply”
I sit upon this old grey stone
and dream my time away.
Han Shan
My heart is like the autumn moon.
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
About her seemed to hang the mist of the
winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves.
William Wordsworth, “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers.
i want the wind to sting my skin
i want the snow to bite my back
i want the wind to blow
the leaves off the
street, the smoke
out my chimney, my
fire out,
the scarf off my
neck
i want the grass to untie my shoes
stain my knees
soften my fall
i want the dirt to rub into my fingers and elbows
ruin my sweater
i want the sun to laugh at my cheeks
red and numb
i want trees to explode slowly
and sink like rubble
to the ground
i want the pine needles as a bed in the cold
i want the moon to sleep with me next to clovers
i want the leaves to cut my feet through the soles of
my shoes
that way
i’d
know they cared
i want the october snow to
laugh when i trip.
Bill Bryson, A
Walk In The Woods
Almost
from the day of its opening, the [Appalachian Trail] has had to be moved
around. First, 118 miles in Virginia were rerouted to accommodate the
construction of Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park. Then, in 1958,
overdevelopment on and around Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia necessitated lopping
twenty miles off the trail’s southern end and moving the start to Springer
Mountain, in the protected wilderness of the Chattahoochee National Forest. Ten
years later, the Maine Appalachian Trail Club rerouted 263 miles of trail—half
its total length across the state—removing the trail from logging roads and
putting it back in the wilds. Even now the trail is never quite the same from
one year to the next.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”
The
foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “May-Day”
So by remote Superior Lake,
And
by resounding Mackinac,
When
the northern storms the forest shake,
And
billows on the long beach break,
The
artful Air will separate
Note
by note all sounds that grate,
Smothering
in her ample breast
All
but godlike words,
Reporting
to the happy ear
Only purified accords.
Jack Kerouac, “Sea”
These
gentle tree pulp pages
which’ve nothing to do
with yr
crash roar,
liar sea, ah,
were made
for rock
tumble
seabird digdown
footstep hollow
weed
move bedarvaling
crash? Ah again?
Wine
is salt here?
Tidal wave kitchen?
Engines
of Russia
in yr soft talk——
Wallace Stegner, “Crossing
into Eden”
How is it to wake up in Eden?
Our sleeping tents are pitched in a half circle facing the cliff and the east,
but the weather is so fine that we sleep outside. Night after night we awake at
odd hours to see the black sky with big bright stars burning holes in it. We
watch the Dipper and Cassiopeia do their slow dance up and over and down.
Finally, we wake to find the east fire. Lying snug, we wait until the sun
surges up over the mountains far to the east. The green-and-brown camp, the
white tents, come clear, long shadows stretch, and on the cliff edge, haloed
with pure light, the martens have appeared.
Allen Ginsberg, “Song”
yes, yes,
that’s what I wanted.
I
always wanted,
I
always wanted,
To return to the body where I was born.
Federico García Lorca, “Your Childhood in Menton”
Yes,
your childhood: now a fable of mountains.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
I
will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And
a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine
bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And
I live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And
I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping
from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There
midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And
evening full of the linnet’s wings
I
will arise and go now, for always night and day
I
hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While
I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I
hear it in the deep heart’s core.