"Two rows of pearls hung out on both sides of the street."

Travelers' Aid at Great Northern Depot, c. 1925.

"Min-ne-ap-o-lis! Minneapolis!" called the brakeman through the train. "Min-ne-ap-o-lis! Minneapolis!" Nils jumped up with such a start that his hat rolled way down the aisle.

Immediately a great noise and commotion began within the coach. Most of the passengers were getting off here. Nils, in a daze, stood there rubbing his eyes. Were they there already?

Per and Nils found themselves in the vast Great Northern Station, much bewildered. Even at this hour of the night the human current moving to and from the trains ran very swift.

Out on the sidewalk Nils paused. He had to look about and greet the place. The lights along Hennepin Avenue twinkled festively; they resembled two rows of pearls hung out on both sides of the street. Just a few steps below him ran the river; he knew its every bend as far the Washington Bridge. He felt at home there on the sidewalk, was a part of the metropolis which now lay in peaceful morning sleep. Something within it was his; he belonged here!

-Ole Rolvaag, The Boat of Longing, 1921

The White City.

Photo by nevermindtheend.

In January 2003, when I was twenty-four and punch drunk on city life, I moved to Minneapolis from my home town of Chicago.

Once I arrived in the Twin Cities metropolian area, I moved into Jonny's colonial-style suburban apartment complex, a vanilla variation on the "brick shitbox" school of architecture. The building looked municipal from the outside, like a White House ringer erected on the cheap. Inside our unit, we had white walls, white appliances, white noise and carpets the color of untrammeled sand in Kauai. In Chicago, I'd lived in a cluttered walk-up adjacent to a liquor lounge and a center for homicidal youth. My new lodgings, by contrast, were pin-drop silent. My life felt like a dry-erase board that had been wiped of all its past transgressions and left turns into sordid moral territory. In Minnesota, I could be the the most anonymous girl in the world. I could reinvent myself as a lacrosse champ from Topeka if I wanted to. I could deign Mafia ties and carry a teacup Maltese about town. I could change my name to Lynn, get bulimic, and hork ZonePerfect bars into the talking garbage cans at Ridgedale Mall. It was magic! I had erased myself, just like Lisa Loeb in that one supergay video.

After two days spent wandering shell-shocked around town, I somehow got a job as a copy typist...as I filled reams of paper with dopey radio scripts, I watched the snow fall past my twenty-sixth-floor window. The flakes plummeted so swiftly from the gray strata of clouds that they didn't seem to going up or down. That winter, I dubbed Minneapolis the "White City" because the world around me looked like a blank answer bubble on a standardized test.

- Diablo Cody, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, 2005

"His friends wonder where he is going next."

Construction of Dayton's Department Store at Nicollet and Seventh, 1937.

The city of Minneapolis is a man in his late thirties who made a tremendous success at twenty-five. His parentage is mixed and racial differences quarrel in his veins. Ideas, too, and emotions thwart each other in his head. He is not quite sure of himself. And yet -- he is pugnacious and still young with plenty of blood in him. His friends wonder where he is going next.

Minneapolis isn't like any other city. Not like New York. It's not cosmopolitan. Nor is it like, say Detroit. Detroit is like a big company town -- held down to the belt and the sales talk. Minneapolis is far more varied and headstrong. Nor is it like Pittsburgh, which is crowded and smoky and tough like the steel it makes. Nothing like Kansas City, which has tried to be like Boston. Nor like Boston -- St. Paul is proverbially the Boston of the Middle West. Minneapolis is like none of them.

-Charles Rumford Walker, American City: A Rank and File History of Minneapolis, 1937.