"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.