The State of Cool
How the middle of nowhere became the center of everything.
By Tim Gihring
Photo by Darren Booth (Typography)
(page 2 of 2)
Truth be told, we didn’t deserve to be cool in 1984. What passed for ethnic food here was spaghetti. Our diversity, on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being a Benetton ad, 1 being Aryan Nations) was about a 2 (Hootie & the Blowfish). Our museums, as implied by the fortress-like 1970s additions to the Walker and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, were stuffy and forbidding. Even there, you had to be in with the “in crowd”; teenagers were about as welcome as wildlife art.And then, hesitantly, we began to throw open our doors. In 1988, the MIA became one of the first museums in the country to offer free admission, something many New York museum directors still can’t bring themselves to endorse. In 1991, the Walker began offering Free First Saturdays, and later Free Thursday Nights. And in 1996, the Walker became the nation’s first museum to devote full-time staff to teen programs.
At the same time, people with last names not ending in “son” began flooding in: Minnesota’s foreign-born population more than doubled during the 1990s; 1 in 10 Minnesotans are immigrants or children of immigrants now—the sixth-highest percentage in the country. Which frankly makes our state more appealing to people who may want to move here but don’t know what an “uff da” is and don’t care to.
Sure, there are some fluky reasons for our distinctive quality of life: a diverse economy, good health care, water. We owe a lot, in fact, to a man with a pencil-thin mustache and a dislike for socks: Sir Tyrone Guthrie, the man architect Ralph Rapson called “an exciting, invigorating, dynamic, arrogant, obnoxious bastard,” who chose Minneapolis for his world-class theater. Among the other contenders? Milwaukee and Detroit. We now have one of the country’s most vibrant theater scenes; they have light beer and Oldsmobiles.
But mostly we’ve become cool not because of our blessings but because of what we’ve done with them—shared. Minnesotans, like most pioneer peoples, are hardly clubby, preferring open spaces, open government, heck, even open-faced sandwiches. We’re all in this Jell-O salad together. It’s a particularly Midwestern thing. I was once in a Kansas City store (okay, a hip underwear boutique) for no more than 10 minutes when the owner asked me what I was doing at 1:30 a.m.; a funky theater troupe would be performing then down the street. Could you imagine a New Yorker asking that of a tourist?
What’s more, we Midwesterners even kinda like each other. The Twin Cities, in particular, have what Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam calls high social capital—about the highest in the country—and it’s why Putnam recently suggested that if Hurricane Katrina had struck here instead of New Orleans (the capital of low social capital), the response would have been different. “The folks in St. Paul wouldn’t have been standing with guns on the bridges across the Mississippi up there,” he said, “trying to keep the people who were trying to flee devastated Minneapolis from getting into St. Paul.” To say the least.
We take this generosity for granted. But the Dayton Hudson Corp., whose heirs have kept our cultural institutions going for decades, was only the second American company to give a portion of profits to charity. As late as 1974, only 6 percent of American companies gave away more than $500 a year. In the 1973 TIME article on Minnesota, the author seems downright baffled by the altruism of local firms, marveling that most of them devoted a section of their annual reports to “ ‘social concerns’ or some such.”
All of that generosity really started paying off in the last decade, when some $500 million in capital campaigns built these cultural facilities the rest of the country now envies—the new Walker, the new Guthrie—and kept them accessible to visitors. By contrast, the Museum of Modern Art in New York charges $20 (though coincidentally its Free Friday Nights are sponsored by Target). The Metropolitan Museum of Art also asks for $20, even if it’s a suggested donation. “What is it about art,” sniffed the Met’s director recently, “that it shouldn’t be paid for?”
Point being, I might never be cool anywhere but here. As a person of modest means, with a modest haircut and a modest awareness of trends—someone who was never invited to raves in the ’90s or even slumber parties, really, in the ’80s—I could be cool in New York for maybe three months before I was demoted to a karaoke bar in Jersey. I couldn’t afford to be cool, and New York, frankly, couldn’t afford for someone like me to be considered cool. In a recent New Yorker piece on Harry Reasoner, who began his journalism career in Minneapolis before working at CBS News, the broadcaster was said to have struck the right balance between “Midwesternness and sophistication,” as though the qualities were mutually exclusive.
And maybe that’s just about right. The Twin Cities are cool not because they are the same as the world’s most sophisticated places—but because they are different. Let others make distinctions, erect barriers, draw lines. We want you to be cool here. And we don’t care if you know the Replacements’ original band name or where Tom McElligott labored as a copywriter before joining Fallon. Though just in case you find yourself far from home, that’d be Dogbreath and Dayton’s, respectively.
Tim Gihring is senior writer for Minnesota Monthly.
Cool in Theory
Things we’re supposed to love, but can’t
~ Nicollet Mall~ Trader Joe’s
~ street food
~ light rail
~ Parisian-style condos
~ Happy Apple
~ Surly beer
~ Midtown Global Market
~ pronto pups
~ North Loop
~ Riverplace
~ burlesque
~ local wine
~ lacrosse
~ dog parks
~ Josh Hartnett
~ New Urbanism
~ charter schools
~ Voyageurs National Park
~ third parties
~ yoga
~ Robot Love
~ Tapes ‘n Tapes
~ winter
~ RollerGirls
~ Community Supported Agriculture
~parking-meter cards
~downtown Minneapolis Target store
~ prairies
~ Canada
~ lists
~ flash-seared food
~ magazine theme issues
Comments may be edited for length, clarity, or appropriateness.
Reader Comments:
You lost me at Happy Apple and Surly beer. In fact, listening to Happy Apple while drinking Surly beer is as cool as it gets.
I loved the article until the end. I'm with Paul... Happy Apple is one of the best things to come out of Minneapolis. Surly Beer is rad. And if by "burlesque" you mean "burlesque design" than may a pack of rhinos trample you on your way home from maplewood mall.
http://sf0.org/burnunit/taskDetail/?id=1299
What do you mean "we," kemosabe?
I love dog parks. As owner of a S. Minneapolis home without a fenced-in yard, I don't know what I'd do without them. Where else could my energetic young Golden Retriever run freely? And believe me, he needs to.
I'm with you on the yoga thing, though...