In case you've been away for a bit, it's another hiatal week, for reasons. Today we go back to go forward. It's retrofuture time, as we examine what 1957 thought 1967 would be.
Said the paper:
What will Minneapolis and neighboring communities be like 10 years from now? Through the series of articles "Minneapolis—1967"- based on current plans and ideas from our civic leaders - you'll be able to imagine yourself in what could be the Minneapolis metropolitan area of the next decade. You'll ride on the Minnetonka monorail at 100 miles an hour.
There's a description of the monorail ride, and how the seats and windows are made of the newest amazing plastic tech.
You'll step on moving, underground sidewalks. You'll walk into the "living rooms" of the new office buildings, whiz along the freeways, visit the small plazas in the Golden Gateway district, shop in the modern stores along air-conditioned Nicollot plaza, fly in a helicopter from the downtown heliport to the airport. "Minneapolis—1967" has been thoroughly researched and will be graphically presented by Daniel Upham and Paul Veblen, Minneapolis Star and Tribune urban development specialists.
They’re wrong in nearly every respect, except for A) slum clearance, and B) the freeways blasting through everything.
The grand plan:
Bigger version here. Take a look at the buildings in the middle - the City Hall on the left, then the phone company building to its right, then the tall Foshay tower in the center. Those were present in 1957, as was the building in the middle-right, the Nicollet Hotel. Everything else was new. But all that open space? A densely-built old neighborhood that had fallen into disrepair. More on that here, if you wish.
The freeway design is insane. I am not a freeway foe, and I understand why they built them. I can’t imagine trying to get in and out and around without them. Surface streets are insufficient to handle the load - but of course the modern urbanists insist that we shouldn’t be driving cars at all, but taking streetcars and light rail everywhere. Or rather, monorails and helicopters. Except here we're driving cars AND taking copters.
Good news! We’ll have merged government.
MAGOO = MAGU.
Mr. Magoo would be known to all. Myopic, blundering, supremely self-confident - perhaps not the best symbol for this new governing body. We’d eventually get something called the Met Council, unelected, responsible for all sorts of things.
And yes, Mr. V was a descendant of Thorsten.
Other predictions:
There would not be a Gay Aqualand. There were no illustrations - how could there be? It didn't exist. But it was described as an open plaza with fountains, and a huge penis sculpture. KIDDING
You would take these to the airport . . .
. . . which would look like this.
It would not look like this, but close enough.
Downtown hostel, reborn!
That would be this building. It would be demolished and replaced with nothing, until an unimaginative office tower was built on the spot.
Some ads looked forward. Your curtains will be fresh and crisp, because electrical heat does not coat everything with gas-breath!
Even farms will go modern!
Completely and utterly unrelated: an ad that ran one of the days in the Future Series.
It took a little searching (obviously, who’d know this off the top of this head?) but I found the winner.
His entry was “Comma,” who had a hairdo shaped like a comma. Very much in keeping with Gould’s Theory of Criminality, wherein all super-criminal’s names are determined by their physiognomy.
I hope the family had a good time.
Comma never appeared in any Dick Tracy strip.
AI ADJUNCT IMAGERY
Why not use these things as prompts? Here's Minneapolis Monorail c. 1960s.
Interesting. It pulls the Basilica from Loring Park, and tries to come up with a combo of the Capella and IDS, then hallucinates the top of the old Soo Line building.
In this one . . .
. . . there's a bit of IDS and the Wells Fargo tower in the middle, and a lot of the Andrus on the right.
Shop at MODOK!
If the image above shows anything, it's how poorly the monorails would have fit in with the existing buildings. Which is why the articles focus on the need to remove them.
All of them.
No, really. The story about the new Nicollet shopping district noted that the second floor of all the buildings would be connected and modernized, and as the process moved up the street, it would require demolition of everything and the construction of something new and modern.
The people with no interest in the past always want the power to control it. The past is annoying. It nags, it disappoints. It stands in the way. The post-war urbanist motto when it comes to the reminders of the old world: move along. Nothing to see here.
This week we'll follow another case that filled the papers in the Twenties. This time it's . . .
01 20 28
The father ups the reward. It had been a grand before. You wonder why he'd been skint about it.
Naturally, you get lots of this.
Smith, friend of Smith, returns to Smith:
There’d been a crank letter. You know there were many crank letters. Many tips, all of them unhelpful, each one its own particular torture.
So the pond's been dragged. All the sightings were mistakes. No trace, no contact. And it's been a week.
Tomorrow: a White Slavery theory blows the case wide open.
(or does it)
That'll do. More tomorrow, with a different farrago of stuff on top. |
