cup o’ sugar

On Tuesday Ange Tank and I trekked to Rapson Hall at the U of M for a round table discussion on Peavey Plaza hosted by our landscape architect friend Carrie Christensen. Carrie is involved with a couple of LA organzations (HALS, MASLA) working to advocate on behalf of Peavey and its preservation as an important, historic designed space in downtown Minneapolis. Peavey Plaza's reputation has suffered over the years due to various reasons (lack of maintenance, modernism's fall from favor, etc.), and now neighboring Orchestra Hall is applying serious pressure for a complete renovation of the space. Boo to that! First of all, the space belongs to the city/the public, not OH. Second, a little foresight is all it takes to realize the plaza's future value as an iconic design artifact representing the City's massive urban renewal that went on during the late 50's through the 70's. Third, the plaza is the only public green space in that area of downtown, connecting Nicollet Mall and bookending Loring Green/Grand Rounds (the power of maps to reveal connections!).

Last year Peavey advocates' efforts yielded a designation for the plaza as a Marvel of Modernism. Current efforts focus on persuading MPLS City officials to grant it historical landmark status, which wouldn't inhibit adaptive change to the design (that's not the point, anyway), but would help ensure the process followed guidelines that would maintain the integrity of M. Paul Friedberg's original design.

I'm not a downtown girl by any means, so my experience with Peavey is extraordinarily limited...can't even say that I've ever walked through it (just past it). Still, I'm a die-hard fan of modernism (seriously, I fail to see the hard sell), especially when modernism responds sensitively to local needs/environs/culture/etc. (no, that's not an oxymoron, that's good design). I'm also a fan of public spaces like parks and plazas in general...places that bring people together, link the city to the natural world. Ben and I were recently in Mexico and visited about two dozen fabulous examples of public plazas and parks. Seeing the ways the Mexican people utilize and capitalize on their public spaces was inspiring! We saw food carts, balloon vendors, clowns, bike tricksters, capoiera, concerts, quinceañera parties, superballers (oh, wait, that was us), elderly folks, young folks, middle-aged folks...it was awesome (the power of plazas to create connections!).

Back to MPLS, here's a link to a story on Peavey Plaza on MPR from this past December.

At the event on Tuesday, Gina Bonsignore (President, MASLA) asked me and Tank to help out as we could in terms of spreading the word through our design and friend networks. So, there you have it. And now that the sun is shining a little brighter each day, it only makes sense if you are in the downtown vicinity to head over to Peavey Plaza and spend a few minutes appreciating it. Then, tell your friends to tell their friends...and that's how this works, see. Lastly, I heard something about a MPLS modernism walking tour scheduled some time in mid-May (May 16th?). As the date gets closer I'll get more info and share online. Sounds like a fun mini-staycation and a chance to appreciate our unique brand of metro cool a little more deeply.

     

Click here to download:

Peavey_Plaza_Modern_Marvel.zip (212 KB)

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Food is more than food. Denise Chávez spends the entirety of her book, A Taco Testimony, making this point. And grandmaster Octavio Paz gets right down to it in his essay on hygiene and repression ("At Table and in Bed"): "[American cuisine]...is the...contrary...of Mexican...cuisine, whose secret is the shock of tastes: cool and piquant, salt and sweet, hot and tart, pungent and delicate. Desire is the active agent, the secret producer of changes...In gastronomy as in the erotic, it's desire that sets substances, bodies, and sensations in motion; this is the power that rules their conjunction, commingling, and transmutation" (Paz, 1987, 76).

Speaking of desire, the first photo is the physical embodiment of a serious taco fixation. What follows are photo-maps of the flavors and contrasts explored in yesterday's barrio-quest to feed that desire. First stop, Lake and 5th (Lake Plaza). Sopes/picaditas (cool and piquant, check)...these were hot off the grill, the salsa freshly made (still warm) and perfectly rambunctious over the crumbly queso fresco. Then, two tacos, one al pastor (that pineappley spit of roast beast), one de barbacoa (goat). This plate of contrasts is a map of the tongue: sour, salty, sweet, bitter; a harmony of color: complementary greens and magenta flanking desaturated orange and yellow; and a tactile collage of hot vs cold, rough vs smooth, wet vs dry, dense vs feather-light. You eat tacos with your hands. That says something right there. Utensils did come in handy in addressing the chicken mole, rice, and beans, however...but mainly just to dissect the meat from the bones and pile it onto warm tortillas...which were then also eaten with hands.

Our next stop was Mercado Central at Lake and Bloomington where a young girl fed three carrots as thick as my wrists through a giant extractor, then cut the heaviness with a double-shot of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Kyle and I were feeling a little gluttonous by this time (desire breeds desire), so we also bought two pieces of cake from the panadería (vainilla con fresa for him, chocolate con durazno for me). It would have been all sweetness at this point were it not for the Subcomandante Marcos t-shirt that Kyle had nabbed for $10 (US) in a vendor stall on 5th (viva el contraste!). The kid is smart, after all. He made the connection between the mole and Jamaican jerk sauce, and despite having never read Octavio Paz, he observed all on his own—and in an utterly serious tone—that "Mexican people really know how to party". Food is more than food.

Now: Who wants to work with me to start a recycling/composting/green awareness campaign in the barrio? It is sorely, sorely needed and could tie in to other citizenship-building efforts. Is landfill remorse from styrofoam dishes and plastic h20 bottles the necessary contrast/counterpoint to this garden of gastronomical delights? Let's hope not.

               

Click here to download:

Barrio_Trippin.zip (1915 KB)

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