Cities 07

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on my lunch break, I traverse the Skyway of Downtown Minneapolis and spend my precious 60 minutes in search of something to make my relatively dull workday a bit more enjoyable. While usually that ‘something’ is three chicken tacos from Chipotle, today (Friday, February 23rd) I spent my break in search of something different. In the confines of the Skyway it is often difficult to forget that a sidewalk still exists down below, and the differences between the two were exactly what I set out to observe. Jane Jacobs argues that the action on sidewalks creates interaction, and certainly the significant levels of action occurring in the skyway each weekday can create the same ‘sidewalk ballet’ that she describes in her work that helps maintain safety and create togetherness. However, Engels would argue that though the Skyway is a ‘public’ place, its elevation from the sidewalk and proximity to the wealth and prosperity of the Downtown corporate center resemble the efforts of the wealthy in Manchester to bypass the poverty that exists within their city.
Walking both the Skyway and the sidewalk between the intersections of 2nd Avenue & 6th Street and Nicolett Mall & 9th Street, I hoped to notice differences between the types of people that used either the Skyway or the sidewalk down below, the types of security measures or policing efforts used and the amount of interaction noticed between passersby. The Skyway scene between 1100am and 200pm is a bit of a spectacle for anyone who has never encountered thousands of starving business executives on the prowl for something to eat. The majority of people within the Skyway are found in some sort of business formal attire, which generally equates to a suit or a shirt & tie for men and either skirts or dress pants with heels for women. It is rare during this time of day to see anyone in any sort of attire less ‘dressy’ than this unless it is ‘Casual Friday’ or you are roaming the Skyway section very near to Target on 9th Street & Nicolett Mall. There is also little diversity among race, as most of the people passing by are white. The pace of the Skyway is hurried at its slowest and frantic at its worst, depending on that particular section’s proximity to a popular restaurant or a bank, but most people seem to be on a mission with a plan that involves walking very quickly . A great number of people I observed were either walking alone and talking on a cell phone or walking with one other person involved in a conversation. It is rare to see large groups of people walking, and if there happens to be one it is clear that their slower pace is an obstacle for others attempting to get to wherever they are going in such a hurry. Aside from those pairs of people walking and talking, interaction is really quite minimal and this utilitarian style is highly visible in the restaurant service within the Skyway. Most of the restaurant options located in the Skyway are chains that offer food to go, but the service there takes ‘fast-food’ to an entirely different level. The goal of these restaurants is to get a customer in quickly, served quickly and out even faster. The longest I have ever waited for a meal on my lunch break was 3.5 minutes. This leaves little time to interact with the person waiting on you or anyone else, for that matter, and this is very representative of the entire Skyway experience. The fast pace of the Skyway greatly contrasts what I found on the sidewalk between the same areas.
While there were many people dressed similarly walking down 6th Street, the nearer I got to Nicolett Mall the fewer ‘business formal attire’ I noticed. More people were found in casual dress of either sweatshirts/pants, heavy winter coats and jeans. The sidewalks are desolate in comparison to the hustle and bustle of the Skyway, but the atmosphere is also starkly different. The pace of motion is closer to meandering than to walking, aside from the occasional pedestrian running to catch a bus. While traffic is heavy, density on the sidewalk is not. *In warmer months, restaurants that offer outdoor seating attract many more people out of the Skyway and onto the sidewalk, so the emptiness is not year-round.* Though there are fewer people, the sidewalk population is more racially diverse and has a much higher percentage of African Americans than the Skyway. People linger at bus stops and engage in conversations with multiple people while waiting or sitting, which was more interaction than I witnessed in the Skyway. The most striking difference between the people on the sidewalk and those in the Skyway were the few people on the sidewalk who seemed to have nowhere else to go except the sidewalk and the man sitting on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign asking for food or money. While I cannot say with certainty whether the people I saw were homeless or severely impoverished, the fact that they were present on the sidewalk but not in the Skyway drew some interesting conclusions. The other difference that I noted was in security and policing. My observation of the sidewalk failed to find any police officers on foot patrol and only noted squad cars passing en route to another (presumably) distant location. In the Skyway, however, security guards are visible on a regular basis despite the continual visual absence of any loitering or ‘suspicious activity’ during my lunch break. While Jane Jacobs may argue that the activity within the Skyway creates ‘eyes on the street’ and a sort of self-policing, the presence of security guards leads me to believe that the perceived level of safety within these corporate hang-outs is a result of exclusion and removal of the people I found on the sidewalk. Though both the sidewalk and the Skyway are public property and public spaces, the people who use each are not the same, even though the only difference between the spaces is elevation. Engels would argue that the Skyways in Downtown Minneapolis are similar to the efforts used by the wealthy entrepreneurs in Manchester to bypass the poverty and misfortune that they do not desire to be part of or to witness. Although the Skyways are often portrayed as an additional layer of profitability and activity for the Downtown area, the difficulty of accessibility to the entire public and the reliance upon security guards to create a specific kind of atmosphere supports Engels’ ideas of the bypass of poverty by the wealthy and fails to support Jacobs’ ideas about the ‘sidewalk ballet.’