Beltane Early Growth Moon
Writing the post below reminded me of a topic I pursued in some depth for many years, cities. Cities fascinated me from the moment I visited Chicago, Washington and NYC as a teenager. Small town central Indiana, even the Indianapolis of the late 50’s and early 60’s, had none of the energy, the danger, the possibility.
(Cedar-Riverside People’s Center, formerly Riverside Presbyterian Church. I had an office there in the late 70’s and early 80’s.)
When I moved to New Brighton in 1970, on my very first day at Seminary, also my very first day in Minnesota, we visited the Guthrie, the Walker and the MIA. Not too much later I discovered a program, I don’t recall its name, that allowed students to buy theater tickets and orchestra tickets for ridiculously low prices. That put me in the seats at the Guthrie, its design in the old spot based on the Stratford, Ontario festival theater, a theater in the round(ish) with a thrust stage, a theater I had visited many times.
At some point not long after that I got a job as a weekend staff person for Community Involvement Programs (CIP), a facility for training recently released and high functioning developmentally disabled adults. The concept involved apartment based training, teaching folks how to live independently. The next stop after C.I.P. was your own apartment.
I lived in the facility, located in Mauna Loa apartment building, just to the east of what was then Abbott Hospital in the Stevens Square Neighborhood. After that move I lived in either Minneapolis or St. Paul until 1994, our relocation year from Highland Park, St. Paul to Andover. (There was a brief and unhappy hiatus at the Peaceable Kingdom, my first wife and mine’s 80 acre farm in Hubbard County, and a bit of time in Centerville, the rest all in the cities.)
Over those years, starting with the organizing of the Stevens Square Community Organization and its subsequent redesign and redevelopment, which featured a very public fight with General Mills over their purchase and rehabbing Stevens Square apartments, my life became inextricable from the life of urban neighborhoods. That engagement stuck until I left the Presbyterian ministry in 1991. It even lasted a year beyond that when I took on teaching a small group of students in urban ministry internships.
Someday, I’m going to write about those years. They were fun and a lot of good got done. Plus I learned a lot of things about cities.
