Fall Harvest Moon
Kate and I ate at Gather last night before seeing Episode 1, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma production in the Walker’s McGuire Theater. We had a table beside the window that projects out over the side walk, giving a panoramic view of the Basilica, St. Marks Episcopal, Hennepin Avenue Methodist, Loring Park and part of the Sculpture Garden while Hennepin Avenue, filled with bustling cars and bicyclists and individuals walking, walking ran just below.
On the east side of Hennepin, the location of the three churches, the transcendent has precedence. And the past. The deep Western past. On the west side of Hennepin though modernity has sway. The noumenal realm swept away in favor of the phenomenal, the religious by the secular, the surface and the particular gaining favor over the ideal. It fascinates me that we have here in our built environment such a bald dividing line and that that line either begins or ends in a cemetery and disappears among the industrial detritus of the early part of the last century.
Hennepin Avenue runs roughly north and south in front of the Walker Art Center, coming up from Lakewood Cemetery, then taking a gentle right, curving until it runs east and west through downtown Minneapolis and across the Mississippi to peter out among the brick warehouses, off brand filling stations and small manufacturing businesses of east Minneapolis.
( CLAES OLDENBURG, COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988)
Right at the Walker though it creates an interesting division between then and now, past and prologue, the modern and the pre-modern. On the west side, fittingly, sits the Walker Art Center, a premier museum of contemporary art with a wide-ranging performing arts program that brings globally significant musicians, dance, theater and film to the Twin Cities. North of the Walker building complex is a sculpture garden filled with modern and contemporary sculpture including the iconic spoonbridge and cherry.
On the east side of Hennepin, beginning diagonally south from the Walker and in order moving toward the north are Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral and then the Basilica of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul. These churches are, respectively, dominant congregations in the case of Hennepin Avenue and St. Marks and the second congregation of Roman Catholicism in the state. (after the Cathedral of St. Paul)
These days I find myself a west of Hennepin sorta guy.