8 ways Minneapolis and New York are more alike than you’d think

If you want to impress a New Yorker with our cosmopolitan Minneapolis, don’t take them to the theater or the art museum. Take them to the U.S. Bank Plaza downtown, and point to the scaffolding that doesn’t seem to serve any purpose or show any signs of going away. The person will get it right away.

There are other things that bind New York and Minneapolis, as well. We’re not in the same league as Manhattan, to state the blindingly obvious, but you’d be surprised by how much we do have in common. Here’s a list of similarities, and one that definitely sets us apart.

We know it now as Loring Park, but when it was created in 1883, it was known as Central Park. From news stories in the 1880s, it’s apparent that Minneapolitans were well aware of the New York version, and it seemed a natural, if prosaic, name. Central was changed to Loring at the end of 1890 to honor Charles Loring, “Father of the Minneapolis Park System.” But that didn’t mean the connection to the New York version was severed. The park was laid out by landscape architect Horace W.S. Cleveland, who was one of the entrants for the New York Central Park design competition. He lost, obviously, but would make his mark with other beautiful projects: He designed the Grand Rounds in Minneapolis, and applied his theories of natural landscape design to design the St. Anthony Park neighborhood in St. Paul.

Central Park is home to Cleopatra’s Needle, an Egyptian obelisk installed in 1881. The 32-story Foshay Tower that stands 447 feet tall and modeled after the Washington Monument is shaped like an obelisk, and is much bigger than New York’s example. If you don’t think that counts, we have the obelisk-like Washburn “A” Mill Explosion monument in Minneapolis’ Lakewood Cemetery. The monument honors the 18 men who were killed in the 1878 blast that destroyed what was the city’s largest industrial structure.

In 1963, New York wrecked Penn Station, a magnificent Roman edifice. The New York Times called that action a “monumental act of vandalism.” Minneapolis lost the Great Northern Depot in 1978 after Amtrak moved out when traffic for train travel dropped. Aka the Great Northern Station, it was known for its colonnade and arched entryways. While the structures aren’t comparable in size, the Great Northern brought the same heavy solemnity to the stretch of Hennepin Avenue between Washington Avenue and the Mississippi River.

The Palace Theater in Times Square, built in 1913, was part of the Orpheum Circuit chain, as was Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theatre on Hennepin Avenue. Our venue opened in 1921 as a vaudeville playhouse before turning into a movie theater. The Palace’s interior, like our Orpheum, was restored with love and care, but the Palace exterior is a garish mishmash of blaring billboards. We have a classic period marquee that stands out at night, instead of being drowned out by Broadway’s visual cacophony.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art, designed by the New York City-based firm of McKim, Mead and White, opened in 1915. In 1910, the firm designed the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In both cases, they turned out their trademark — imposing, Beaux-Arts classicism, replete with columns and Roman motifs. Founding partner Stanford White had a hand in neither, having been shot in 1906 by a jealous lover who was an unbalanced heir of a railroad fortune.

Minneapolis’ Park Avenue runs north-south from downtown, and was the first street in the city to be paved. Swank mansions belonging to the business elite lined the boulevard, as was also the case for its Manhattan counterpart. While our Park Avenue declined in the postwar era and its grand houses were demolished or chopped into roominghouses, a few mansions survived, such as the Swan Turnblad house, now the American Swedish Institute.

New York’s Park Avenue was the home of the 1%, if not the 1% of the 1%. As the city grew north, the land was too valuable for homes, and the postwar boom transformed it into a canyon of corporate office towers and residential blocks.

The list of great architects who’ve worked in both cities is long. The names might not mean much to the ordinary resident. Put it this way: imagine that Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth played for the Yankees and the Twins.

Cass Gilbert designed the University of Minnesota’s great Mall, and he designed the 1912 Woolworth Building in New York — the tallest in the world, for a while. The modernists and post-modernists — Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, Helmut Jahn — plunked down a tower in the Mill City and Manhattan. Even the “starchitect” designers who favor styles and shapes completely divorced from tradition have gifted both cities with their peculiar ideas.

The difference, of course, is that New York is so much bigger, with so many excellent buildings competing for your attention. Here, they have space to be appreciated.

Visitors to New York may wonder why so many buildings have dark, depressing scaffolding over the sidewalks of every old stone building. It’s a complicated story, and it has to do with the unintended consequences of a law that requires masonry inspection every five years. It’s cheaper to leave the scaffolds up than to take them down and put them up again.

Which brings us to the scaffolding around the U.S. Bank Plaza building.

It’s encircled the building for months. Is there any work going on above? The building’s reps declined to comment, saying only it was for the public safety. Well, we can be sure of two things: Our scaffolding is nearer and cleaner, and eventually, it’ll come down, and the street will look nice again.

That’s one thing Minneapolis and New York don’t have in common.