It Feels Like Spring In Minneapolis

Unseasonal heat struck us today, melting the ice and driving people to the fresh, snowy streets. I went out running and it was the perfect goodbye to the city I've learned to love. I'd run this route around the lake countless times in the summer, and had wondered whether I'd ever see it again. And today I got to do the run one last time, watching all my fellow runners and the skaters and cross-country skiers who'd taken to the lake. But the best part was when somebody yelled at me (I was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, in the middle of winter) "Thats a real Minnesotan!

A Fact About The Twin Cities: The Break-Up Cafe

Oren Snarkalopalis didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about his restaurant, Gyros City, until it had been open two or three weeks. Then, the veteran restaurateur says, he picked out a definite trend. “Breakups,” Oren says. “Everybody always chooses my café for their breakups.”

Since Gyros City opened its doors in 1981, the cozy Greek restaurant has garnered an almost supernatural reputation as the site most likely for a couple to break up. Located in a quiet Uptown neighborhood between Harriet and 12th Street, Gyros City is constantly filled with couples—some men drawing shocked patterns on the red-and-white checked tablecloths, women gesturing with hands stuffed full of Kleenex—all of them breaking up. The tables are dotted with plate after plate of Snarkalopalis’ prized gyros left half-eaten. In the kitchen, Oren always turns the radio up as loud as it can go. “So I can’t hear the sobbing,” he explained.

Over the past three weeks I went into Gyros City about twice a day, and usually found myself the only single person in the whole restaurant. Everybody else was a couple, breaking up. Some had come from as far away as Edina. One couple I interviewed said that they had been walking by the restaurant and thought that they should pop in for dinner. “Then,” the unidentified woman sobbed, “as soon as we sat down, he starts telling me that he kissed somebody else at his office Christmas party. I mean, what am I gonna do? He met my grandma!” If a couple walks into Gyros City, it seems, they will break up.

The restaurant has built up an eerie reputation with Uptown residents. The phrase to go on a date to Gyros City is local slang for breaking up. Some couples will even test their relationships by going to Gyros City and trying to remain together. Few do.

I asked Oren if he was married. He smiled. “Yes,” he said, “and she’s never been in here. And that’s how I’m keeping it.”

A Second Fact About The City Of Minneapolis, City of Lakes & Twins & (Sometimes) Twinned Lakes

The streets of downtown Minneapolis are festooned by Skyways – elevated walkways that stretch from office building to office building. Minneapolitans can traverse the Skyways for miles, keeping themselves out of the weary winter snow or the blistering summer sun. But few Minneapolitans know the secret history of the popular Skyway system.

They were first dreamed up by Apollo S. Snark, an investment banker who lived his entire life in Minneapolis. On February 15th 1913 he founded the Skyway Society, hoping to construct covered walkways through every building in Minneapolis. He gathered together investors, but the project stalled when Snark was killed in the trenches of the First World War. It was his widow, Beatrice Snark, who took his bequest and devoted it to the construction of the Skyway.

The Skyways were all the rage in the Jazzy Twenties. Gangsters and cops rubbed shoulders at B. Snark’s fancy parties drinking the famed Skyway Sour. However, it was in the Great Depression that the Skyway became legendary.

Thousands of displaced laborers found refuge in the Skyways, slowly constructing a shanty-town that would erect itself every night, only to disassemble early in the morning, before the custodians opened up the doors. The shanty town had groceries, bars, playhouses – even schools. Many of the squatters were skilled white-collar workers, thrust into poverty by the Great Depression. Because of their proximity to the business center of Minneapolis, these men found it relatively easy to secure jobs downtown. By 1944, over twenty percent of all executives in Minneapolis businesses were residents of the Skyway, according to the Skyway Benevolent Society.

In 1951, while an open secret for long before that, the Skyway squatters were officially discovered, and over three thousand men women and children were evicted from their homes in the office buildings of Minneapolis. The leaders of the Skyway’s society gathered their substantial resources and bought plots of land in Minneapolis’ northern suburbs, founding what would become town of Edina.

Edina was meant as a temporary refuge. The nadirs of Skyway life founded a mutual fund, the Skyway Benevolent Society, and encouraged all Skyway denizens to donate ten percent of their income to the mutual cause. Since so many Skyway residents held powerful positions in Minneapolis industry, this mutual fund bloomed. It is one of the biggest mutual funds in the U.S. today.

The leaders had only a single goal: to buy the Skyway – their ancestral homeland – back from the city of Minneapolis.

“These men felt betrayed,” explains Harold Sampson, a Skyway ancestor. “Many of these guys had fought in the Second World War and felt entitled to some respect. The Skyway was their home. They didn’t think of themselves as squatters.”

The next generations failed to share their parents’ enthusiasm for the Skyway system. They found life on the outside to be just fine, and many rejected their cultural heritage. Harold Sampson is one of them. The trim thirty-two year old is a member of the Children of the Skyway, a social club for people whose parents or grandparents were Skyway refugees. But he does not want to return to the Skyway, even if the Skyway Benevolent Society bought them back. “I’m fine where I live. Why do I want to go sleeping under a bench just because my granddad did?”

In 2005, the Skyway refugees were thrown into a near civil war. The mutual fund had finally amassed the one trillion dollars that would buy the whole downtown from the City of Minneapolis. The Council of Elders put the proposed sale up to a vote. After a three-day long debate, the council was still split down the middle: the dissenters, many of whom had never lived in the Skyways, wanted to use the Society’s ample wealth for charitable causes, or to provide Skyway ancestors with a college fund. The other half wanted to buy back the Skyways. Finally, an accord was met: the group would buy only a small part of the Skyways, amounting to only forty percent of the system, and rent them out to the City during the day. Today, if you look under the windows of certain Skyways, you will find a brass plaque that reads “Property of the Skyway Benevolent Society”. These Skyways convert – at night – to housing for Skyway residents. Historical tours of the system are given three times a week in Summer.

A Fact About The Twinned Cities: Minneapolis and Saint Paul

A group of fur-traders set up camp along the banks of a small lake in 1837, drawn by abundant water and game. The area was flat and fertile, perfect for settlement. When summer came, the group headed out east to gather people to found a new town – Minneapolis – the city of the lake.

The problem was that the settlers had kept themselves amused through the long winter by getting profoundly and consistently drunk, and on the way back, the head of the expedition, Silas Sharksman, realized that they had no idea where the town actually was. In a late night meeting with his lieutenants, Sharksman proposed three courses of action: sending out an expeditionary force to scout for the lost settlement, scrapping the entire wagon train and return to Philadelphia, or deception.

The group decided to bluff. They continued out west, spinning lies to their settlers, as the wagon train ambled its way through the densely wooded hills. “Just over that hill,” they’d say, “there’s a fork in the road.” “And then we’ll be there?” The settlers would ask. “We’ll be close,” the trappers said. After a four and a half month trip – they had only enough provisions for three months – the exhausted group saw a lake on the horizon, which glinted the setting sun. “That’s it!” Sharksman yelled. “That’s the place where we will found the City of the lake!”

The excited band feasted that night, and the next morning they realized – with horror – that the area was littered with lakes. The lieutenants mutinied, and revealed the hoax to the settlers. The acrimonious group split in two: Sharksman’s group settled what is now Minneapolis, and a lieutenant named Paul Hawkes founded Saint Paul.

For the first decade of their settlement, the two cities waged a perpetual low-scale war. But as the nineteenth century grew bloodier, the repeated raids softened to a series of pranks, The cities’ unique founding is remembered to this day by the annual April Fools’ tradition of “Joking” in which the mayors of Saint Paul and Minneapolis prank each other.

One noteworthy “Joking” prank was played by Saint Paul mayor Monty Montson in 1924. He had successfully masqueraded as Minneapolis Mayor Garry Pegsson’s wife for an entire year before revealing his transvestism to an amused Twin Cities. Sally Pegsson – Garry’s wife – had spent the year on a relaxing Carrabeian vacation – provided by Montson, who, from then on was known by the Pegsons (and the local media) as "Mommy Mayor".