“Right on Lake Street” is a turn into Minneapolis history
As a young child, I stayed up late into the night with a flashlight beneath my bedsheets, turning not comic book pages but those of an atlas. Roads and their assigned names fascinated me to no end, although this interest led only to a fifth-place finish in the Minnesota State Geography Bee finals and a role among my friends as “the directions guy.”
This attraction to streets has been a lasting one, and even though my mode of transportation these days has two wheels instead of four, this inclination makes exploring Minneapolis’ streets a temptation too good to pass on.
Early on in these explorations I encountered Lake Street.
I didn’t grow up in this part of town, but the moment I met Lake Street I knew I had found something special. Having now lived, worked, and attended school in nearby Seward for the last several years, I have spent a great deal of time on Lake and already have my share of associations and memories to accompany it.
With all of this in mind, you can imagine my excitement upon hearing of the new exhibit at the Minnesota History Center, “Right on Lake Street.” Running through March 2008, “Right on Lake Street” is a collaboration between the Minnesota Historical Society and Macalester College, with design work done by Lake Street-based In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.
In the Heart of the Beast’s input is evident at first glance. Guests enter the colorful exhibit through the 21A bus, out the windows of which many Lake Street landmarks are shown. In the bus’s windshield a video of the bus route plays with footage of driving along Lake Street.
The exhibit features another video component inside its representation of Patrick’s Cabaret: a documentary featuring the cabaret as its subject. The exhibit as a whole is extremely visually engaging, with these videos, In the Heart of the Beast’s artistic design, and images by people such as local photographer Wing Young Huie, who did the Lake Street USA project. Audio is also a key element of the exhibit, with sounds commonly heard along Lake Street playing aloud.
Alongside Patrick’s Cabaret, many Lake Street landmarks are depicted in the exhibit, recreated on a smaller scale of three–25- foot-tall representations that inform viewers of that building’s history and significance. Ironically, one such building is the recently closed Resource Center of the Americas.
The exhibit began as a collection of projects by Macalester students over a two-year span.
“Students could choose any topic they wanted, whatever it was [about Lake Street] that interested them,” said Macalaster graduate Laura Kling, one of the students involved in the project, as she showed me around the exhibit.
The exhibit opened on Sept. 18 with a gala that brought together a wide variety of people who participated in the exhibit’s development, as well as Lake Street residents. For those involved in the project’s creation, it was a great experience to share the work they had done with those who know Lake Street best.
“People were [pleasantly] shocked to see themselves represented; many are not used to seeing themselves in an exhibit,” Kling said.
“At the opening, I saw a guy looking at pictures of the Minneapolis Moline. He motioned to his son and asked him to come over, saying ‘your grandpa used to work there,’ and recalled what his grandfather had told him about it,” said Kling.
The concept of memory is a key element of the exhibit; guests are invited to include their own memories of Lake Street at the highly interactive exhibit’s end. I didn’t do so at the time, but I plan to head back and add some of my own memories. Lake Street is living Minneapolis history, and as the engaging and informative “Right on Lake Street” makes apparent, we’re all a part of it.
last revised: November 19, 2007