I hope you didn’t open this looking for a spicy take about ICE or Renee Good or the ongoing protests or how evil or innocent any of the actors involved are, because this isn’t going to be that.
This time it’s some stories, memories, and photos about my hometown, which I love and miss dearly, especially during times like these when the city is going through it and I’m not there.
I took all of the photos included in this essay this past year when I visited Minnesota during a few longer trips between February and December of 2025, with the exception of the ones that include me (and the video).
Like all good Minnesotans, I’m obsessed with being from Minnesota, so I don’t need to tell regular readers that I grew up there. You definitely already know.
This outsized pride Minnesotans have for our state manifests in myriad ways. Consider, for a moment, Prince and Bob Dylan, arguably Minnesota’s most famous exports. Minnesota loved, and still loves, the hell out of Prince. Alternately, many other Minnesotans think that Bob Dylan is a traitor and a sell-out because he left Minnesota as soon as he could and doesn’t love it as much as we all think he should. Prince, though, he remained eternally loyal to the state and lived here until his death. He loved Minnesota as much as the rest of us, so he will be eternally memorialized as Minnesota’s favorite Minnesotan.
I was born in Missouri, actually, but we moved when I was so young (three) that it’s hard to imagine myself as anything other than a native Minnesotan, and sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m not, technically. Not that it really matters, although I like to think that had some subconscious effect on my turning into something of a “transplant whisperer,” always befriending newbies to the state to make them feel welcome since so many claim they don't.1
My mom, baby sister and I lived in Northwestern Minnesota very briefly right after we moved to Minnesota, and then went to the northern suburbs of Minneapolis for a little while to live with my grandma, two uncles and an aunt. We moved to Minneapolis proper just before I started kindergarten. For a few years, we all lived with my grandpa and another aunt (it’s a big family) while my mom finished school and got a job, then we got our own house a mile or so away.
The general vibe in Minneapolis in the nineties and early aughts when I was growing up and “coming of age” was that we were cooler than people realized, even if we were “flyover country.” We said we liked it that way, kept the riff raff out, kept the rent cheap, haha, etc., but I never thought that was really true; at least, it wasn’t entirely true for me. I think a certain kind of Minnesotan — Minneapolitan in particular2 — wanted to be recognized far more than we were at the time. We were obviously much cooler than the coastal cities and not only did we know it, we were tired of being cool in obscurity. While we loved when we got national attention for anything — even snow, our most banal but reliable contribution to the national conversation — it wasn’t enough.
Maybe that's why we elected a professional wrestler as governor in the nineties. My governor can beat up your governor, all the car bumpers used to say back then. We’ve always known we needed to be a little weird to get attention and we’ve become obsessed with our seemingly evolved inclination to be that way.
I’m not sure if that underlying desire to be noticed is still a prominent vibe. Especially now that Minneapolis has everyone's attention, again. I only get my sense of the vibe in bits and pieces these days, anyway: Facebook updates and texts from family and friends, a few visits a year, and the actual news, increasingly. Not to mention the thinkpieces. Dear lord, the thinkpieces. People who’ve never stepped foot in the city calling it a shithole, probably actually believing it if they’ve never spent meaningful time in any actual city at all, long enough to know that they contain, well, multitudes.
I’m being snarky, but really. Cities that are big enough and diverse and have all sorts of distinct neighborhoods and different places to go and varieties of people living there are pretty hard to generalize as shitholes, at least in some objective way that goes beyond one’s personal tastes. At least, if you’re being fair.
Maybe it's not so hard, actually. Maybe some cities really do just suck. I maintain this opinion of Baltimore, although it’s based entirely off of one downtown area that I've had to go to a number of times for unpleasant reasons, so deep down I know it's probably not all a terrible hellhole and that there are, in fact, many cool things about that city. I did have a good time at a bar there once, chatting with friendly strangers. There, I said a nice thing about Baltimore. I am off the hook now.
I know, I’m a hypocrite. I feel better when I remember we all are.
I’ve said before that the quilt of subcultures in the Twin Cities often felt like it could let anyone fit in. Of course, the small-town kind of vibes that a medium-sized city can contain will also possibly oust you from any of them quickly enough, too, blacklisted, and memories are long. There are pros and cons. But as far as subcultures are concerned, you’ve got a lot to choose from in the Twin Cities. You can probably find Your People there, if you look hard enough.
Like, it’s gotta all be pretty bad for the whole city to really be worthy of such outright dismissal. And I’m sorry, but that’s just not even close to the case in Minneapolis.
But if it keeps the housing more affordable than most of the country and the jobs available and the people polite, you can keep thinking that, if you want.
Minneapolis has a reputation for being Nice. It’s the biggest thing Minnesotans in general are known for. Minneapolis is also a city of activists, especially in the Powderhorn neighborhood, where Renee Good was shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
Minneapolis has always has been a protest city. And it’s always been a progressive city in a blue state, even through a long string of Republican governors that was only finally broken by Mark Dayton in 2010.
Of course I have my own experiences with Occupy Minneapolis and other similar left-wing movements in the early-to-mid 2010s, though, which I have yet to write much about at length, but will soon enough.
Occupy made me feel more pride for my hometown, and that I had more of a real stake in its future, than anything else. It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel the strong urge to find a way to move. I was 28 and about to be divorced, I didn't own a home and was making the most money I'd ever made before then working in operations at a bank for only $14 an hour. I was up to my ears in student loan debt, and I was living in the suburbs with my then-husband and mom, sister, and young niece when Occupy started to save money. When else was I going to get to feel that way? So powerful and actually effectual? It wasn't looking good yet.
But during that time, in the beginning, a ton of us were literally sleeping outside on that grassy hill downtown, looking up at glowing skyscrapers from our sleeping bags during an unusually warm October in Minneapolis on purpose. Doing something so audacious and getting away with it will make you feel like you can do anything.
I remember growing up in the nineties when crime was through the roof and we called Minneapolis “Murderapolis.” I found an old paper I wrote in middle school about crime, exclaiming that we were “almost as bad as Chicago,” mimicking what I'd heard on the news in a very middle school way. And yet, we still played at the park, rode our bikes to the gas station for candy, walked to the library alone. The nineties were a different time, man. We also had a pit bull, though.
Crime subsided, as it does. My childhood in Minneapolis was like anyone else's in that time we all reminisce about now, which is to say before the internet, or when the internet was still new enough that you needed a CD for it and to make sure no one needed the phone first. Life didn’t revolve around it yet. The internet was a treat given out in half-hour increments to budget the limited hours on the free AOL discs. The rest of the time was real life because it had to be.
I still found ways to go be off in another world for hours at a time, of course, by reading a lot. Going to bookstores was a highlight of any experience, and it happened most often in the winter. One of my favorite traditions was going to the Holidazzle Parade downtown. My mom and sister and I would take the bus which, oddly enough, always felt like a highlight of the experience because we didn’t usually need to take the city bus anywhere, and I didn’t start using it regularly until I was a teenager. As a kid, it was still an adventure.
We’d bring a wagon and blankets and a giant thermos of hot chocolate and disposable cups to share it with other parade-goers. The Holidazzle was at night, and it was beautifully lit for the holidays, taking place on Nicollet Mall, along a 10mph pedestrian and transit road.
Another winter tradition was Dayton’s 8th floor Christmas display, featuring a different classic Christmas story every year, depicted in large dioramas with moving mechanical puppets. After we saw the entire thing, we’d walk down the street to Barnes and Noble where we’d go to the kids’ section and were allowed to pick out two books each. We could spend hours in there. I’d start reading one of the books I just got immediately on the bus ride home.
My sister and I always begged our mom to get cable when we were kids. We wanted Nickelodeon and MTV! Sometimes she'd find a good deal and cave, signing up, and we'd be thrilled for a few days until the novelty wore off and then we'd go back outside, my sister climbing trees or playing baseball, me riding my bike and wandering the woods, us getting into whatever shenanigans outside together with our neighbor friends. My mom would complain about the wasted money she spent on the cable TV we never watched. The neat thing about Minneapolis is that there’s so much open green space, so many lakes, so much wooded area and trails for feet and bikes alike. It’s not a concrete jungle unless you want it to be and live downtown. There are trees everywhere, water everywhere, nature and parks galore. You didn’t need to live in the country to explore nature, but in Minneapolis you got to do that and also got to race leaf boats down the divot running down the alley behind your house during a rainstorm when it briefly turned into a stream of the perfect size for leaf boats and action figures alike.
If you grow up in North or Southeast Minneapolis, you also grow up in Northeast Minneapolis. At least, that's how it was for us in the border neighborhoods. I was bused across the river from North to Northeast for most of elementary and all of middle school for whatever zip code or district reasons they had. Most of my friends were in Northeast, maybe the Southeast border, if they weren’t in a Northside neighborhood like I was, because that’s who went to Northeast schools.
It’s funny how, in a relatively small city compared to other large metro areas in the country, or our nearest eldest city-sibling, Chicago, you can feel like you don’t know some of the city you’ve spent most of your life in at all. I talk a lot about the North and Northeast neighborhoods in Minneapolis, even districts like downtown or Uptown, but little about South, Southeast, or any others, because it’s so easy to forget the rest of it exists. Even if you work there or go to the doctor there or something. It feels like going to a different city, almost. And don’t even mention crossing the river to get to Saint Paul (in the Twin Cities, Saint Paul must cross the bridge because Minneapolis refuses; I have been on both sides of this obnoxious but stubborn rule).
I finally got to know some of the Southside during Occupy in 2011. I lived for a few months in an apartment just south of downtown where we occupied. I loved my neighborhood. I lived over South again a few years later, renting a room in a friend’s house in a neighborhood a few blocks from the river parkway.
I was always near the river when I lived in Minnesota, save for a couple short-term rentals. Being within walking distance to the Mississippi was something nice to be able to take for granted, although for a lot of us, we never have stopped appreciating the beauty and significance of the river, or its closeness. The nearby Rappahannock and Potomac rivers are nice and all, but they’re not my river, you know?
I think the massive pride Minnesotans feel for our state contributes to the pride we feel for “our” river. Anything that’s ours — even our tiny sliver of Lake Superior3 — is a source of statewide pride. Does Alabama care this much about its quarter inch of coastline? They probably should.
The river is a backdrop to so many of my childhood memories. The riverbank where we'd gather with way too many other families to swat at mosquitoes from our blankets while we watched fireworks on the Fourth of July. The default bike riding location if we couldn't think of anything else to do. An obvious senior photo and wedding backdrop, especially from the Stone Arch Bridge, a constant sight at the photo lab. Little areas locals know about to go hang out and drink beer and commit other low-level crimes like nudity and loud music or pot when it was still illegal.
The vibe, though. From my essay linked above:
Like “home” for anyone, it’s a vibe I instantly recognize and feel at ease with, knowing what’s expected of me and how I can act, where I can go, how to get there without GPS, even the distinct aroma of the innards of 1930s-era Craftsman houses dotting the gridded city and the feeling and smell of the hot pavement in the summer and the violently dry air that instantly freezes your nostrils in the winter and makes everything smell like smoked ham. The Sad Clown who used to roam Nicollet Mall. The way an aging hipster will make any layered, cold-weather getup look effortlessly (or obnoxiously) cool while riding his fat tire bicycle to a punk show during a blizzard, where the bike rack will already be full of other fat-tired bikes who got there first.
I’ve also said before — quite arrogantly, I’ll admit — that I think that people from4 Midwestern cities are generally just more interesting than people from coastal or other cities in the US. To me, anyway.
I do think it’s pretty neat that you can drive to Target the morning after a snowstorm and see about 10 different people out for a run on the freshly-shoveled and snow-blowed sidewalks the way there and back. It’s pretty neat that there are saunas all over the place now and a growing number of bars selling low-dose THC seltzers that are slowly changing, for the better, the going-out culture, make “going to the bar” a different and even more available experience for more people. It's neat that everyone rides a bike, even though I complain all the time about rude cyclists. It’s pretty neat that we have the best state fair anywhere in the damn country, rivaling only maybe Texas, but I’ve only heard that secondhand so I’ll maintain for now that it’s Minnesota. It's neat that Minneapolis is an activist town, even when a bit overzealous. It's neat that people in Minneapolis won't take shit.
It’s easy to feel like a rock star in Minneapolis. It’s small enough that you feel like you can compete, but big enough that if you win, it feels like it still matters.
I like how winter in Minnesota makes Minnesotans come together every year, even if out of mutual spite for the season we’re all still trudging through while the rest of the country is seeing its first tulips.5 Minnesotans will either love or hate winter — and, truly, a lot of people do love it, somehow — but they will all mutually come together about it. It also won’t stop much — including protests, or candlelit vigils for iconic fast food signs.
Maybe these days it’s more likely that school or an employer will allow remote learning or work on snow or ultracold days, but back in my day, there was hardly any such thing as a “snow day” in Minnesota; plows were efficient enough for the buses to get us to school in time, and it was just expected that we knew how to dress for it (whether or not we choose to is a different story — just count how many men there are in shorts at any given Menards on a Sunday in February). But I always worked those “essential” jobs, which meant “customer service so if you don’t show up, we don’t make money,” nothing actually important, so I never got to skip work on account of snow, and remote working wasn’t a widespread thing in my spreadsheet job days.
Our elementary school had a program where, every year, some organization would donate brand-new winter coats to low-income students. A random school admin lady coming into the room to hand out coats to certain kids was such a normal thing that I didn’t even register what it was until one year, I think sixth grade, when my name was called to receive a coat. I was so confused. I told the lady that I already had a coat, so I don’t know why she was giving me one. In my memory, she reacted as though I was saying that because I was ashamed to apparently need to receive a free coat, but in reality I just didn’t even understand why she assumed I didn’t have a coat in the first place when I had just gotten one, and I had no idea why they were even being given out to begin with.
One thing I finally realized, and it’s embarrassing that it took so long to truly accept this, is that when you’re appropriately dressed for the weather, it’s actually not that bad. The real problem is that I don’t like wearing all those damn layers. The most comfortable items of clothing I would like the weather (or my thermostat) to accommodate at all times are yoga pants with a tank top and optional hoodie. Minnesota is not the state for that year-round outfit, especially if you’re not a fan of socks. You better become a fan of socks or slippers if you want to be a happy person for half the year in Minnesota.
But I don’t even like wearing a coat, so layering fleece leggings and an extra long-sleeved shirt under my sweatshirt with the coat on top of it, not to mention the scarf and hat and gloves and snow boots, well... goddamnit, I hate winter. I remember one year, maybe 2013 or so, trying to walk to the bus stop and it took a good twenty minutes to get from the front door to the sidewalk because the ice and slope of the sidewalk and grass between them were all absolutely covered in a coat of overnight ice, falling several times like one of those comedy routines in Family Guy that intentionally goes on long enough to make you want to throw the remote at the TV, ready to give up and smash all the ice around me but with nothing to actually do but keep trying to get to the damn bus stop. I made it. I had to climb a frozen snow bank to get inside of it. I swore a lot.
Taking the bus was, for a while anyway, was one of my favorite things about living in the city. It’s mandatory to complain about the city’s poor or under-developed public transit system, but really, it’s pretty decent, especially compared to where I live now, which is too far from DC’s Metro system and not big, dense, or low-income enough to have much of a need for a functioning public transit system of its own.6 Yeah, in hindsight it was pretty silly to put the train on the street with the rest of the traffic and the streetlights, but the buses are pretty efficient and I easily used public transportation for years when I lived and worked in the city, or when I was commuting in. I will grant, however, that busing around or between suburbs is nearly impossible and takes all damn day.
The summer is what’s really magical, though, because you’ve been waiting for it since the first day of last summer. It doesn’t have to even be summer, really — there can still be snow on the ground, but if it’s a 50 degree day with the sun out, restaurants are opening their patios and everyone is out, wandering the city, walking the lake paths, chipper as fuck and loving the hell out of life.
People are strolling parkways pretending they don’t need to dodge chunks of still-there ice while they cheerfully greet their neighbors and their dogs sniff each other. The only thing that doesn’t smell delightful in the summer is downtown Minneapolis, which smells like sewage for reasons I don’t remember anymore. Whatever, at least it’s relatively clean. But in those first days of spring, before you remember that mosquitoes exist, are when Minnesotans are the happiest you will ever see them. It’s like emerging after a decade in a bunker, no matter how much you try to get out in the winter despite the hostile elements.
You get so used to crossing the Mississippi at any given point in your day-to-day life that I remember when the I-35W bridge over the river collapsed in 2007, a bunch of people were like, “wait, which one is that again?” (I was like that.) It’s a really busy bridge. The kind where you literally forget you’re even on one because it’s so big and carries so much traffic. The only reason I don’t forget anymore is because the view is great. I love the view.
Anyway, Minneapolis is the best city, and while it has its ups and downs like anywhere else and I’ll happily complain about it all myself (and readily do!), you simply cannot change my mind about it.
Frankly I'm starting to see a regional pattern here and I think certain feelings of being unwelcome are justified because some people are just too rude to hack that that Lake Life
Saint Paul seems content remaining boring forever and I love that for them
it actually surprised me when I really looked at a map and discovered just how little claim we actually have to that lake compared to other states (and Canada), but how much we feel we own the whole thing. Or maybe that’s just me.
Long-term transplants officially count
as a now-Virginian who sees my first tulips at least a month before my MN friends and fam’s spring blooms start appearing on facebook, it still sometimes feels like living on another planet to see the color green so early in the year
although if a bus would come down my little cow-catcher road sometime, I’d happily take it somewhere to avoid the bonkers ass traffic
Think we can all agree on Baltimore here.
As an adopted Saint Paulian (and any judgments you make about my personality from that statement are assuredly accurate), which bar’s patio is that in the pic?
(Aside: I’ve spent the last eighteen years orbiting Saint Paul—first for law school, then work—but only moved here permanently in 2024. Feels like I’m home at last though)