Mary's City

In the 1970s hit TV series of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, her character Mary Richards, newly arrived in Minneapolis from the fictional small town of Roseburg, Minnesota, exuberantly flings her beret into the air, an iconic toss featured each week in the opening sequence of the show.  Hoping to make a fresh start in a new career, Richards had fled to Minneapolis after breaking up with her boyfriend and fell in love with this city of skyways.  When we visited the city a couple weeks ago, I did, too.

Tim and I had planned to spend our week in Minneapolis with our children, but conflicts arose and they were unable to join us.  Disappointing, but since neither Tim nor I had visited here before, we decided to give the city a fair trial.

First on our itinerary was a major league baseball game between The Twins and the Tampa Rays.  Smarting from a demoralizing loss to the Rays the night before (19-6, ouch!), the Twins roared back to defeat their opponents 11 to 7 on Sunday, July 15th.

Under a clear blue sky we, along with 25,559 other fans, cheered them on.  When Brian Dozier hit a grand slam with loaded bases in the overtime 10th inning at Target Field, the crowd went wild and I fell in love with the Twins.  How thrilling!  America's game at its best!

Then back to our downtown Airbnb condo to quickly shower off the sunscreen and don our best clothes.  We had tickets to see West Side Story at the Guthrie Theater.

The director, Joseph Haj, tweaked this musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet to speak to contemporary immigrant tensions by turning the white gang members of the Jets into a mix of Afro-Americans and second generation whites who rumble with the more recently arrived Puerto Ricans.

The stage's backdrop showed a tilling State of Liberty.

The tragic story of Maria and Tony, the star-crossed lovers caught between the racial loyalties of the Jets and the Sharks, shines amid finger-snapping choreography and the music of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein.  I loved it!

I also loved the view of the Mississippi River from the 4th floor outdoor balcony of the Guthrie Theater.

On Monday our friends Chris and Doug who we met at our very first Habitat build in January 2016 showed us their beloved city by bicycle.

Their friends, (now our friends) Gary and Joanne, joined us as Doug cycled us along the Mississippi River to Minnehaha Falls and past five beautiful bodies of water in the Chain of Lakes (Nokomis, Lake Harriet, Bde Maka Ska, Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake).

Doug even took us to see the fictional Mary Richards' apartment which is actually a house that was recently on the market for $1.6 million.

With stops for lunch

and ice cream

and numerous photo ops,

Spoonbridge and Cherry is the centerpiece of the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden.

we enjoyed much of what makes Minneapolis consistently ranked as one of the top bike cities in the country.

Plus, we had a great time with friends, both new and old.

Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum
Artist unknown, "Ring It Again, Buy U.S. Gov't Bonds," 1918
James Montgomery Flagg, "I Want You For U.S. Army," 1917

During our bicycle ride, I'd caught a glimpse of the futuristic-looking Weisman Art Museum across the Mississippi River on the campus of the University of Minnesota and determined to pay it a visit the next day.  Designed by Frank Gehry, the museum was hosting an exhibition entitled "Fight or Buy Bonds," a collection of propaganda posters produced to rally Americans to support the Allies during World War I.  All the posters included in the exhibit were wonderful but James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam poster is undoubtedly the most famous.

Our final day in this city nicknamed The Mill City began appropriately at the Mill City Museum built in the ruins of the Washburn "A" Mill, once the world's largest flour mill, which was destroyed by an 1878 explosion and rebuilt the following year.

St. Anthony Falls 

Cadwallader Colden Washburn bought the waterpower rights on the Mississippi in Minneapolis in the early 1870s and with his partner, John Crosby, built a number of flour mills that along with his rival competitor, Charles A. Pillsbury, put Minneapolis on the map as the nation's flour-milling capital.  "It required 375 railroad cars, or a train two and a half miles in length, to move the average daily output of the Minneapolis flour mills," wrote a reporter for the Kittson County Enterprise in 1886.  Washburn-Crosby became General Mills in 1928 with a focus that gradually shifted from milling flour to producing cereals and baking mixes.  When the mill was closed in 1965, machines that had been here for decades were simply left in place.

Most of those machines were destroyed on February 26, 1991, when a fire swept through the building.  The mill was abandoned until the Minneapolis Historical Society took it over and refurbished it as this museum which opened in 2003.

Interesting to me was the museum's exhibit about Betty Crocker.  My mom's Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook which she received as a wedding gift in 1951 is losing its front cover and its well-worn pages are smeared with flour and stained with ingredients.

I learned to cook with the help of its step-by-step instructions illustrated with pictures.  When I was a little girl, I thought Betty Crocker was a real person, but instead she was created to answer the flood of questions about baking the Washburn-Crosby Company received following a 1921 promotion for the company's Gold Medal Flour.  As a high-school senior, I took the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow exam as a lark, but my test results embarrassingly earned me the award.

I'm sure Mary Richards, a feminist icon during the Equal Rights Amendment era, would have been just as appalled by the award as my adolescent self was.