Seven Weeks on the Mean Streets

My brother recently had a job that required him to purchase 231 gallons of gas in seven weeks. Ben was behind the wheel of his 1997 Honda Accord ten hours a day, seven days a week, and he covered 5,500 miles without ever leaving the metropolitan area. But this was no trucking or courier gig; he was getting fifteen dollars an hour to drive his car along every single street in the Twin Cities and their first-ring suburbs.

Ben had answered a Craigslist ad posted by a technology start-up. They were looking for people in various cities who were willing to spend their days driving. Like Pac-Man on wheels, he trolled every avenue, lane, boulevard, and road, with a Palm Pilot suction-cupped to his windshield, scanning neighborhoods for wireless Internet activity. The company that hired Ben was apparently attempting to create a map of wireless signals on top of a GPS grid.

Ben is twenty-four years old, and is comfortable whether he’s jostling at Atmosphere shows or shaking hands with real estate pooh-bahs in his present job for a developer. He grew up in St. Paul and thought he knew the Twin Cities pretty well. While driving the streets and neighborhoods, however, he discovered that, beyond the familiar, high-density areas most of us regularly travel through (Uptown and downtown Minneapolis, St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, the lakes, and the Mississippi River) was a largely foreign territory. He circumnavigated downtown St. Paul’s airport, encountered the aftermath of a murder, peed at the shores of lakes you’ve likely never heard of, and witnessed a funeral parade with a crowd of mourners, on foot, trailing the coffin down the street.

For the most part, however, Ben was mostly a passive observer in the neighborhoods through which he drove; most of the time when he actually got out of his car it was to download his data at a Starbucks. He also discovered that public bathrooms tended to be readily available in affluent areas and virtually impossible to find in poor neighborhoods. He was financially strapped during this odyssey—he wasn’t reimbursed for his gas or mileage, and ended up making about ten dollars an hour—and subsisted primarily on gas station granola bars.

For the last leg of his journey—driving the remaining un-highlighted stretches on his map—Ben allowed me to ride along. We began our run in a tony Minneapolis neighborhood with elaborate brick pillars at its borders and a number of identical white cantilever porches. From there we swung into Bryn Mawr, with all of its quaint signage (Bryn Mawr Chiropractic, Bryn Mawr Coffee, Bryn Mawr Pizza), and headed out to Robbinsdale, before eventually ending up back in Minneapolis. There, we drove through suburban-style subdivisions with Mercedes in the driveways, hard by scrap yards where men delivered cans piled into garbage bags and stacked onto shopping carts.

Even on a Tuesday night, downtown Minneapolis was chaotic and bustling with people. Ben recalled his cruise through the streets of downtown St. Paul, where it was so deserted that he drove five blocks in the wrong direction down a one-way street before noticing.

After three hours, the Honda began to feel like a Tilt-a-Whirl from which I couldn’t escape. The car was constantly changing direction, pivoting, juking, and U-turning as Ben retraced his steps and searched for tiny hidden streets. Long stretches of straight avenues were welcome, but rare; more common were the one-ways, dead ends, and streets bisected by parks or office buildings. “There’s an art to this,” Ben said, and claimed that he’d developed an almost intuitive navigational sense. “It’s become second nature to drive with a map in my hand.”

Areas that departed from the usual grid—places with lots of single-block streets and dead-ends—required him to drive through multiple times in order to map all the sections. He occasionally got weird looks from people who saw him repeatedly passing by. “There’s definitely some suspicion, particularly in neighborhoods that are real homogenous,” he said. “And especially on cul-de-sacs; everyone knows who lives on their cul-de-sac.” Fortunately, he said, his Honda is an inconspicuous ride.

As we swirled through a cul-de-sac somewhere in the haze of inner suburbia, we passed a sign that read, “Tube Forming Factory,” another industrial site set incongruously among neighborhoods of low ramblers. One thing that really struck Ben on his travels was the amount of industry in the Twin Cities. “As a consumer, you’re so focused on retail and residential that you never really ask, ‘Where do things get made in the city?’” he said. “And it’s everywhere—places that you don’t normally go or think about, stuff is always going on and things are happening that are different. Everywhere you aren’t is somebody else’s reality.”—Alexandra Kerl


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