Peter Bruce is a slight, sandy-haired, serious man who moves and speaks quickly and with purpose. Bruce loves the skyways, how when it’s raining or too hot or too cold they convey people between offices and restaurants and stores. While most people have never heard of him, anyone who’s connected with the skyways—whether in retail or in planning or policing them—knows Peter Bruce and listens when he talks. And he says things like, “I’d say, just from my observations over the years, that for every ten degrees below room temperature it is outside, skyway traffic goes up between five and ten percent.”
Bruce, a mild-mannered convert to the Mormon religion, can talk like that because he makes a significant portion of his livelihood by counting pedestrians and gauging traffic in the skyways and on the street. His clients are retailers and government agencies. He estimates he’s counted foot traffic for eighty to ninety percent of the buildings within the skyway network as part of the Minneapolis business he started thirteen years ago. Before founding Community Enhancement/ Pedestrian Studies, Bruce conducted financial and market research for downtown real estate developers. After he struck out on his own, his first big job was to design the color-coded signage system in St. Paul’s skyways to help ease confusion for the overflow of visitors the capital city expected for the 1992 Super Bowl at the Metrodome (in which, by the way, the Washington Redskins beat the Buffalo Bills, 37-24).
Bruce most loves the skyways, though, when they “augment the flow of people into and out of downtown cores”; when they “naturally complement and interact with the street level” to create a fast and efficient and, yes, eye-pleasing system of people-moving from office to condo to sandwich shop to theater. But he knows that doesn’t happen often enough. Like anyone who regularly uses the skyways in the Twin Cities, Bruce knows how difficult it can be to figure out how to get access to them from the street, or how to get back to the street once you’re in the skyway. This is the big challenge for planners, and it’s a longstanding conundrum. “No downtowns that remove people from the street, via skyways or tunnels, do that well,” Bruce says. (Some twenty or so other U.S. cities have skyways or tunnels—like Houston; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Hartford, Connecticut—though, when combined, the skyways in Minneapolis and St. Paul are the most extensive system in North America and probably the world.)
Exceptions to the street/skyway barrier do exist. Bruce points to his newest favorite example, the Target Store on Nicollet Mall, where a pedestrian on the street can see, through the building’s glass entry, the escalator that ferries people to the second-floor skyway. The other legendary connection is the Crystal Court, whose expansive glass entrance leads into an open atrium where the escalator is clearly visible, and the skyway level is packed with retail. “Buildings could be retrofitted to be more like those,” Bruce says.
But that’s probably not going to happen, as Peter Bruce is well aware, because he knows the downside of the skyway concept. “Anyone thinking about the vitality of the streets downtown can see that the street life is weakened by skyways,” he says. “But second-level retail is strengthened, and I think most people would say that I want more retail that I can get to while still staying warm in the winter.”
If Peter Bruce is the ultimate scholar of the skyways, then Carol Robertson is the ultimate user. As this unofficial “Queen of the St. Paul skyways” knows, they appeal for reasons beyond the climate-controlled retail. A slight and energetic eighty-nine-year-old who looks barely old enough for retirement, Robertson takes to the skyways four or five times a week for an hourlong walk, during which she usually racks up three to four miles on her pedometer. Friendly yet reserved, she has lived a full and active life and is discreetly proud of it. And she loves the skyways for the chance they give her, in the twilight of her days, to walk and think and observe in comfort and safety.
We meet one afternoon on the eastern fringe of the skyway system in Galtier Plaza’s food court. Robinson has lived on the forty-first floor of Galtier since 1991. Normally, she keeps to a precise route, moving quickly and with determination, but given her role today as a tour guide, she’s taking it easy. Given my arthritic knee, however, I still find her pace too swift—something she keeps apologizing for. Over the course of the next two hours we cover nearly the entire system, a rather odd couple making our way through the grid as best we can. From Galtier Plaza we head to the US Bank Center, whose Great Hall we circle three times, passing through the adjacent Pioneer and Endicott buildings and over to the First National Bank.
After criss-crossing Fifth Street through two different skyways, we enter the Bremer Building, where the former St. Paul Athletic Club sits—now a fitness center. “That was a real loss,” Robertson says. “My husband and I loved the restaurant there.” (Her husband, Edward, died in 1996.) It’s clear that the skyways are more than a walking track for Robertson, that in fact they’ve been something more of a lifeline, giving her sheltered access to restaurants, banks, stores, and many other necessities of life that can be hard to get to, especially at a certain age. One of her favorite spots is the view from a skyway attached to the “new” Pioneer Press Building, where a twisting scarlet sculpture is ablaze in the afternoon sun. “Isn’t that just beautiful?” she says, without interrupting her pace.
We cross Wabasha Street into the Lowry Medical Building and the City Hall Annex. Robertson asks about my knee, and offers to stop and go back, but I decline. We push across St. Peter Street and pass the Saint Paul Hotel. We hit another prime spot, the Town Square skyway, which even in midafternoon is filled with people. We’re in the home stretch. Another favorite spot of Robertson’s is the 400 Building, which has a huge lobby where matching indoor and outdoor trees face each other through windows that stand two stories high. “I love how this lobby brings the outside in and pushes the inside out,” Robertson says. A few minutes later, I drop her off back at Galtier. Later, examining a map of the St. Paul skyways, I calculate that the two of us traversed about half the system.
When I chose to move from downtown Chicago to downtown St. Paul in the last days of January 2003, my friends in Illinois thought I was nuts. I couldn’t really argue. As it happened, the winter of 2003 was a mild one in Minnesota, not much different from a typical Chicago winter. So I was more than a little surprised to find so few people on the streets. And then I realized why: Most people preferred the skyways to the sidewalks. This annoyed me because, while the sidewalks seemed like frigid deserts, overhead people made their way through the city in sacrilegious comfort, minus the usual winter gear they should have been wearing—that I was wearing.
I’d only lived in Chicago and New York City—two places where the quality of street life defines the quality of life. Two walking cities. And now I found myself in a place where people seek shelter from the streets in second-story terrariums—skyways, skywalks, elevated pedways, “plus-fifteens” (the name Calgary uses to describe their skyways—fifteen feet above ground—that connect all its downtown office towers). Most stores, restaurants, barber shops, and bars turned to the skyways, carrying out one of the most common dictums of business: Go where the people are. During my first few months in the Twin Cities, I stubbornly disdained these street-life-draining monstrosities. I could handle whatever changes the weather threw at me, unlike my new neighbors, these supposedly weathered and hardy Minnesotans.
Which got me to thinking: Why doesn’t Chicago or New York or any of dozens of other cold-climate urban centers have skyways? After all, the main difference between winters in the Twin Cities and in other places is the outlier months, November and March, which tend to be colder and snowier here. The answer is simple to urban architects and planners like Ken Greenberg, head of Toronto-based Greenberg Consultants: Skyways are a bad idea. “The skyway network is a prime example of a highly focused, oversimplified solution to one problem—exposure to climate—that in turn creates others,” he says. “Climate protection is achieved but at a great cost. Street life virtually disappears; retail is moribund, functioning at best for weekday noon hours but not on weekends or in the evening.” That criticism hits its mark in both downtowns, but particularly in St. Paul, which practically ceases to exist outside regular office hours. As one fellow bus-rider remarked to another the other day, heading from downtown toward Lowertown, “This really is a ghost town after five.”
A primary mover behind the downtown development blueprint St. Paul has been following since 1996, “The Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework,” Greenberg points out that retail and street life can and do thrive in similar, very cold urban areas without skyways—even in places just outside downtown. “A good example is Grand Avenue in St. Paul,” he says. And downtown St. Paul itself, before the skyways. “Where skyway solutions have been employed in other cities like Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton,” Greenberg adds, “the results have been similar.”
For evidence, Greenberg points to an April 11, 2004, editorial in the Hartford Courant, in which urban planner Toni Gold delights in the demise of that city’s twenty-year-old skyways (which they called “skywalks”). Gold, who works at a New York City nonprofit called Project for Public Spaces, begins her commentary: “Hartford’s skywalks are coming down, with barely a whimper of protest from their one-time proponents, or even a hurray from their one-time opponents. Well, hurray, I say. Two cheers for city sidewalks. It’s now become obvious and widely acknowledged that cities should reinforce their sidewalks, not compete with them.” She ends her piece by quoting one of the most well-known urban planners of the last century: “As usual, William H. Whyte had the right take. Speaking at a conference in 1981 he said: ‘It’s distressing to go to a city and know what’s going to be there. You can almost plug your second-level walkways right in…But we already have in the central city the most fundamental spaces of all, the streets and street corners. These are our great treasures, and they’re right under our noses. They’re messy. They’re crowded. They’re full of all kinds of people. They’re animated. Absolutely full of life. And they’re our future.’”
Greenberg even suggests that Twin Cities leaders should reconsider the necessity of skyways. He believes it’d be better to build “mid-block passages,” which he describes as sheltered or semi-sheltered public pathways or interlinked lobbies that lead through the interior of blocks—as opposed to skyways that link buildings across streets. “They provide partial protection from the elements,” he says, “and while they require people to cross streets, they make for a reasonable winter-city experience. These could be grand, well-lit, and attractive street-level protected spaces that could make a real contribution to the quality of downtown pedestrian life.”
Mid-block passages sound nice, but the fact is that skyways are an entrenched and virtually irreplaceable part of downtown Minneapolis, and, to a slightly lesser degree, downtown St. Paul. How did this come to be? Most people will tell you that the opening in the mid-1950s of Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed shopping mall in the country, played a big role in the skyways’ development. Political and business leaders in both cities understood that they had to do something to keep their downtown retail and entertainment markets viable in the face of the pending exodus-to-suburbia that was sweeping across the U.S. in the post-World War II euphoria of the fifties. Skyways are among the earliest results of suburban influences on downtown Minneapolis, a kind of proto-mall decades before City Center and Gaviidae Commons were built. The idea was to make it more convenient for Twin Citizens to spend their dollars downtown rather than out in Richfield, Bloomington, or White Bear Lake. In other words, to offer roughly the same experience as the suburban malls were offering.
Edward Baker—the architect who designed the first two skyways in Minneapolis in 1962 and 1963 and later collaborated with Philip Johnson on the IDS Center and its Crystal Court—agrees with that line of thinking. But he also offers another, more pointed and political explanation, one that centers on the urban renewal plans for the Gateway District in downtown Minneapolis.
His story begins with a Minneapolis mayor by the name of Hubert Humphrey, who got it into his head that he wanted to redevelop the seedy red-light district along Washington Avenue. “A Democratic friend of his owned most of the property around there and was given a long option on it, about a dollar per square foot, I think, as long as he redeveloped the area,” Baker says. One of Baker’s clients was a man named Leslie Park, who owned a significant portion of the real estate around Seventh and Marquette. “One day Park told me, ‘We have to do something, because if we don’t, the whole downtown will shift over to Washington Avenue.’ He and other property owners around Seventh and Marquette weren’t going to let that happen.”
Park asked Baker to come up with a creative idea for that area, something that would catch people’s eye and imagination—and keep downtown centered there. “I made a sketch on how to connect all four corners of the Seventh and Marquette intersection with a plaza, making it light and airy, and with a restaurant at the second level over the street, so that people could walk on the second-floor level.” The driving idea, Baker explains, was to alleviate the traffic on the street by putting the pedestrians on the second floor. As it turned out, however, Baker could never have built a restaurant above Seventh and Marquette, because the City of Minneapolis, which owns the actual streets, would have charged exorbitant fees to allow retail to occur above them. “So we went with bridges connecting the buildings across the streets with walkways that became skyways,” Baker says, adding that connecting that block cost $26 million.
Watson Davidson is the man most often credited for starting the skyway system in St. Paul (though some skyway purists disagree). The Davidson family at one time owned a great deal of downtown St. Paul, including the historic Pioneer Press and Endicott buildings. Seeing the success of the Minneapolis skyways, Watson Davidson built one in 1967 connecting the Pioneer and Endicott buildings across Fourth Street to the Federal Courts Building; the second came in 1970, when the Fifth Street Center project included a skyway over Cedar Street.
Minneapolis’s IDS Center, completed in 1973, was the first to incorporate a retail center built around skyways. After that feat, it got to be so that “if you built a building downtown, you had to include a skyway,” Baker says. “The system became enormous—and, frankly, a little unwieldy, I think. But it’s become a way of living, because people do find it’s a wonderful way to go to work.”
Indeed, thanks to the transportation division of the City of Minneapolis, the pedestrian commute between parking space and office space, for many workers, no longer involves going outside at all. Mike Monahan, an engineer, was intimately involved with the huge expansion of the skyway system during his career—he joined the Transportation and Parking Services division of the Department of Public Works in 1969 and was its director from 1985 until he retired in 1999. During that time, he saw the skyway transformed from a quaint, even amusing urban oddity of the frigid North into an irreplaceable feeder system that conveys tens of thousands of people each day from ramps on the fringes of downtown Minneapolis into the business and retail core. Ed Baker points to the threat of Washington Avenue development as the initial inspiration for the skyway system; Monahan knows intimately how the system achieved its unprecedented growth: “The parking ramps became economic tools, is what happened,” he says. “When the Government Center ramp went in [1973], the Government Center wasn’t there, the Lutheran Brotherhood building wasn’t there. ‘Build it and they will come’ was the idea—and they did.” The city built one ramp after another at the fringe of downtown, knowing the skyways would follow, until it was virtually ringed with major parking complexes.
It wasn’t that easy, of course. Someone had to pay for all those garages. This is where Minneapolis hit the mother lode: Starting in the late 1980s, the city got the federal government to pay ninety percent of the $100 million bill to construct three massive parking ramps around the Target Center along Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh streets. Known collectively as the Third Avenue Distributor (“TAD”) ramps, they contain seven thousand parking spaces, which were subsequently tied into the skyway system as anticipated. How’d Monahan and his colleagues do it? They did it by convincing federal officials that enabling commuters to park their pollution-spewing vehicles in these fringe parking lots would help improve air quality in the downtown core. No matter that the ramps would also encourage the auto-centric culture that does overall damage to air quality—the federal government went for it. Minneapolis and the state paid only $5 million each for the $100 million project, which stretched into the 1990s.
“The ramps are nicely connected on all corners by skyways to downtown via the Target Center,” says pedestrian counter and skyway expert Peter Bruce. “And so they really do promote the whole idea of a skyway culture.”
“One writer from out of town called the skyways ‘gerbil trails,’” laughs Todd Klingel, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce. “I loved that one; it’s probably my favorite description. Because we do have whole groups of people exercising in the skyways.” Klingel, owner of a robust sense of humor, has been involved with downtown Minneapolis issues for twenty-five years and he loves the skyways. He calls them “the biggest indoor winter cabin in the world.” But he’s also aware of their limitations. The lack of a universal signage system in the skyways makes it difficult for people to find their way through them, and the fact that the skyways are not open twenty-four hours can cause real problems, especially for visitors. “I’ve heard stories from visitors about how on a really cold night they went to dinner through a skyway—so didn’t take their coats—and then find the skyway closed after dinner, forcing them outside. So they’re cold and lost. There are some bad things that happen because the skyways aren’t open twenty-four hours.”’
There is a wealth of untold stories from thirty years of life up in the skyway. Rob Allen, police inspector for the First Precinct in Minneapolis, remembers his moonlighting days doing security there: “I guess there’s something about skyways that makes people feel romantic, because occasionally I’d have to get on the speaker and tell some couple to get a room. People don’t realize how many security cameras there are in the skyways.” Which brings me to another point: Two of the most prominent stores in downtown Minneapolis, Marshall Field’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, allow people to walk from skyway to skyway right through their stores—even when the stores aren’t open. One would assume that sticky-fingered people have taken advantage. While such thievery does occur, Allen says, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d think. Ann Massey, general manager for the downtown Saks, says the store opens its doors for the skyway pass-thru at 7:30 a.m., while the store itself doesn’t open until ten. “It’s the truth,” Massey says. “People don’t steal. It’s because Minneapolis people are so nice and honest. Really. I think it shows that we trust the public and they trust us.”
The Minneapolis Downtown Council, which favors skyways—and was in fact created to monitor the skyways—keeps a list of locations where it believes the city should build additional skyway bridges because of heavy foot-traffic, or remove skyways because of under-use. It is possible to recycle the latter into the former. In the early 1990s, Lutheran Brotherhood decided that a new Sixth Street skyway connecting its building to the Government Center would be superior to the Fifth Street one that already existed. Monahan and Greg Finstad, a former assistant, recall how one cold Sunday morning at five a.m., workers finished dismantling the one hundred forty-foot skyway, loaded it in pieces onto trucks (fourteen axles, ninety-eight tires), and drove it to a rail yard along Interstate 394. A few years later, the city wanted a skyway connecting the Seventh Street parking ramp across First Avenue to the Carmichael Lynch Building. “And so I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a skyway for you,’” Monahan laughs. That’s how one hundred and forty feet of skyway got recycled. “We saved $300,000 by doing that,” Finstad says. “With Minneapolis being pioneers in recycling, we thought it’d be a good idea.”
For better or worse, the skyway system exerts a major influence on the culture of both downtowns—their daily look and feel and pulse. There are more than one hundred skyways in the Twin Cities (about seventy in Minneapolis, forty in St. Paul). Are they really efficient at bringing customers to retail operations? Apparently they are. In St. Paul, for example, according to a walking survey the city mapped in 2000, there were slightly more than two hundred skyway-level businesses, compared to ninety on the street. In Minneapolis, the ratio is closer to sixty-forty, though no one knows for sure, because, for some odd reason, no one in Minneapolis has ever counted. But the power of this discrepancy is evident in the lease rates. In St. Paul, skyway space costs between twenty-five and thirty-five dollars per square foot, depending on location and the ease of retail access. The cost of sidewalk space is much cheaper—between ten and twenty dollars less per square foot, a huge difference in commercial value. In Minneapolis, skyway-level rent is in the range of twenty to fifty dollars per square foot, whereas street-level property goes for ten to thirty dollars per square foot. It’s clear that retail wants to be on the second level.
Equity Commercial Services manages four buildings in downtown Minneapolis, buildings that include twenty-eight skyway-level businesses. Chuck Howard is a principal at Equity. “You’re selling two different things when you’re talking street level versus skyway level,” he says. “The thing that draws a business to the street level is if they are a national group and want a corner that really stands out. In general it’s preferable to be on the skyway, because for the most part skyway traffic stays on the skyway. It’s a detriment if you aren’t connected in downtown Minneapolis.”
Now that I work in downtown Minneapolis, I understand the draw of the skyways. It’s amazing how often I—a person who disdained skyways for my first four months here—have found myself walking through those that ring the building where I work (the Pillsbury Center), rushing to the credit union or the dry cleaners or to the several lunch places I favor. Many days I don’t feel the fresh air on my face from the moment I head into work until the moment I leave. It’s funny. Even on beautiful days, when a walk outside would be a pleasure, I rush along from Point A to Point B indoors because, well, it’s so much quicker. I’m more than a little amused that I’ve become a skyway stalwart, a victim of the seductive ease and convenience of the system.
So: Skyways are wonderful urban conveniences that do a great job of delivering people from car to office and office to stores or restaurants or theaters—or they are bloodsuckers erasing the life that downtown streets should be teeming with. No matter which side one takes, anyone who knows the skyways well knows their two faces, their yin and yang. Even Ed Baker, the putative inventor of the skyway, recognizes the mixed blessing. That they drain life from the street, he says, is “a valid criticism.” But the solution, he argues, is to get more people to live downtown by increasing available housing, which would put more people on both the streets and in the skyways. “Then the skyways could be a great amenity not just for people working downtown but also for people living downtown.”
Pedestrian consultant Peter Bruce also knows the downside of skyways, how they can suck the marrow from the street fifteen feet below. For a city center to be healthy, Bruce knows that people must be on the streets, too. “We’ve done a great job here of helping people avoid the streets,” he says. He praises Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak for refusing to build a large hotel adjacent to the Minneapolis Convention Center, precisely because “people wouldn’t get out on the streets enough.” What Bruce envisions when he looks into the future is “a new science” of city-center urban planning, one that more elegantly holds together everything that a downtown can be, one that includes street amenities like outdoor sculpture (he considers the “Peanuts” campaign in St. Paul a particularly brilliant example) and clear signage and traffic signals and well-paved sidewalks, as well as easy-to-access and more transparent skyways—in other words, smooth and enjoyable transitions between the street and the office and retail and housing and entertainment, efficient exchanges that not only make life easier for people who work downtown, but also pique people’s curiosity and lure them to live and play downtown. “Now that’s planning I’d really like to be involved with,” Bruce says.