Author: Christy DeSmith

At 120 years old, the Grand Army of the Republic Hall over in Litchfield is one of the last-standing halls of its kind in the nation. It’s an inconspicuous building: narrow, pallid, sunk between two ugly, newer structures in the middle of a residential block. It hardly looks deserving of all the festoons Litchfield will…

Stepping off the light-rail train at Minneapolis’ Midtown/Lake Street station, you’re surrounded by a menagerie of pastel glass panes, seemingly hovering in midair on the elevated platform. For a tiny second, it feels as though you’re exiting the famed El in Chicago, though this station is newer and tidier than any stop on the Loop—the…

Back in the 1950s and 60s, a day trip to Excelsior, the waterfront town along the south shores of Lake Minnetonka, was the highlight of summer for many a city kid. The main attraction was the widely hyped Excelsior Amusement Park, which was inspired by Coney Island and had opened in 1925. Proprietor Ray Colihan…

Anybody who’s attended a Fringe Festival knows the drill. In the first days, before word-of-mouth reviews get out, you flip through the program, scanning for provocative or otherwise attention-grabbing titles (see this year’s I’m Naked and I’m Ready), which might indicate a show worth taking a chance on. Last year, scouring the listings, I zeroed…

With its low ceilings, faint sawdust smell, wood paneling, and seventies-era earth tones, Jim Fiorentino’s front office is what you’d expect of an old garage door company. Going into the larger warehouse, however, is like entering some kind of a fairytale world. It’s not just the massive, hundred-year-old Belgian band organ, decked out with painted…

One hundred and fifty years ago, when a Methodist pastor stumbled into what became Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, he thought he’d found the Garden of Eden. Dotted with apple trees and surrounded by lush green bluffs, no other place, he argued, conformed so closely to the biblical description of Eden. Even now, despite upstream polluters that…