The Rake Magazine

Tag: history

  • Get Rail!

    I once punctuated a doomed love affair with a ride on the Empire Builder to Glacier National Park in Montana. It was my 25th birthday, and I spent it sighing deeply into a window-framed postcard of North Dakota, idly expecting the steel rails to yield some inspiration.

    Instead, I was deposited unceremoniously outside an RV park in West Glacier with a too-heavy pack, bad shoes, and a strong impulse to hitchhike east. A week later, I was back on board, but feeling more like a commuter than a wandering romantic—sort of like grabbing the 21A back to St. Paul after last call in Minneapolis. Except I really needed a bath.

    Still, I understand the allure of faraway places and the mystique of train travel, even though that understanding mostly comes from old Hitchcock movies. I’m less certain of the train’s appeal as engineering marvel. It is very large and very powerful and afflicts its devotees with a delicious sense of danger. (Early steam engines were liable to explode at inconvenient moments, and modern trains remain slightly prone to derailment.) But there is something prehistoric about these machines in their lumbering, inertia-bucking clumsiness. Even at moderate speed, the modern train has little sense of balance and nothing remotely resembling grace. It is a big old clunky, foul-smelling, grease-spewing juggernaut that somehow has dodged extinction for the past half-century.

    So, I’m not sure about trains. It’s great that they’re often cheaper and more comfortable (especially for kids) than the terror-stricken airliner. It’s great that you can get a decent breakfast on the 8 a.m. to Chicago. And it’s great that you can check out the appliance-strewn backyards of people you’ll never meet as you pass through towns you’ll never visit. But trains are surprisingly slow, seldom run on schedule, and reliably serve bad beer. And on the mythic level, well, I think it’s pretty much over.

    Or is it? Two blocks from my house in east Minneapolis, crews of bundled, burly men are building an 11-mile rail line that about this time next year will be carrying what the state’s policy wonks pray will be large numbers of happy commuters into downtown Minneapolis and out to the airport and Mall of America. The half-billion dollar project is not only the largest publicly funded construction effort in state history, it may be the most maligned, ridiculed, and lampooned as well.

    I can’t say I disagree.

    You can trace the stupidity of Light Rail Transit way past Jesse Ventura and Ted Mondale, before Arne Carlson and John Derus—all the way back to a gloomy rail yard in 1954, where on a rainy June day a man named Fred Ossanna, hiding out under a damp fedora, supervised the burning of the last Minneapolis streetcar.

    The Twin City Rapid Transit Company, which Ossanna headed, once operated nearly 530 miles of electric streetcar track in the metropolitan area. Lines tied Minneapolis and St. Paul together and ran as far west as Minnetonka, east to Stillwater, north to White Bear Lake, and connected suburbs as far flung as St. Louis Park and Columbia Heights. It was, according to some observers, the best transit system in America. But between 1949 and 1954, Ossanna and his crew of progressive-minded bean counters successfully transformed it into a bus line.

    And here we are, nearly a half-century later, starting all over—but with none of the wild frontier optimism that allowed the system to be built in the first place.

  • Life in a Northern Town

    It’s the world’s largest freshwater port. But when the steel, timber, and frozen pizza industries go to hell, the city is screwed. Or maybe not. How did our favorite northern town go from being “the state’s largest white ghetto” to being its most popular destination? It’s all about converting to the post-industrial future that awaits us all—the global tourist economy.


    Today, the quintessential symbol of Duluth may not be the raw beauty and power of Lake Superior, or even the beloved Aerial Lift Bridge, but instead the rather humble rust-colored ore boat afloat on Superior’s waters in the lift bridge’s shadow. The SS William A. Irvin is a retired 610-foot ore boat that sailed for U.S. Steel from 1938 to 1978, carrying iron ore and coal to Great Lakes ports. In 1986 the Irvin became a tourist attraction in the Duluth harbor, and is now visited by thousands of people every year.

    The Irvin has become a figurehead of Duluth’s waterfront, but it could also be called a figurehead of Duluth’s successful conversion from a swarthy industrial port town to a diversified economy with a heavy emphasis on tourist dollars. “We’re both a tourist attraction and a working city,” says Ken Bueheler, executive director of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum at the downtown depot. “I think most people get that now. We are both.”

    In order to fully appreciate the significance of the Irvin’s perennially fresh paint and long lines during the high season, you have to understand how much likelier it once seemed that any retired ore boat docked in the Duluth harbor would have rusted itself away to oblivion right along with the blighted economy and waning population of a dying city.

    Back in the summer of 1974, my mother was packing my sisters and me and the family dog into the old Impala for the move from Duluth to the wild west. My dad and his sister were simultaneously dumping my great aunt’s North Shore log home (with stone fireplace on a wooded lot near the Lester River) for a paltry $15,000. They were glad to be rid of it. And around that same time—an era of scarring economic hardship for the hilly city—another fed up Duluthian was paying for the installation of a billboard that begged: “Will the last person to leave Duluth please turn out the lights?” That dismal billboard might have been my final view of the city, as the Aerial Bridge and the gritty Duluth-Superior harbor disappeared behind the rising southbound slope of Interstate 35 at the Cody Street exit.

    As a West End girl, my view of Duluth was necessarily impoverished. But my mother’s weekly drives along London Road to “look at the mansions” made it clear even to a child that somewhere along the line there had been real wealth in Duluth. In the late 1800s, when the timber, steel, shipping, and railroad industries that put Duluth on the map were in their full glory, Duluth boasted the highest concentration of millionaires per capita of any city in the country. The 1970s and 80s, however, saw brutal setbacks in the steel, mining, and timber industries, and as the economy bottomed out, Duluth’s high school graduates flocked away en masse and thrust the population into deep decline.

    In recent years, though, the city has been transforming itself. A tedious battle over the expansion of I-35 through downtown finally gave way to a successful freeway expansion that included the use of surplus funds to re-brick the downtown streets and build a boardwalk along the shore. These days, the dozens of new hotels, resorts, restaurants, and shops—and of course the William A. Irvin—in Canal Park and along the North Shore suggest that people really love to stay in Duluth.

    And yet the city’s latest tourist attraction—the Duluth Aquarium—ran into trouble within a year of opening its doors, and is still scrambling to concoct a viable plan for reopening in the spring. Some wonder: Is this snow-belt city of ore boats, paper mills, and arctic weather really sustainable as a tourist town?

  • Something About Mary

    If Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, then you know who deserves most of the credit. As interest in Mary increases among the unwashed masses, the Church has more trouble trying to manage her image, her meaning, and her legacy.

    Anne and Joe were a typical couple. They married young and drove hard for success, and Joe’s career in animal husbandry eventually made them wealthy. After two decades of marriage they were still so in love that friends could only envy them. All but for one thing: Their marriage was infertile, and they ached for a child. There were no effective medical interventions, so they had little more than a hope and a prayer of parenthood. When Joe overheard a client’s off-color joke about his sterility, he finally hit the breaking point, and instead of returning home from work that night, he took off toward the outskirts of town and collapsed on a dusty hillside. He lay there for days, broken and wild with grief, blaming himself.

    Meanwhile Anne grew frantic. Joe often traveled for work, but she’d been expecting him home days ago. She stared outside at the birds building their spring nests and felt numb with sorrow. It was in that moment of utter despair that she was seized by a sort of paranormal vision that left her with hope for motherhood and a desperate urge to go looking for her husband. Joe had a similar experience on the hillside, and he immediately sped home. The two met up at the city limits, where they were stunned by each other’s accounts of what they could only describe as a divine message. Flushed with the heat of hope and desire, they raced home. The next morning, Anne was pregnant.

    Nine months later she had a healthy baby girl who proved to be exceptional. She could walk seven steps by six months of age, and when she was three, Anne and Joe presented her to their priest. He predicted big things for the girl.

    Sometime between her 12th and 14th birthdays, the girl was ready to follow in her mother’s footsteps toward an early marriage. The priest summoned a handful of eligible bachelors. One of them was a carpenter named Joseph, an older man and a widower. As the group convened, a dove somehow emerged miraculously from Joseph’s staff, and perched on his head. The priest pronounced Joseph to be the one God had chosen to be the husband of the young woman.

    Unfortunately, Joseph had doubts about the marriage. He worried that friends and family would ridicule him about his youthful bride. Furthermore, he already had two sons of his own. But he took her in, reluctantly, and then left for a neighboring town to go about his trade. Months later, when his wife told him about her unexpected pregnancy, Joseph was unhappy and incredulous, and she cried bitter tears. It took a visit from an angel to declare Mary’s virginity and the immaculate conception of Jesus.

    The rest of the story is well worn. Mary’s name is now known the world over—despite the fact that accepted scripture actually makes very little mention of her, and apocryphal texts and legends fill in only a few more blanks. Regardless of this spotty historical knowledge, public interest in Mary—on the popular and scholarly level in Catholic, Protestant, and even secular circles—has existed ever since Jesus was born and died. And after several decades of increasing popularity, attention to Mary is reaching a crescendo and igniting this question: To whom, precisely, does Mary belong? Of and for the people, Mary is attractive to the masses specifically because of her humanity, and because there is so little concrete information about her. She can be whoever you need her to be.

    Yet certain institutions, most notably the Catholic Church, have a fervent interest in defining and protecting Mary and her likeness. If religious scholars riff on whether Mary’s mantle should be red or blue—and they do—then it’s easy to see why they’d recoil at the collection of irreverent plastic Mary memorabilia at places like Sister Fun, the oddball gift shop on Lake Street. There, on any given day, you’ll find the image of the Virgin emblazoned on everything from key chains to ashtrays—displayed right alongside the fart powder and hairy soap bars. But taste is a matter of opinion, and the gap between one person’s and another’s is really all that divides the merchandise at Sister Fun from the “relics” at the Marian Library, a service of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton. The library’s collection includes “nearly 100,000 cards depicting Mary in the art of all ages and numerous Marian shrines, attractive collections of statues from around the world, Marian postage stamps, recordings of Marian music, Marian medals, and rosaries.”

    Legally and poetically, Mary sits squarely in the public domain, where people are free to make what they will of her, including a profit. As much as the Church may want to be the primary beneficiary of Marian interest, the reality is that more and more people are wanting a piece of Mary for themselves.

  • Portait of the Artist as an Old Master

    Thirty-three years ago, Richard Lack started his atelier for classical realism. The modernists laughed, groaned, and went back to their wine. Decades later, the arts movement that found a happy home in Minneapolis may be the most exciting thing happening in the nation.

    You walk up a flight of stairs and down the flourescent-lit cinderblock hall of a faceless warehouse in the industrial heart of East Hennepin Avenue. You push through a set of black steel doors labeled simply The Atelier, and you enter a space where time and the outside world have lost their hold. The stinging smell of oil and turpentine hangs on the air, and the pristine white walls are punctuated by long gray curtains hiding innumerable rooms beyond. Dividing the walls like a riot of unrelated windows are hundreds of paintings.

    The paintings are landscapes, still lifes, and a small army of figures, mostly nudes looking on. They are solitary images, some in color, many in black and white or sepia, each with its own demure elegance. Pull back one of the curtains and a cascade of cool, northern light dapples the small room as if it were a private chapel. More paintings line the perimeter of the room, stacked upright four or five deep. Opposite the window is a table covered with blue silk, a white porcelain pitcher, a silver tray, and a clutch of pink roses. From one wall, a plaster face, milky and deathly in its bone-like monochrome, frowns down at a disheveled assortment of paint tubes and brushes. The silence is vast, the scent of mineral spirits dizzying. The stillness is both mesmerizing and foreign.


    But the sensation suddenly evaporates when a voice chimes out from behind. A small woman with a flash of brilliant blond hair appears from around the corner. Her greeting reveals an easy Texas drawl as she introduces herself as Cyd Wicker, co-director of the Atelier, a school for fine art painters. Wicker’s name reappears over her shoulder, attached to a large painting of Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. It’s a relief to know this isn’t a time warp anymore. As we stroll through room after room of pedestals, easels, still-life props and paint carts, Cyd explains the courses that would-be painters pursue at the Atelier. Four years full-time, drawing the figure three hours every day, five days a week. Pencil, charcoal, painting in black and white, painting in color, portraiture, still-life, interiors. She speaks in terms of tonality, light, nature and observation.

    Then she ticks off a list of names: Burne-Jones, Millais, Godward, Waterhouse, and Bouguereau (yes, the beautiful child and mother offering an apple at the MIA—the one that’s on all the posters). But mostly the names are unfamiliar, long dead. Foremost, Wicker talks of lineage, the ancestry of the Atelier—as if it were a family tree. Still more names: Ives Gammell, the Boston School, William Paxton, Jean-Leon Gerome, Jacques-Louis David— these men, too, long past. Except one, Richard Lack, who founded this institution in Minneapolis more than thirty years ago.

    At 74 years old, Richard Lack is an institution in his own right. “It’s really been incredible what he’s accomplished,” says Steven Levin, a successful painter and one-time Lack pupil. Lack has been an artist nearly all his life. A well-regarded portraitist and landscape painter, he has works in collections all across the county, including governor’s portraits at our Capitol. Moreover, as the founder of Atelier Lack, the forerunner of the current Atelier, he’s taught his craft to dozens of others. His students consider him to be one of the most influential teachers alive today, a teacher of whom they speak in the same breath as Rembrandt and Rubens. Steve Gjertson, in his recently published biography of Lack, unabashedly calls him “one of the most significant American realists of the second half of the 20th century.”

    Yet Lack’s success hasn’t made him a household name by any means, and the fact that people have come from all over the country to study with him has gone largely unnoticed by the cognoscenti. “He stayed on his own path, and it’s always been an uphill struggle,” Wicker says. The established art world looks at Lack as an anomaly, part of something abandoned a hundred years ago in the tidal wave of modernism and its tangle of currents. While Lack may not appreciate the dismissive posturing of the moderns, he doesn’t give them much heed. It’s the past that he really cares about. He is an apostle of a tradition of painting that all but perished in the 20th century. Yet it’s a tradition with roots reaching back to the Renaissance—to the imagery, style, and techniques of those still known as the giants of art history, the likes of Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci.

    Lack is a purveyor of realism. “Classical Realism” to be exact, a term his biographer claims Lack himself coined in 1982. And the company of the old masters suits him just fine. It’s their impulse he lives by. For Lack and his followers, what is good in art today should be judged by the same merits it was judged by then. As he wrote more than twenty years ago, “Our criterion is broad and simple: A picture must be beautiful in line and color, and the representational element skillfully achieved. Only then can we dwell on matters of taste, style, innovation, historical significance, relevance of subject matter, paint handling…”

    The teacher wasn’t writing about Cherry Spoon Bridges. “The rest of the world can have it,” he says in a satisfied undertone, on a glorious autumn day in his studio. His snow white hair and quiet gaze give him a countenance that is at once ancient and full of life. Somehow his aluminum walker and blue robe have a regal dignity, lit from north facing windows set at 45 degrees, just as da Vinci dictated. In a way, you could call it a matter of perspective.