Walking down the trail from Godfrey Parkway below the bridge that connects Minneapolis’ 46th Street and St. Paul’s Ford Parkway, I looked up, and saw the following graffito on the concrete support:
NATURE
TRAIL
TO HELL
That’s right. Not even nature can provide an escape from the hell that your life has become. Oh, well. It seemed worth a try, anyway.
The nature trail doesn’t lead to hell, but to Lock and Dam No. 1. Since last year’s closing of the St. Anthony Lock and Dam upriver to stem the invasion of carp into the Minnesota interior, Lock and Dam No. 1 has been promoted to head of navigation on the Mississippi River. If you could look all the way down the Mississippi River to St. Louis, 750 miles away, you would be looking down from the top of a 400-foot segmented, slow-motion waterfall that allows barges to proceed, step by step, between the two cities. Four hundred feet is an abstract term to spatially challenged people like me, so imagine peering down the distance of a football field, top to bottom.
The Lock and Dam No. 1 is the best place in the Twin Cities to see, up close, how commerce and industry has shaped the river physically. The visitor’s center is open during the warmer months, and you can walk up much closer to the action than you think you ought to be able to, and see what it looks like to have 6 million gallons of water displaced with the flip of a switch by a civil engineer. It’s the kind of thing that, if you’d seen it as a child, could have potentially impressed you enough to foster a lifetime interest in engineering. It’s still impressive to see as an adult.
A hundred years ago, people might have been dancing in the streets of St. Paul if they’d known their hated upriver rival’s lock and dam had closed, leaving their St. Paul the head of navigation, the last word in maritime commerce in the interior. (Of course, you’d first have to explain to them a lock and dam had been built in Minneapolis in the 1960s, but they’d appreciate it, anyway.) As relations between the two towns warmed after a rough few decades around the turn of the century, the opening of the bridge over the lock and dam was a way to encourage economic development and ease of travel between two comparatively remote parts of the cities. The plaque on the base of the bridge uses language so diplomatic you’d think it connected two warring principalities that’d just arrived at an uneasy peace. Each mayor and each city engineer is scrupulously positioned with equal footing on each side.
The plaque, oddly, calls the bridge the “Mississippi River Bridge,” though the official (and better name, in my opinion) is the Intercity Bridge, a concrete monument to the connection between the two towns, and a term you don’t hear nearly enough.
Commerce often trumps civic good intentions, though, so most people colloquially know it as the Ford Parkway Bridge, or even just the Ford Bridge. Crossing east into Highland Park, you’re quickly reminded of the enormous imprint the Ford Motor Company placed on the neighborhood that once hosted its factory: Ford Parkway was once Edsel Road, and the area is strewn with reminders of the neighborhood’s automotive benefactor (my favorite are some apartments a half-mile down called the Ford View, their logo over the front doors in the familiar Ford script). Even the name “Highland Park” is an awkward, vaguely aspirational bit of corporate deference to Highland Park in Michigan, where the first Ford plant was built. Both Highland Parks are in the same boat these days: Neither one is home to a Ford plant.
Henry Ford brought a plant to St. Paul pretty early on, in 1923, about two decades after the company was founded in Michigan and a few years before the term “Fordism” was coined, though the concept already existed in practice. Ford was attracted by the possibility of harnessing the river for cheap power near the existing site of a major lock and dam, an option not entirely possible in other metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Across the river, on the Highland Park side, there is still a red-tiled hydroelectric plant that powered his assembly lines, and still generates power, another reminder of how commerce shapes the landscape.
This is a landscape shaped both by commerce and by early ideas of conservation, and the two live in a delicate balance with each other. You can see the direct transfer of one into the other, in fact: Your descent down the nature trail to hell to the visitors center at the lock and dam takes you past soaring limestone bluffs streaked through with white and yellow, and capped off with verdant green. This is limestone of the same type, in all likelihood, that was powdered and heated to create the Portland cement that was then shaped into the concrete architectural forms of the dam and bridge.
“You’ll find scenery between here and St. Paul that can give the Hudson points,” wrote Mark Twain on this stretch of the river, speaking through the voice of a character he encounters, a few decades before the dam. “Why, you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick; it’s like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass—when the water’s still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of the river—ragged, rugged, dark-complected—just the frame that’s wanted.”
The frame Twain wanted was provided, maybe, by the engineers that built the Intercity Bridge. It sets a sort of frame around the whole scene – the dam, the falls, the bluffs, and all the rest of it. I love crossing the bridge on foot or on the (technically “intercity”) A Line or 46 buses, and seeing the dam below, and the way the mist from the falls rolls across the river. I love the way the red brick of the Minnesota Veterans’ Home lingers on the bluff above, like a little river village. The tower on Building 6 peeks over the landscape – for years, I thought it was a church steeple, but it’s just an ornament to the head building on the campus.
The notification of your descent into nature trail hell under the bridge is joined by another graffito on another support: THIS POISONED RIVER WILL BREATHE AGAIN. It’s hard to tell if the same people spray-painted this one, or even if the two statements are in ideological alignment with each other. What you can take away from one or both, I suppose, is that there is a real and deep complexity in how natural and human-made systems interact. There’s no better example of that interplay than a lock and dam and a hydroelectric power plant, sitting across the surface of a great river. Hell or not, you are getting into some sense of the transcendent, at least — it’s hard to not feel a sense of awe at the scale of the river itself, and the scale of those human systems that have grown up over and around it in the course of a hundred years.
Love your column Andy….great info about little known aspects of the twin Cities…Although I have not lived there for over 20 yrs…your column sure takes me back.
Thank you and Minn Post.
Greg Price
Regarding locks and dams on the Mississippi
Nice piece, Andy.
A couple of thoughts come to mind:
1. Wasn’t there a story line involving Henry Ford working with the Army Corps of Engineers (which operates all the Mississippi locks and dams) to get them to stop construction on an already started lock construction a few blocks up-river on the St. Paul side (Called the Meeker Island lock where concrete footings are still visible at low water) in favor of building #1 at its current location, in return for which Ford would build the hydro electric power plant you mentioned and provide free electricity to the lock and dam in perpetuity?
2. Wasn’t the 1st Ford assembly plant in Minnesota in what is now the Ford Center building across North 5th Street from Target field, and wasn’t its claim to fame that it built Model T fords on a VERTICAL assembly line, meaning that the bare chassis started out life on the top floor and as it moved down towards the street level components were added and when it arrived at the street it was complete? Given the timing of the Highland Park plant, it would seem logical that it was needed to provide a place to build the to-be-introduced-in-1927 Model A Ford while the 5th Street plant contained to turn out Model Ts.
3. I wonder the degree to which all of this Ford plant stuff is related to the story I have heard that the Tenvoorde Ford dealership in St.Cloud is the oldest Ford dealer in the USA? Any insight into that?
4. Finally, you indicate that Lock and Dam #1 (Ford) has regained its place as the ‘head of navigation’ on the river, meaning that once a boat passes through it, there are no more passable locks up river. Certainly with respect to the Upper St. Anthony Lock at the foot of Portland Avenue in Minneapolis closing this past summer, that would be true, but it is my understanding that the Lower St. Anthony Lock (pretty much right under the new I 35W bridge and just a few blocks down river from the Upper) is still operating. If that is true, then the Lower St. Anthony lock would constitute the upper limit of navigation. Assuming that is the case, I can only wonder why the Lower St. Anthony lock is still operating, as a Google earth satellite view of the area doesn’t show much reason for commercial activity above the Lower and below the Upper lock. Any insight into this issue?
P.S. Did you know that there are 27 numbered Army Corps Locks and Dam on the Mississippi, numbered starting with #1 at Ford — a numbering system thrown out of whack in 1963 when the Upper and Lower St.Anthony Locks opened in Minneapolis) with the last one being at Granite City, IL, just up-river from downtown St. Louis and there are no more locks and dams down-river all the way to the Gulf of Mexico? Lock and Dam #1 has one of (if not the) highest lifts (# of feet it raises a vessel) of all of them.