For use: Friday, July 21st, 2000

 

Future Shoes: "And to Think that I Saw It on Lake Street"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

I have lived over half of my life within a few blocks of a very long street that traverses the Twin Cities like an asphalt equator: Lake Street, as it is called in Minneapolis, and Marshall Avenue, the name it goes by in St. Paul. 

Though it includes a thousand businesses, and though its history includes a lengthy period as a streetcar venue, and a couple of decades where you had to go to Lake Street to buy a car, it was never a glorious street. There are no museums along its length, or mansions or faculty clubs. What there is is fast food, tattoo parlors, Vietnamese restaurants, a tannery, a motorcycle chop shop, a boarded-up Sears building, and the silent facades where a porno district once thrived.

But there's something different going on right now. As you travel the length of Lake Street, you see black and white photographs displayed in shop windows. The TV repair place on the corner of 44th Street has a dozen. White Castle at 36th has a few. Even Precision Tune on 37th Street has some up. Altogether, over 600 photographs are up. And people on the sidewalks are stopping to peer at the pictures.

As you slow down, too, you see they are pictures of the people of Lake Street. All kinds of people -- babies in strollers, moms and dads, winos, gangstas, shopkeepers, peace marchers, layabouts, evangelists, grandmothers, dudes, dudettes, grandchildren, policemen, even the occasional boxer dog. There are Mexicans, Indians, Hmong, Norwegians, Egyptians, Filipinos, Paraguayans and Irish. There are African Americans from America and African Americans from Africa. There's everybody in these pictures.

And the pictures are good. Well composed, well mounted, sharp black and white. Some, like the huge 10-feet tall photos on the Sears façade, jump out at you with super-realistic vividness, every pixel firing at once.

I was lucky to meet the photographer, a second-generation Chinese American named Wing Young Huie. Wing reminded me of me. Just like I'm a business writer always on the lookout for something more interesting than a story on stock prices, Wing is a commercial photographer with an appetite to something a little more than that. A few years ago he created a community photography for the Frogtown neighborhood near downtown Saint Paul, just as that mostly low-income neighborhood was trying to reclaim itself after decades of nearby prostitution and peep shows. The exhibit started out as a way for him to show what he could do, but in the doing, something changed -- and the work became about the people living along that stretch of University Avenue.

Multiply the Frogtown project by about 50, and the even greater ethnic diversity of those six miles, and you have a sense of the hugeness of the Lake Street USA project.

Lake Street is the old main drag in South Minneapolis. But promise me, that if you go there, you will get out of your car. Pick out a couple of blocks that you want to see, and walk from window to window. You are sure to be struck not just by the different people in the pictures, but the different people beside you, also looking at the pictures.

Visit Wing Huie Young Huie's Lake Street USA page at http://www.lakestreetusa.walkerart.org

While I stood with Wing at the Sears building, a trio of Ethiopian girls in their gorgeous veils threw stones at a chain link fence. I talked for a few minutes with a Salvadoran teenager about a picture of a father and a son on their front porch, both of them laughing. A big red-headed man paused at the electric door to the Chicago-Lake liquor store to look at the pictures, and shout to his mother, just behind him, "Hey, will you get a load of that?"

A Native American guy in a bright white T-shirt came over and started chatting with Wing about a kid he knew in one of the pictures, holding up a sign with the mysterious legend: "FINE AS FROG'S HAIR." He knew that the kid was Egyptian, and he used to live a few blocks over, but now he had moved up to Northeast, maybe.

It struck me how naturally the guy just walked up and started talking. People know him by now, not just by the camera around his neck, but by all the hours he has put in on the avenue. Wing has put four full-time years into Lake Street USA.

Wing listened to the man, but politely corrected him. "No, he just lives a few blocks over now, in Phillips."

Lake Street isn't listed among the American streets that are paved with gold. Lots of folks avoid it, because people get killed there, and people who live there aren’t rich, and don’t always speak English.

But this, says Wing Young Huie, is what America is becoming. It is our present and our future. And the neighbors who peer into the pictures, recognizing faces they know, seeing themselves amid all the different faces and colors, see that they matter too. And that Lake Street is as much a place to be as anywhere.

 

Michael Finley's FUTURE SHOES

1841 Dayton Avenue

St. Paul, MN 55104

Phone 651-644-4540