Day 4

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Day 4 - Obfuscator writes: Perhaps it’s just the museums we saw today. Perhaps Minnesota museums are just built for, well, children. Or perhaps all museums are getting this way, and I just haven’t been in enough of them recently. We first went to the Mill City Museum, built in the old General Mills (Washburn A, I think) mill in Minneapolis by the River. Well, to be sure, that wasn’t our first stop. First we (today “we” includes male cousin, D, who graciously took off work and showed us around) went to the new Guthrie Theater, which boasts the longest unsupported structure in the world. Slightly reminiscent of the House on the Rock‘s Infinity Room, but so much less impressive. The Infinity Room gives the impression of a glass needle, while the Endless Bridge seems almost like a twisted, predated memorial to the collapsed 35W Bridge, which is easily visible from it. The Endless Bridge also just seems less impressive, because while technically unsupported, it looks much more supported than the Infinity Room. D pointed out that the problem with the Guthrie is that it’s 9 floors, and only 3 theater spaces. Evidently, most of the structure is bars, as evidenced by the 4 or 5 we saw in our short time there. A great place to get drunk and lost in, if you like theater.

The Mill City Museum is a shameless pitch for General Mills, run by the Historical Society. (Onaxthiel adds: “I thought it was just a shameless pitch for flour.”) The Museum was very well made, especially for a building that blew up in a freak industrial flour accident in the 1890‘s, and burned down in 1992 (Onaxthiel adds: “because they let homeless people into it, rather than driving them out with fire . . . Oh wait.) You could go into all sorts of areas and see milling machines and read about them. We also took a sort of multimedia tour of the Museum where we rode a freight elevator to different levels of the Mill and saw video and heard narration from people who used to work there, before it closed. It was also fairly interesting to see a lot of the old ads for various General Mills products, and the history of Betty Crocker was a bit . . . disturbing to my 2007 sensibilities. By the time we left, I had learned more than I ever wanted to know about milling or wheat. Luckily I have already forgotten most of it, so life is good.

The kiddy museum tour continued at the Minnesota Historical Society, in downtown St. Paul. As a side note to the Madison crowd - D put enough change in a meter to keep us in this museum for a couple of hours. This was in fact, cheaper than the parking lot nearby. Discuss. Located inside a very nice, pretty, and expensive looking facility, the Minnesota Historical Society looks on the surface to put Wisconsin’s run-down campus building to shame. When we saw the exhibits though, well, they’re for kids. We walked through a replica of a specific house in St. Paul, where they gave the history of the many (50?) families that have lived in the house in the past 90 or so years. Then we went through the exhibit about the early Frontier days, and the one about the interstate system, and the one about music and pop culture in Minnesota, and blah blah blah. Lots of multimedia. Lots of little gizmos and interactive crap for 9 year olds and adults with worse ADD than Onaxthiel. (Onaxthiel adds: “I do not have ADD! Oh look, a butterfly!”) I was ready to go home when we did. Back to the Cousin’s dwelling where we watched part of “Made” before getting bored and turning it off, and then “Breach,” a much better film.

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Photos

35W Bridge
The collapsed 35W Bridge

The Endless Bridge
The Endless Bridge - Guthrie Theater

Mill City Museum
Mill City Museum

Twisted Beam
Twisted Beam inside Mill City Museum

More 35W
More of the 35W Bridge

Comments

[allen]

more on betty:
any details on what was disturbing about her?