It’s been three years since I last saw this river, on a brisk November morning at its opposite end. Elena and I cross the Mississippi at the Upper St. Anthony Lock, closed to prevent the northern spread of bighead carp, a non-native invasive which can out-eat any fish that belongs here. The only natural waterfall on the Mississippi, St. Anthony Falls fueled the flour mills that were the economic engine of Minnesota for almost one hundred years. The waterfall slowly eroded the sandstone on which it sat, resulting in a tunnel collapse in 1869 that nearly crippled the mill industry.
The citizens of Minneapolis and the neighboring city of St. Anthony (absorbed by Minneapolis in 1872) asked for help from Congress, which sent in the Army Corps of Engineers to install a wall beneath the falls and a concrete spillway above them. Business proceeded as before until one night in 1878, when flour particles in the air went up like gunpowder in a massive explosion that leveled the Washburn A Mill and killed eighteen workers. Minnesotans, however, are nothing if not resolute in the face of hardship (how else survive these winters?), and the community rebuilt and grew. They were milling off St. Anthony Falls until 2003, when General Mills finally shut down the Pillsbury A-Mill, its last in the city. Someone’s turning it into luxury apartments now, and will probably name it Flour Power Condominiums or something similarly uninspired. Sic transit gloria.
Elena and I stay across the Mississippi from the future site of Golden Fields Apartments (or whatever they’re gonna call it) in a hotel where the elevator tiles contain a blue gel that moves when you step on it. Every night we walk down some back alley or other to the unmarked entrance of a speakeasy. There are several of these around town, throwbacks to a simpler time when the sandstone caves along the river were host to wild parties for the local ne’er-do-wells: bootleggers, gangsters, women of the night—basically, anyone you’d want to hang out with.
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This is the eleventh post in a cross-country road trip series. To start from the beginning, click here!
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