Living Memory
By Mitch Berg
I was in a discussion a few weeks ago about what the future holds for the Twin Cities. Someone – a Minneapolis booster and fan of the current administration in Minneapolis and Minnesota – said the cities’ current decline is a sign that the metro is in “the throes of a new city being born”.
Well, maybe. Good times aren’t guaranteed to last, and any city can turn things around. And they can turn in either direction – fifty years ago Detroit was a thriving city with some worrying symptoms, and Nashville was a backwater with some music companies. The elevator goes down *and* up.
But a whoooole lot of people, particularly boosters of the status quo in Minneapolis and Saint Paul over the past ten years, think that’s the *normal*.
It occurs to me – when we talk about what the Twin Cities and Minnesota used to be, people under 40 have no idea what we’re talking about. Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination. It was certainly a destination when I moved here in 1985.
Let’s recount what’s changed since I’ve lived here.
In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader. It wasn’t just defense.
In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time.
This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Sure,” you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the East Side of Saint Paul. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, IBM, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.
Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Tyme; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of all kinds of music. And not just music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside New York.
And we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy. And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices. That’s all gone now.
It wasn’t all local. Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized (freeing up a tidal wave of capital that financed the prosperity of the ’90s). Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere.
But state tax policy was exporting jobs long before Clinton cashed the “peace dividend”, much less NAFTA.
3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight.
And it’s not just big businesses. The startup I’ve been working on (www.storyaliz.com) moved, along with 2/3 of its staff (of, uh, three people) to the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Between taxes, regulations, the “family leave” policy and the stagnancy of the small business climate, there’s just no upside to trying to do a tech startup in Minnesota.
And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?
There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.
Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite.
Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things.
In 1986, when I was producing the Don Vogel show, I booked a writer from Fodors Travel Guides – which were where you went for information about places you wanted to travel, before there was an internet, and were pretty well-respected at the time – for the show. He’d just written an article calling the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”.
Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.
So when people like the one I was talking with say “we’re watching the birth of a new city”?
Sure. It happens.
But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics.
So ask yourself this: do our current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, scotch tape, comedy, brilliant ideas and products of all kinds – or just consuming goods and services?
Because that determines the city and state you get.
I think there’s a very strong case that Minnesota has become a consumer, not creator, culture.
That’s a problem.
