Wing Young Huie, Lake Street USA, St. Paul: Ruminator Books, 2001
Wing Young Huie, The University Avenue Project, Volumes One and Two, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010.
My copy of The New York Times landed in the snow this morning, safely wrapped in two blue plastic bags. Fortunately I got there before it was buried and I got to see the front page headline announcing that there were rural-urban divides in Minnesota. Not that any kind of article on any kind of divide would surprise me — having studied the collapse of American society for some decades — but this one even less so because I looked at the rural-urban divide in Minnesota for my Main Street book.* I had the opportunity to visit Sauk Centre, a farming town that was once famous as the model for Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street but was sadly depleted when I visited. And I had the opportunity to visit the much more vibrant Main Streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The rural-urban difference is real there as in many places. For me, as a social psychiatrist, the hard question is, “What do we do about these divides?”
I learned one answer in Minneapolis, where it happened that I met Wing Young Huie. He is a photographer who, in the summer and fall of 2000, created a public art exhibit on Lake Street, showing photographs of people who lived in the abutting. neighborhoods. His idea was to post huge photos all along a six mile stretch of Lake Street, turning the street into a public art gallery. He took thousands of photographs, eventually choosing 675 for the exhibit. Some of the photos covered the sides of buildings, others were in store windows. His book, Lake Street USA, is filled with these photographs, as well as some of the exhibit in situ. I included these two in my Main Street.
The great Scottish poet, Robert Burns, in his famous poem “To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” wished:
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!Wing Young Huie was, for Minneapolis and St. Paul, that Power, granting the wish that the cities might see themselves. One youngster was riding his bike past a slide show of the University Avenue Project, Wing Young Huie’s exhibit in St. Paul. The youth caught a glimpse of a photo and said, “Hey, that’s me!”
There are many stories of the exhibit that I heard from Wing Young Huie, among them a story of teens in two gangs. One young man, looking at the photos of the other gang, realized, “They’re just like us.”
I find that to be true for me as well. I look at the photos and I think, “That’s just like me — my family — my friends — my neighborhood.”
Wing Young Huie did these remarkable exhibits more than two decades ago, but his photos are part of the cultural fabric of the Twin Cities. They bridged divides and helped to weave many communities into what we see now: one community that is standing up for its neighbors.
This is the heart of what Main Street has done and can do for us: help us see ourselves so that we can care about one another. The poet Robert Burns concluded that much good would result if we could see ourselves:
It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, An' ev'n devotion!
*Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All, New York: New Village Press, 2020.