Editor’s note: This is the first installment of “Street Views,” a twice-monthly column by Streets.mn board member and contributor Joe Harrington. As he described in our recent newsletter, the column will raise issues “relevant to Minnesotans today: transportation and land use, climate and environment, public policy and — more broadly — city life.”
A few weeks ago, a friend shared a digitized promotional video of Minneapolis from 1968 that was circulating online, reposted from the collection at Augsburg University. According to the Star Tribune, the video sat unnoticed in the university archives for decades before being unearthed and posted to YouTube in 2019.
The video begins with a train ride into the city’s Mill District, before launching into a catchy song written by Dick Wilson and Ray Charles, the creators of the “We’re Going to Win, Twins” song. The video takes a tour of Minneapolis across the four seasons where “each season brings a new discovery.” As to be expected, winter was de-emphasized with 3 seconds of airtime in a 3-minute video.
It featured many familiar and undeniably hometown features: leisurely walks and sailing along the lakes, Minnehaha Falls, a lively Hennepin Avenue and Minneapolis’ “modern” new downtown, including the Gateway Center and folks enjoying a meal in a stylish downtown building overlooking the Foshay Tower (now a hotel).
This 3-minute clip gave today’s Minneapolitans a rare glimpse into the city’s past. “The film shows Minneapolis in a snapshot of time,” said Stewart Van Cleve, an archivist at Augsburg. “To see the color of the buildings, the color of [people’s] outfits — it’s amazing. It changes your understanding of the times.”
The creators of this film, whoever they are, were engaged in a process called place branding. All cities, whether explicitly or not, engage in this process, based on the idea that cities and regions can be branded just like anything else in the free market. These videos join other approaches like ad campaigns, hosting major sporting events like the Super Bowl or the Final Four, and other strategies to boost the public perception that uplifts and circulates ideas — both good and bad — about what defines a place, space and public life in a city.
Minneapolis’ 1968 video was not alone in promoting the city’s image. Television networks across the United States adopted a template for city promotional videos, inspired by the 1977 “Hello Milwaukee” promo. This trend included WTCN’s (now KARE 11) Minneapolis-St. Paul “Hello Twin Cities” videos in 1982 and spread to numerous other U.S. cities including Phoenix; Nashville; Dayton, Ohio, Syracuse, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Charleston, South Carolina, among others. States like Iowa and Indiana also replicated this video-focused branding approach, with the scheme even traveling as far as Adelaide, Australia.
Seeking a ‘Modern’ Feel
These videos demonstrate how cities adapt common marketing techniques to promote themselves, balancing two opposing goals: diving deeply into their unique local character while aiming to present a broadly appealing image to potential residents and businesses. But did these videos show the whole picture?
In both cases, the Augsburg archive and KARE 11 videos presented a selective view of Minneapolis, captured at a moment in time. During those years, numerous unseen processes were actively reshaping the city’s physical landscape, cultural identity and overall representation in ways not depicted in these promotional clips.
By 1968, the city had undergone rapid change and urban renewal brought on by a variety of forces. Perception of urban blight and racialized views drove officials to target Black and poor neighborhoods to be razed by highway construction, carving up the city for the sake of what was then thought of as urban progress.
This began with the displacement of Black neighborhoods in Near North Minneapolis to build Olson Memorial Highway in the 1930s and ’40s and spread to Old Southside and Cedar-Riverside during the 1960s, erasing these communities from the landscape and shattering a shared sense of place and community.
The highways remade downtown Minneapolis into an island, separated on all sides from the rest of the city. This created barriers to movement and cemented Downtown as a single-use space for businesses and commuters, a move that some planners and residents in Minneapolis have come to regret.
Highways provided the tool to enable white flight from Minneapolis to the suburbs, which is ironic, given that the videos feature primarily white residents. The new highways also displaced hundreds of homes and apartments, exacerbating the city’s population decline even as suburban growth accelerated.
The huge drop in population and property put a hole in the city’s tax base, one that has yet to recover from Minneapolis’ peak population, which peaked above 520,000 in the 1950s. This process was not confined to Minneapolis but instead exemplified a broader change in cities across the country as the U.S. suburbanized. This may have led each video’s creators to highlight the modern development of Minneapolis as well, showing that urban renewal had left its mark to coax residents into staying in the core and not moving to the suburbs.
Those same years saw a slew of other significant urban mega projects. The streetcar system, the backbone of mobility in the Twin Cities for half a century, was ripped up and destroyed. On the last day of service, June 18, 1954, one streetcar was driven from Downtown Minneapolis to St. Paul and was ceremonially burned, with press and politicians riding a bus back to Minneapolis in a sign of the times.
The University of Minnesota’s expansion to the west bank and the expansion of nearby Augsburg also reshaped the cities, displacing huge swaths of Cedar-Riverside already reeling from highway development projects. Dubbed the “The Freeway Gang”: University Expansion and Urban
Riverside Plaza, part of a federal urban renewal experiment in Minneapolis, branded as a futuristic housing development that leveled part of Cedar-Riverside, was built. Its likeness was later featured in the Mary Tyler Moore Show during the 1970s.
Just a few years later, as reflected in the KARE 11 video, other buildings like the IDS Center, gave Minneapolis’ skyline a new modern, cosmopolitan feel. This may have served a dual purpose: both to show the fashionable new office space for downtown workers and to keep the city’s companies from fleeing downtown for more spacious suburban offices. Today, only five of the region’s 15 Fortune 500 companies are based in Minneapolis proper, one is in St. Paul, and the rest are in the suburbs.
As the city changed, these videos were a tool to soft launch a new image of Minneapolis as a modern metropolis, one free of the perceived urban decline and issues of race and class in places like Chicago and Detroit. Showing the amenities that Minneapolis had to offer, especially for white residents, was likely meant to prove that Minneapolis itself — not just the swankier surrounding suburbs like Mendota Heights, Edina and Golden Valley — was a suitable place to raise a family and live out a Minnesota lifestyle, complete with golfing, sailing, skiing and enjoying the artistic amenities, such as the Minnesota Orchestra and the Guthrie Theater, for which the Twin Cities were becoming known.
People of color, immigrant communities and low-income folks were largely excluded from the videos. If you consider the exclusionary policies and practices of the time, its clear the video’s creators saw no welcome place for these marginalized groups in this sparkling vision of Minneapolis.
Past Imagery Sparks Current Debate
These tensions — both past and present — still play out today and reveal ongoing friction between idealized past views and current perceptions of urban decline. In the weeks following the September 10 presidential debate, in which former President Donald Trump proclaimed three times that Minneapolis burned in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, the comment threads on these nostalgic videos of Minneapolis sparked debates on social media and have been spun off into conservative talking points, most recently by J.D. Vance who campaigned in front of the Minneapolis Third Precinct on October 14th.
These comments, seen below, range from comments aimed at politicians (“Ahh the years long before Mayor Frey and Governor Walz destroyed Minneapolis”) to comments reminiscing on the city’s past (“Amazing video, truly heartbreaking what’s become of Minneapolis”), to racist and xenophobic comments about Somali immigrants in the city (“Was this in the travel brochure for the Somalis?”).
More comments also defend Minneapolis, some directly pushing back on the new narrative of urban decline by praising the city, some clinging to the way the city was portrayed and others acknowledging the complex history that got us here.
These discussions echo historical narratives of urban blight, often reproducing race- and class-based anxieties, demonstrating the enduring power of such urban imaginaries in shaping public perception. Tensions on immigration, suburban and urban divide, apparent political partisanship, and the state of the city at large also poke through as many of the comments portray Minneapolis as terrible, no-good place.
These videos naturally appear to offer a straightforward glimpse into the past, which in many ways they do. However, it’s crucial to consider whose perspective and experiences these videos capture and recreate years later.
As Minneapolis continues to redefine itself following George Floyd’s murder, the aftermath of the pandemic and slow downtown recovery, past visions of the city and present-day attitudes continue to shape how residents — and the wider world — perceive Minneapolis.
Years from now, media created today will provide glimpses that future Minneapolitans see of our city. It’s time for us all to shape how Minneapolis is viewed today and years from now — a city that acknowledges our complex history, celebrates our diverse present and envisions more inclusive futures where all residents can see themselves reflected in the city’s story and success.