In 1991, a group of Powderhorn Park Neighborhood artists and volunteers organized the first ever Powderhorn Park Art Fair in the big bowl of Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. The event was a success and they decided to repeat it for a second year. Now, almost 30 years later, it continues.
The first year of the fair, I filmed and edited a 30 minute documentary video about the fair which played on public access TV in Minneapolis. So I decided to film at the second fair.
I shot two hours of video of that fair and maybe I wasn't able to spend as much time at the fair, or maybe I was too busy with other things, but that two hours of video stayed on a tape and I never looked at it or edited it after I shot it. That tape remained unviewed and unedited until last spring, when I digitized it so I could edit it on the computer. I edited the video down to a little over 20 minutes and here is what I made of it.
It was filmed on Hi-8 tape with my Sony TR81. The video was all on one two hour tape, which was close to film. If I were going to edit it in 1992, I would have had to transfer it to SVHS and edit it on an SVHS edit system at MTN, the public access center where I was volunteering, and where by 1993 I would join the staff.
Today I was able to edit it with Adobe Premiere on my computer in my home office. As I write this, John Karrigan, the volunteer delivering flowers at 1:55, has died over the past weekend. His funeral is this coming Saturday. I'm sure a number of people in this video aren't around any more.
This is an edit I created this year from video that I shot in May of 1992 but had never edited until now.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) had proposed in early 1992 to do a massive rebuild of interstate 35W through south Minneapolis. Talk about rebuilding the freeway started not long after the highway was finished in the first place, in the 1960's.
In May of 1992, MnDOT presented several options, asking for feedback on them. Their plan was to construct one of those options, which were all pretty similar. They all called for widening the freeway by taking houses in both the Windom and Phillips neighborhoods. The options varied from taking hundreds of houses to taking around a hundred. All the options also called for a stacked freeway where 35W and 94 come together.
A public hearing was scheduled on those options. It was to take place at the Richfield High School, a place not very accessible to transit, though I took the bus there to get to the shoot, which meant that I walked several blocks to get to and from the High School.
The day before the hearing, groups opposed to the plan held a rally at Franklin Steel Park in the Elliot Park Neighborhood. The park sits right beside the freeway. I went there because I was filming all kinds of things happening in the Phillips Neighborhood, where I lived, and wanted to film this too. I filmed the speakers and also did some interviews.
I also went to the public hearing, but did not stay for the entire thing. It went until 2:30 the next morning. Rather than get a seat in the auditorium, I walked around to get interviews, film the media, and step in now and then in the gymnasium of the high school, where the hearing was being close circuit televised for an overflow audience.
I filmed an interview with a MnDOT Project Manager. I'm not sure what he thought of me with my small Hi8 camcorder, but he did do the interview for me.
At the time I thought I might do a documentary that looked at transportation in Minneapolis, and especially the disinvestment in public transit since the 1950's. Where the freeway now ran there used to run a very extensive streetcar system. That was long gone and people opposed to the freeway expansion were asking for light rail in the corridor instead of more freeway lanes. Around that time I did some filming of historic photos of streetcars to make this longer documentary project, but I never did. I filmed and edited other things and the tapes from these two shoots just sat in a box.
Now in 2018 35W is being reconstructed through the Phillips Neighborhood. Some houses were taken for this final plan, but nothing like the number of houses that were proposed to be demolished in 1992.
Light Rail Transit is not being built in that corridor, but a Bus Rapid Transit line is. That BRT line was give the green light for the federal share of its funding on the day that I finished this edit of this public hearing that happened 26 years ago.
I had bought my first Hi8 video camera just a couple weeks before this. It was small, a Sony TR30, I believe. I could carry it in my backpack, I could carry it in a pocket.
This was 1992. I was a student at the University of Minnesota and worked a night job that allowed me to sleep. So I had some extra times during the day. I filmed as much as I could that year, I filmed more than I could edit.
I lived in the Phillips Neighborhood of Minneapolis. I lived near Little Earth of United Tribes, which was the center of the American Indian community in the city. When the Super Bowl was coming to town, and one of the teams playing was the Washington, D.C. team, the American Indian Movement organized a conference and a protest to ask Washington to change the mascot of their football team, a racist derogative term.
I don't really remember filming this video, and am not sure why I never edited it (until now). At the time I usually liked to film interviews, and for this I just filmed the speeches and the march. I began filming at East Phillips Park, where Clyde Bellecourt, Paul Wellstone, and others spoke. I then followed the march to the Metrodome, where we circled the stadium and then listened to speeches from Vernon Bellecourt and others.
The Super Bowl is once again taking place in Minneapolis this weekend, and it is truly amazing to compare the level of security between the event in 1992 and 2018. In 1992, AIM has set up a teepee on the plaza right in front of the stadium entrance. We marched just a few feet from the open doors of the Metrodome. There were a few police officers around, but their presence was pretty minimal.
This year, a wall of chain link fence on concrete blocks surrounds the new U.S. Bank Stadium for a block. Downtown is peppered with National Guard humvees. It seems like there are hundreds of private security guards in downtown at any time. The comparison is simply unfathomable.
As I was finally editing this video, twenty-six years after I shot it, I had to do some searches to find the spellings of some of the names. It was sobering to see all the people in this video who have since passed on, from Vernon Bellecourt and Paul Wellstone to Brian Roberts, at the time a law student, Dixie Latu Riley, Matthew Little, and E. Randal T. Osburn. Look for a shot of Congressman Keith Ellison standing near me in the crowd around 4:45.
After I did this edited I found a few more minutes of Super Bowl video on another tape. That video had some issues, but I will try to edit a little out of that one too.
