University Ave. Revisited

She stands in a hallway, the walls decorated by construction-paper flowers—a school, probably. Her round face is framed by a black hijab, the religious headdress of Muslim women, and she has a determined expression on her face—a look too serious for a girl her age. Her eyes evade the camera; they are fixed on something unknowable down the hall, over the photographer’s shoulder. In her hands is a small chalkboard, cocked at an angle, on which she has written the words, “Don’t mess with reality.”

Shot by photographer Wing Young Huie at the Dugsi Academy on University Avenue in St. Paul, the image is one of 400 photos that will appear in store windows and other venues along a six-mile stretch of University this summer and early fall. Though it’s similar to a project Huie did on Lake Street 10 years ago, The University Avenue Project is also considerably more ambitious, featuring photos 30 feet high in some places, as well as a nightly slideshow of images projected on screens as large as 40 feet, and an entire calendar of concerts, community gatherings, and educational activities.

“If you are driving along University Avenue this summer, you will not be able to avoid it,” says Huie with a laugh. “It will be everywhere.” Commissioned by Public Art Saint Paul, the exhibit will stretch from KSTP near Highway 280 all the way to the Capitol. The photos are of people Huie met during nearly four years of wandering University, and will be displayed primarily in shop windows and places, such as abandoned car dealerships, where any sign of life would be welcome.

Indeed, The University Avenue Project comes at a time when University itself is preparing to undergo what may be its most dramatic transformation ever. Construction of the Central Corridor light-rail line is scheduled to begin in August, starting near the Capitol, and by 2014 Twin Citians will once again be able to ride between Minneapolis and St. Paul on a rail-based form of mass transit. That trip was last possible in 1954, when the streetcar line was removed to make way for the golden transportation options of the future: buses and automobiles.

Ironic, yes—but irony is far too frivolous a word to describe the tragicomic drama that has played out along University Avenue over the past hundred years. Since the 1960s, when St. Paul’s predominately black Rondo neighborhood was razed to build I-94, the street has been trapped in a relentless chokehold of economic and physical decline, the new Midway SuperTarget and some fine Asian cuisine notwithstanding.

Drive down the St. Paul portion of University today and you see one of the drabbest streets in America, a charm-challenged boulevard of conspicuous neglect and visionless civic planning. Vast stretches are blighted by empty parking lots and the ghostly shells of failed auto dealerships, sorry reminders of a commerce now largely banished to the suburbs. Most of the structures are brown brick boxes, built back when brown bricks were plentiful and architects, evidently, were not. The sidewalks are empty and, at night, frightening. Things are considerably less forlorn on the Minneapolis side, if only because the street cuts through a neighborhood with trees.

’Twas not always thus. Prior to I-94, University Avenue was the main artery between Minneapolis and St. Paul, and it pumped the lifeblood of Twin Cities culture—especially if you had a car. For decades, the Prom Ballroom’s 9,000-square-foot maple dance floor was the place to be on a Saturday night. It hosted huge dance parties fueled by such big-band legends as Glenn Miller and his orchestra, Count Basie, and Tommy Dorsey. Buddy Holly even played there a week before he died. A Bally’s Fitness and an auto-body shop occupy the site now.

Beginning in 1897, St. Paul Saints fans used to gather at Lexington Park—a ball field then located at the corner of University and Lexington Avenues—to watch epic duels between the Saints and their archrivals, the Minneapolis Millers. Two subsequent generations know this corner as the location of a Red Owl grocery store, where almost everyone in St. Paul shopped. A plaque commemorating the iconic history of the corner still exists today—in front of a TCF bank.

Until the mid-1960s, the lot near the Midway SuperTarget was known as “Circus Hill.” Every year, Barnum & Bailey brought its show through town, set up camp on Circus Hill, and paraded its elephants from Prior all the way down to Lexington. Circus Hill is now the grim Central Medical high-rise, and the parades are quaint memories.

Somewhere between University Avenue’s storied past and its imminent future lies another University, the one photographer Wing Young Huie sees through his lens: a thriving, ethnically diverse fusion of people trying—some successfully, some not so much—to navigate the obstacles and challenges of life in America, and Minnesota in particular. Huie doesn’t want to change these peoples’ circumstances (“I’m not a moralist,” he says); he wants to meet the street and its people as they are, in this time and place, because he knows it will never look this way again.

“There are a lot of parallels between the Lake Street Project and this one,” says Huie. “University Avenue now is the way Lake Street used to be before all the renovation and gentrification. Like Lake Street, it represents the best and worst of the Twin Cities, and it’s a microcosm of what we are becoming.” Driving, says Huie, may be the worst way to experience University. “I only shot people outside on Lake Street,” he says. “But for this project, I wanted to go deeper, behind the walls and doors, to meet people who live and work and go to school on University Avenue.”

University Avenue has always been an idiosyncratic street with a hodgepodge of businesses, some delicious, some interesting, some a little shady, and some just plain weird. Like a true Minnesotan, University doesn’t reveal its real character until you peer behind the innocuous façades. That’s how one discovers the surreal charms of the Turf Club’s Clown Lounge, the fantastically entertaining collection of junk at Ax-Man, the koi pond in the Mai Village restaurant, the ribs at Big Daddy’s, the amazing collection of first editions (and vintage porn) at Midway Used & Rare Books, the retro treasure trove at Swank, and some of the best ethnic eating in the Twin Cities. It’s also how you meet the girls at Agape, a school for pregnant teens and teen mothers, or how you run into an ex-con and former meth addict who has the words “I have sinned” tattooed on his neck.

To find these elusive denizens of University, Huie spent countless hours roaming, camera in hand, asking permission to take people’s pictures. For Huie, the photos aren’t about cataloguing ethnicities or even creating “beautiful” photographs. Rather, they are an attempt on his part to advance the art of documentary photography by, paradoxically, stripping away the artifice.

“In documentary photography, there’s often a barrier between the viewer and the photograph, as well as a tendency to objectify and exoticize people,” says Huie. “Even in my own work I’ve felt that.”

As an artist, Huie is always looking for ways to surmount that barrier so viewers might feel a deeper, more personal connection with the people in his photographs. In the past, Huie’s projects have included direct quotes from the subjects, displayed alongside the photographs. For the University project, Huie hit on the idea of incorporating subjects’ words directly into the photographs—by having them write something about themselves on a small chalkboard.

“People holding up signs is everywhere in different cultures: panhandling, demonstrating, at sporting events. And you see it a lot in advertising now,” says Huie. “I was also doing a lot of shooting in schools, so I thought, ‘Schools and chalkboards make sense.’ ”

In a slice of The University Avenue Project he refers to as the “backbone,” Huie’s subjects reveal personal and often extremely intimate things about themselves on a chalkboard. “I wanted the questions to be open-ended, and structure them in a way that would get interesting answers,” Huie explains. “So, for example, I asked, ‘What are you?’ instead of ‘Who are you?’ or ‘How do you think others see you?’ and ‘What don’t they see?’ ”

In one photo, a woman is sitting on a bench, holding up a chalkboard that reads, “I was shot 5 times!!! You have to live life 2 the fullest.” Another features an Asian man, whose message about himself is: “Waiting on a lot of things.”

Few of the people in Huie’s University Avenue photos are smiling, and not all carry a chalkboard. In fact, at one point Huie was going to stop taking the chalkboard photos because he feared they were “too much of a gimmick.” But when he started showing people the photographs—with and without the chalkboards—“everyone’s attention was drawn directly to the chalkboard photos,” he says. So he kept taking them.

The other difference between Huie’s Lake Street project and the exhibit that will overtake University this summer is that Public Art Saint Paul is organizing and producing it, to the tune of about $250,000. As a result, photos will be displayed in more ambitious and eye-catching settings. With the help of 3M and its wall-vinyl billboard technology, which allows digital printing on large textured surfaces (like the side of a bus or a building), some photos may be displayed as giant, building-size murals. The centerpiece of the exhibit is an outdoor projection venue at Hamline Avenue that will display a two-hour slideshow projected on nearly 40-foot screens attached to giant shipping containers and set to music recorded by local musicians.

“This isn’t Lake Street II. It’s much more than that,” emphasizes Christine Podas-Larson, director of Public Art Saint Paul. “It’s about giving people a chance to experience photography in a deep and profound way, in a way they don’t usually see it—as a public performance that reflects the realities of people who make up our civic core. It’s also the last chance people are going to have to see University Avenue this way.”

As for what University will become in the next five, 10, or 20 years, no one really knows. If the coming light-rail line spurs the sort of economic revival that everyone is hoping for, life along the avenue could improve dramatically. The utopian fantasy is an influx of new businesses, rising property values, and re-invigorated neighborhoods populated by shiny, happy citizens of the world. The reality is likely to be more complicated. In the meantime, existing businesses are focused on how to survive the light-rail construction and aftermath.

Wing Young Huie’s photographs capture both the paradox and promise of University Avenue, and they’ll be an inescapable part of the landscape from May 1 to October 31. The backhoes and bulldozers will then introduce a new reality—one that, with any luck, will be substantially less messy than the one it’s replacing.  

Research assistance provided by Kristina Anderson, Emily Howald, Sarah Howard, Stephanie March, and Eric Johnson.