More doors were open

Sunday, May 14, 2023

I was most interested to see the behind-the-scenes tour of the Minneapolis Post Office. They had timed tours and they didn’t work yesterday, so it was the number one priority today. We arrived early for the noon tour (almost an hour) because of getting shut out at the newspaper yesterday. Turns out the Postmaster General had cancelled the tours because of lack of security. It’s a sad thing that the post office needs to be on high securty, but it does. The Doors Open volunteer said not to blame her, because it was the Postmaster General. I said, “Of course not. Unless you ARE the Postmaster General.” That made her look very concerned – I guess until she realized she wasn’t the Postmaster General. We found a guy (with a great voice) who told us all about the equipment they have and how the mail is sorted, etc. and really enjoyed seeing the all-original lobby from when the building was built in 1935. It has the longest chandelier in the world – a 350-foot, 16-ton bronze chandelier runs the length of the lobby, originally designed to regulate temperature. (What? Cool. Or hot. Depending, I guess.)

The Federal Reserve Bank was right across the street. We gawked at $4.6M and sat on the shredded money throne. We learned about all the things they include in bills now to keep counterfeiting away. There is no counterfeit insurance of any kind – if you take one, you just lost that money – so it is good to know what to look for on a bill. We learned all about all the special stuff included in the $100 bills – and I was the assistant to the lady presenting, because her finger would not make her smartboard work. She would tap and tap and nothing happened, so I sprang into action and pushed the screen. She thanked me and we said we knew Daniel who worked there, and she said she was his boss, and he is wonderful. We agreed. We went in a room to see a movie about them receiving trucks of money from banks and I took a picture (because the robots that move the money had name tags – John Dough and Carrie D. Cash), and I wanted to remember – then I was chastised, as no photography was allowed during the video. Darn! But it did make me remember what I wanted to remember. I obviously deleted the pictures, because RULES!

On to the Minneapolis City Hall building. It took 19 years to build and opened in 1906 – a half city and half county building. It is still half and half. There is a 14,000lb statue in the lobby. It was commissioned by the city of New Orleans to commemorate the Mississippi River and fashioned after a similar statue in Rome honoring the Nile. After the guy carved it out of a single block of marble, they had no money to pay for it. It went into storage. A year later, some wealthy Minnesotans were in NOLA and heard about it and bought it for $40,000 and gifted it to the city. Then the city had to tip it on its side (14,000 pounds!) to get it through the door! It’s cool – Minnesota and the headwaters of the river are honored at the top with the wreath of pinecones and oak leaves, then there is a corn stalk for the middle of the country, and a gator and turtle for the mouth of the river. There are beautiful stained-glass windows around the lobby, but several of them appear more dim than the others. That is because the county determined at one point that the center courtyard was half theirs and they had a four-story building built on exactly half of the courtyard space. It covered some of the windows. Our guide had no idea what was in that addition at this time – he has never seen it open. Huh. There are 5 million hand-made, hand-laid floor tiles. At least 3 have handwritten names (one with an address) of single women who made the tiles in Ohio – presumably sending messages of availability to the single men laying the tiles in Minnesota. No record is known of anyone making a match. My very favorite part of the tour was in the council chambers. When the room was originally built, it was 3 stories high, making the acoustics awful. The council members couldn’t hear each other and decided to lower the ceiling to two stories in 1923. The style was fancy then, and the room was fancy. In 1950, the mid-century modern style was upon us and fancy was out. They further dropped the ceiling to one story and attached wood paneling (like someone’s basement) to the walls. It stayed that way (butt ugly, according to our guide) until 2005. They took down the paneling and were delighted to find a lot of fanciness had been left, just covered up. The room is now fancy and lovely again, and two stories high. They won’t be changing it back to three stories any time soon, because the space above the current ceiling is the basketball court for the jail on the 4th and 5th floors. The county jail holds about 400-500 people at any given time on the upper floors. When we were touring Parliament in London, they told us that their clock tower was second in size to one in Minneapolis. We were boggled. We later heard that the Allen Bradley clock in Milwaukee was bigger. Today, our guide said ours is the biggest four-faced CHIMING clock – bigger even than the one in Elizabeth tower in London. OH! Chiming! Allen Bradley’s clock doesn’t chime. At the end of the tour, our guide sat at a little keyboard and played “It’s a Small World” on the bells. We all ran outside to listen – such fun.

We walked across the courtyard to the Hennepin County Government Center. There are two towers (A for Administration and C for Court) with a 32-story atrium between them. On cold days during the year Keith worked downtown Minneapolis he used to get off the bus just outside that atrium and cut through to a skyway to stay warm. He had no idea what the building was until today. Huh.