River view from the new Guthrie

The Guthrie Theater's new home on the Minneapolis riverfront opened in June, 2006 in an improbably large blue building designed by Jean Nouvel. It is set in a former flour milling district that died decades ago and had been a wasteland for thirty years or more. The Mississippi River front here had been ignored during its industrial era. (This whole area has been recently rediscovered and redeveloped. Old warehouses are now lofts and condos, and there is new construction and parkland.)

The Guthrie's size and scale fit in with the remaining warehouses and grain elevators, but its color really stands out. The building contains three theaters (one of which is modeled after Ralph Rapson's original 1963 Guthrie) and several restaurants as well as the usual facilities to support a large professional theater company.

Perhaps its most distinctive feature is a cantilevered bridge that extends toward the river and ends in mid-air. The view from the balcony at the end of this bridge begins looking upstream (northwesterly). The white bridge with the wide arches is Third Avenue; just below is St. Anthony Falls, which was the first power source for all the mills on the river. The lower sandstone bridge with the round Roman arches (known, oddly enough, as the Stone Arch Bridge) was built by James J. Hill for the Great Northern Railway and is now a bicycle and pedestrian bridge. Above that, across the river, is the old Pillsbury flour mill. The block with the smokestacks is an old electric plant that once powered the streetcar system, and further downstream is the University of Minnesota. The 35W bridge is (was) also downstream in this view, less than a mile away, but it's barely visible as a very, very faint horizontal line - if that - because of deep shadows and low resolution.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Mississippi
• River
• Guthrie
• Theater
• riverfront
• Minneapolis
• Minnesota

[ACLTony]

Why did the railroad abandon this route?

[cleostreet]

Because there were no more downtown industries using rail freight, and Amtrak had taken over the passenger business and moved it out of the downtown train station, and it was cheaper and easier for the railroad to use their other lines that bypass downtown Minneapolis. The railroad no longer needed any of its highly taxed downtown land, so they sold it at a good price.

[ACLTony]

Understandable, especially regarding taxes. Just made me wonder as it seems more logical for Amtrak to serve downtown directly instead of the outskirts.  Thanks! :)