MIDTOWN GLOBAL MARKET: The Global is Local

Coats, hats sweaters, scarves, snow pants, purses, packages of new purchases are piled high on the tiny table. Outside it is eleven below zero, before the wind-chill is factored in. In this inner city neighborhood Latinos and Africans and African Americans make up 65 percent of the population and European Americans, Asian American and Native Americans sharing the remaining third. Thawing out on this make-shift dance-floor in the window corner of the Midtown Global Market last Sunday, were small children and grandparents, professional dancers and first-timers, a panoply of body types, ages, races and ethnicities, gathered for free Salsa lessons.

The Midtown Global Market is not just a colorful place to come and chase the winter blues away. It is sweet revenge, the lemonade from lemons, the silver lining after a horrific storm, a picking up the scraps left by the ravages of globalization and making something beautiful out of them.

The Sears Tower was a mammoth department store and one of nine regional catalog mail order centers in the country back when Sears was the primary source for department store merchandise. Located adjacent to the corner of Lake Street and Chicago Avenue, in the center of South Minneapolis, it opened in 1928, employed 2000 people at its peak and was the central shopping site for everything from clothing to car parts for thousands of neighbors near and far. My spouse, who grew up in small towns in Wisconsin in the 1960s, remembers the excitement of coming to Sears on Lake Street once a year for major purchases. I bought expandable bras there over eighteen years ago, while pregnant with my now high-school senior. In 1993, one year before Sears moved its operations, we became a home owners in south Minneapolis and purchased an oven from the Lake Street store.

Sears left the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis some fourteen years ago. They traded up, moving to the Mall of America in Bloomington where they could attract suburban shoppers who make substantially more than the residents of Phillips, where the average annual wage is $13,000. When Sears left, the neighborhood was already depressed. Since the start of the cocaine epidemic in the mid 1980s the primary economic activities here have been street drugs and women’s bodies.

In the 1980s, if you remember, the Reagan administration was funding mercenary forces and death squads in Central America, some with drug money that poisoned urban centers like the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis. Million of refugees of those Central American wars walked across hot deserts to escape, and some of them ended up in the South Minneapolis. Meanwhile, an ocean away U.S. arms manufacturers, like perhaps the Honeywell corporation that had its national headquarter in the Phillips neighborhood, reaped billions selling weapons to warring factions in East Africa while other corporation reaped subsoil and agricultural profits from the region. When the Somali government dissolved into anarchy in the early 90s Somalians poured into refugee camps in Kenya. A group was eventually settled in the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis and soon after thousands more of their compatriots joined them. I’ve heard it said that there are more Somalis in near-South Minneapolis than in Mogadishu now, but I don’t know if that is true.

There they mixed with Native Americans from the nation’s only urban reservation, the Little Earth of United Tribes; first, second and third generation African Americans who made their way “Up North”, third, fourth, and fifth generation Netherlands and other more recent European immigrants. In the mid 1990s a combination of drought in Mexico, NAFTA and job shortages in Minnesota, created the push and pull motivations that led Mexicans from the states of Morelos, Puebla and elsewhere to immigrate to Minnesota. They joined a new wave of Hmong and other Southeast Asian immigrants who came to Minnesota in the early 2000s. Many of these most recent immigrants were attracted to the increasingly global barrio of Phillips. In 2005 the Midtown Global Market, with shops owners reflecting the diversity of the neighborhood, opened in the Old Sears Tower, now the Midtown Exchange.

The Midtown Exchange is by no means some kind of small business utopia. All kinds of corporate compromises were made to fund the project, and neighborhood input was squelched several times in the process. Its survival is dependent on corporate tax dollars from Allina and Wells Fargo, whose offices in the building provide a financial anchor. The condos that fill part of the huge complex--- built right on the Greenway-- a bike, walk and soon-to-be-trolley path that connects the chain of Lakes with the Mississippi—would a great green addition to our city were it not for the sticker price per unit . At $1400 for a one bedroom, they are far from affordable for those who currently reside in the neighborhood.

Still when coats and purses are piled high without concern for security, and strangers from all over the world join each other in this urban core to dance at high noon on an arctic Sunday in January, one can be forgiven for feeling a little bit of euphoria. In the frozen tundra, the globe strikes back….. with a dance!