North Minneapolis is a mostly-black segment of Minneapolis sometimes referred to as Murderopolis, because the killings seem to rise when the economy's bad. It's a neighborhood of charming twenties bungalows, front porches, mixed nationalities, and actual neighborly relations. In 2003, a bunch of the whitest white people from Edina, Minnesota-----home of McMansions and blandness----decided that despite what the neighbors said----we need more cops, more patrols, more teachers, better bus routes-------what North really needed was some kind of fancy turn lane dealio that required demolishing a block of houses through eminent domain and moving their owners elsewhere. I'm entitled to my bitterness. One of those houses was mine, and I attended meetings given by these people who didn't listen to anything any one of the neighbors said. Maybe they thought we were all drug dealers. All the turn lane or whatever it was did was give the kids buying drugs from the dealers a faster escape route back to the burbs, while the fancy planters provided a literal pot to piss in for some of the hookers. One of the defenses of this kind of dismissiveness was the statement, "I've walked through it." In the daylight. For a block. Without talking to people.
That's the way North gets treated.
Yesterday North and a couple other burbs----both considerably paler than North---were hit by at least one tornado that concentrated its fury on North. From Plymouth Boulevard in the South, Highway 94 to the East, Penn to the West, and Dupont to the north, there's a curfew till tomorrow. In the initial reports, the devastation in North got equal billing with what we were told was a 'downed tree.' Somewhere. Maybe the seven rescue vehicles blocked off the sight of it. Behind them, a row of intact trees also didn't help successfully catching a glimpse of this down tree. Singular. (Later news reports did show more and there was more damage---but nothing as bad as the pounding North got.) In North, whole forests had been knocked down, leaving the neighborhood looking curiously naked and vulnerable on top of all the rest of the destruction.
North doesn't look like a place where people live any more. Huge century-old trees, their trunks as thick through as cars, couldn't stay rooted where they were due to the days of rain we've had. First they toppled from the soaked ground, then the winds sheared them off and sent branches careening everywhere. I saw a car pierced by a shredded piece of freshly-cut wood. Houses look like a tree trunk and branches surrounded by kindling. One apartment building had been crushed by a tree that was five feet through. The canopies of some of these monsters are the size of a small six-flat apartment building, but lighter.
Roofs were ripped off of many houses---dozens upon dozens---and cars and trucks were flattened. Power lines got ripped down. Gas lines were severed. A chopper pilot for KSTP 5 looked at the ruins from above and said, "It looks like every fifth house has had its roof ripped off." That doesn't include the houses that simply aren't there any more, the vehicles that were pancaked, or garages that blew away.
At last report, some thirty people were injured, two seriously, and one person had been killed when he was impaled by a tree branch rocketing through his vehicle. There were reports of horrible looting and the sound of gunshots. Police officers were out with the paramedics, but there are so many trees down over so many streets that the first responders had to walk to check out victims.
This is how the New York Times reported it:
Though the damage covered several blocks in Minneapolis, it appeared few houses were totally demolished. Much of the damage was to roofs, front porches that had been sheared away, or smaller items such as fences and basketball goals.
Inhabitant, on the news, however, talked about churches, schools, stores being destroyed, all things that are in short supply in North, where outside people give up on the inhabitants at birth, it seems. Prostitutes stroll along Lowry Avenue and as a result, johns in big cars harass every woman who's on the street----and they apparently define that as being anybody who's female regardless of age, down to little girls just walking from from school. I lived on Lowry for a couple of years, and one day was walking home from work one winter afternoon, muffled to the ankles, wrists, and earlobes in a voluminous coat, hair piled untidily on top of my head, weighted down with groceries, when a brown van with tan rear doors and ladders on top of it pulled up alongside me. The driver was the sort of scrawny white dude whose diet obviously consists of caffeinated beverages and powdered substances, which evidently left him too jittery to eat or bathe much. His blond hair was dirty, and his fingers tapped madly on the steering wheel. It was impossible to avoid seeing how black his fingernails were. With those fingernails and stained teeth, he looked like a vampire who had just dug himself out of his grave. "Wanna make twenty bucks?"
"Wanna die a slow painful death?"
And that, with any normal lowlife, would have been that. Except that this was North, where sometimes crime has a comically optimistic bent to it. My plodding resumed down the alley toward my house and then sure enough, the poster child for inbreeding pulls up alongside me and repeats his offer. "Did your fontanel ever close up?" I snapped, because the handles of the bags were digging into my hands through the gloves and the guy was delaying the time when I could open the back door to my little house, go through a round-topped archway, and dump my bags in my cheerful little green kitchen.
I had just reached the house when this moron once again attempted to interest me in his extremely dubious charms, at which I set the bags down and glared at the dumb shit. "What the fuck? Seriously, how stupid are you? Do we need a visual aid?! I mean, I can get whiteboard and spell it out...." And once again he took off. I dashed for my back door, and that, I thought, was that.
A few days later I noticed a cop outside my house, talking to a neighbor, and I opened the door to listen in shamelessly. Then, with a feeling of disbelief, I heard tell of a shooting. I don't remember how the realization dawned but it somehow became apparent that the doofus who had ventured outside his weight class with me had shot somebody at the house across the alley from my house. In the ass. That was an accomplishment for some of the hapless lowlifes in North. One shooting that I personally witnessed----I was sitting at the bus stop and Shooter Number One jumped out of a car directly in front of me in the inside lane-----involved he and another man with fifteen round magazines each and yet the sum total of targets hit were a totally uninvolved person's thumb and some kind of sign. You have to laugh at things like otherwise you'd get despondent.
I went up to the cop discussing this latest shooting and interjected myself into the conversation as politely as possible. In North, it's always good to keep track of local lowlifes. "Do you have the license plate? I know who that guy is."
At that point, over his shoulder, before the gaped mouth cop could respond, the van belonging to my little friend sped past on Lowry Avenue. There was much rejoicing, shaking of heads, and shouting, but he was rather gleefully nabbed by the cops, who apparently couldn't help but marvel at the sheer dimensions of his general inadequacy, his aim, and his need to, apparently, take those Remedial Crime classes.
It was a real neighborhood, full of people who knew their neighbors and sat on front porches when they dared, or in back yards when they didn't, blocking off side streets for block parties, always remembering to have halal sausages for the influx of Somalis and Ethiopians and other Muslims who showed up. Back yard bonfires, garage football parties, and the exchange of house keys, the offer of dogsitting, and bitching about 'kids these days' united the disparate groups and cultures. One neighbor was a former Iranian cardiologist who at sixty could not pass the English test for his previous job, and so drove a cab and said he felt lucky. No secret police.
And yet everyone witnessed a stupendous amount of crime. The little shop across the street was robbed three times, once on Xmas Eve, while I stared in slack-jawed shock as the shooter backed away from the store, firing. The Turkish and Iraqi guys who ran it worked twenty hour days, bought more stores, and delighted in teaching willing pupils Arabic.
One day as I waited for yet another bus, this one heading west, toward St. Paul, I happened to glance down Lowry in the other direction and observed a yellow cab with its rear doors opening up, like a bird spreading its wings getting ready to fly. One guy leaped from the back seat, rolled, and ran away, then the cab bumped up on the curb as people scattered, rolled down the sidewalk toward the other bus stop, and wiped out the bus sign there. The other passenger leaped out of the other side of the cab and fled, tossing away a handgun as he did so----down my alley, I noted protectively.
A guy with incredibly long locs stood at the bus stop, along with a woman in a headwrap and a brightly-colored muumuu. A shy Somali girl in a long skirt and long-sleeved shirt plus a veil waited alongside her. There were two black guys at my bus stop, who had offered the usual neighborhood ritual of nodding and muttering something that indicated a general wish of good fortune, health, and other good things to the recipent, who then returned the greeting. Then, as everyone stood in shock, the cab driver leaped from the cab and came running back. "Is everyone OK?" There was a sort of frenzy of hand patting and back rubbing and then an international multigenerational intergender group hug. That, too, was North.
Houses in North are selling for twenty or thirty thousand dollars now, and with the wholesale destruction, many people will not be able to return to the neighborhood as rents rise. Slumlords snap up the properties as their elderly owners die, and children try to escape the neighborhood. Many of them were older people living on social security, and a paid off house in a crime-ridden neighborhood where you know all your neighbors is far better than many other options. Many grandparents were raising grandchildren, and now, old and young alike are trying to sleep in one of the shelters in the area, wondering where their most basic possessions are, if they can find them, where their homework is, where their best friend is, and other things too horrible to contemplate.
Tornadoes are relatively rare in Minneapolis, which had the world's smallest tornado about two years ago. It hit maybe two buildings on one block and then evaporated. To have such a severe storm, on the other hand, here in late May is a frightening sign in a spring full of them, and to add to the horror of all the damage both here and in Missouri is the knowledge that we are at the beginning of what seems to be turning into a dangerous, deadly year for tornadoes.
ETA
Channel Five reported that in a four block stretch that contained sixty eight homes, they counted sixty that were were substantially damaged or destroyed, eighteen garages that had been completely erased, and 110 trees that had been knocked over or torn out.
At 2024 Lyndale the Salvation Army has set up a kitchen where you can also donate diapers, toiletries---soap, shampoo, deodorant----underwear, water, clothes, and other common items that people who haven't been in a disaster don't think about.
Both Channels Five and Eleven (Minneapolis) have set up phone banks, but I only have one number: 651-989-5273. All donations are going directly to the survivors.
Another death has been confirmed. The man who died was devoted to the Raptor Center and loved nothing more than working with rehabilitating injured birds of prey.
The injury count has jumped to 42.