Cruising the Skyway on New Year's Eve Day
In my last post I explained that B and I spent New Year's Eve Day bar- and restaurant-hopping, but that post ended up being mostly about the light rail we took to get downtown. Well, in this post I do have a shot of the first bar we went to, Brit's:
B had shepherd's pie (can't go wrong there) and I had tomato soup and a cheese toasty (aka welsh rarebit). Yum. Brit's is also cool because on the roof they have several lawn bowling greens, but those are closed for the winter. They also show movies every Tuesday, and they all the movies they show are set in England -- Finding Neverland, the Harry Potter series, 28 Days Later, etc. But on New Year's Eve Day we just watched a little football there.
Brit's is on the Nicolett Mall part of Nicolett Avenue, which is sort of a Main Street in downtown Minneapolis that has been made into a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, with tons of shops and restaurants and such. It's very nice. Here's a picture of it taken later in the day, around twilight:
However, I don't have any other pics of the bars and restaurants we went to. What can I say, at some point I kinda stopped documenting the good time we were having and just concentrated on the good time.
But I did snap several pictures of Minneapolis's skyway system. The skyway is a network of tunnels that runs through most of the major buildings downtown, and over most of the streets. The idea is that it allows to people to get around in the winter time without going outside. Our friend Mary calls it the human habitat trail, in reference to the connected-by-tunnel habitats you can build for hamsters and such.
Here are 5 shots of the skyway bridges taken from the street. Now, I know that 4 of these were taken from the same corner -- there was a bridge in every direction and I thought that would be cool for the blog. But then somewhere I took a 5th picture -- I think the one of the double-skyway bridge, but I'm not sure.
The inside of the skyway is really very cool. There are many shops and places to eat and drink as you walk along it, and the occasional department store, which is neat because in many cases you are walking through buildings that, except for the skyway, are boring old corporate offices. Unfortunately, the inside of the skyway, like the inside of the Mall of America, just doesn't make for good photos. However, I did get two interesting shots. The first is a map of the skyway:
The yellow lines are the skyway, except for the big curvy yellow line, which is Nicollet Mall. The map looks pretty confusing, but walking around the skyway is not too bad, since every time you cross a bridge, you can look out and see what road you are going over, and see the intersections in either direction.
The second two shots are of of the ITS center:
Both pictures are kinda blurry, but I wanted to include them as an example of how many corporations make their skyway access points into very nice semi-public spaces, complete with holiday decorations, kinda like Trump Plaza and the Citicorp building do in New York City (though obviously not quite on the same level of fanciness).
Okay, I think that's it for photos of New Year's Eve Day. We hopped the light rail back home around 10pm, thinking that we needed to get home by 11pm to see the ball drop on TV. We were upset to find out that the networks tape-delay the NYC New Year's Eve coverage for the central time zone. So to watch live coverage of the ball dropping, we had to watch CNN. Doh!
I have couple more things to blog about this week, and then next week is the St. Paul Winter Carnival. We're really looking forward to that.
B had shepherd's pie (can't go wrong there) and I had tomato soup and a cheese toasty (aka welsh rarebit). Yum. Brit's is also cool because on the roof they have several lawn bowling greens, but those are closed for the winter. They also show movies every Tuesday, and they all the movies they show are set in England -- Finding Neverland, the Harry Potter series, 28 Days Later, etc. But on New Year's Eve Day we just watched a little football there.
Brit's is on the Nicolett Mall part of Nicolett Avenue, which is sort of a Main Street in downtown Minneapolis that has been made into a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, with tons of shops and restaurants and such. It's very nice. Here's a picture of it taken later in the day, around twilight:
However, I don't have any other pics of the bars and restaurants we went to. What can I say, at some point I kinda stopped documenting the good time we were having and just concentrated on the good time.
But I did snap several pictures of Minneapolis's skyway system. The skyway is a network of tunnels that runs through most of the major buildings downtown, and over most of the streets. The idea is that it allows to people to get around in the winter time without going outside. Our friend Mary calls it the human habitat trail, in reference to the connected-by-tunnel habitats you can build for hamsters and such.
Here are 5 shots of the skyway bridges taken from the street. Now, I know that 4 of these were taken from the same corner -- there was a bridge in every direction and I thought that would be cool for the blog. But then somewhere I took a 5th picture -- I think the one of the double-skyway bridge, but I'm not sure.
The inside of the skyway is really very cool. There are many shops and places to eat and drink as you walk along it, and the occasional department store, which is neat because in many cases you are walking through buildings that, except for the skyway, are boring old corporate offices. Unfortunately, the inside of the skyway, like the inside of the Mall of America, just doesn't make for good photos. However, I did get two interesting shots. The first is a map of the skyway:
The yellow lines are the skyway, except for the big curvy yellow line, which is Nicollet Mall. The map looks pretty confusing, but walking around the skyway is not too bad, since every time you cross a bridge, you can look out and see what road you are going over, and see the intersections in either direction.
The second two shots are of of the ITS center:
Both pictures are kinda blurry, but I wanted to include them as an example of how many corporations make their skyway access points into very nice semi-public spaces, complete with holiday decorations, kinda like Trump Plaza and the Citicorp building do in New York City (though obviously not quite on the same level of fanciness).
Okay, I think that's it for photos of New Year's Eve Day. We hopped the light rail back home around 10pm, thinking that we needed to get home by 11pm to see the ball drop on TV. We were upset to find out that the networks tape-delay the NYC New Year's Eve coverage for the central time zone. So to watch live coverage of the ball dropping, we had to watch CNN. Doh!
I have couple more things to blog about this week, and then next week is the St. Paul Winter Carnival. We're really looking forward to that.
posted by James at 7:32 PM
1 Comments:
Regarding the 5 pictures of skyways and which 4 belonged together, I'm guessing the last one you show is the odd one out. The first four were all taken from a ground-level view. The last one appears to have been taken from another skyway.
Cool city! I'll have to visit it some time.
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