Moments at a downtown city corner: change, no change

Published Wednesday, December 25, 1996

Moments at a downtown city corner: change, no change

Chuck Haga / Star Tribune

"It's my corner. . . . I mean, it's just one little part of the world, but things take place there, too, just like everywhere else."

-- Augie, the cigar shop owner in the 1995 movie "Smoke"

Howard McQuitter sits at a cluttered table in the Barnes & Noble Cafe at 8th St. and Nicollet Mall, sipping coffee and writing furiously in a notebook. Two newspapers, a magazine and his open journal are spread across the table. You might expect a secretary to rush up at any time and announce, 'Your nine o'clock is still waiting, sir."

"I'm doing my 1996 movie list," he said. "I divide them into the 'must sees,' the 'not bads,' the 'most artsy' . . . Do you see a lot of movies? I've seen 32, 33 this year -- trying to break my last year's record, 34."

His "all-time record," he said, was 53. A movie a week, plus one. But he didn't say it to brag. He knows he could do better.

"Hollywood is turning out five or six a week now, and I just don't have the time."

McQuitter, 46, works at the downtown Post Office. He stops most mornings at the coffee shop, part of the Barnes & Noble bookstore that opened at 8th and Nicollet 2 1/2 years ago.

"Just about every day for two years, I've been here," he said. "I have a little hub here. I meet some friends, and we talk -- politics, race issues, even sports. I do some reading, and I do some writing. In my journal."

Sometimes he glances out the big windows to the mall and watches the daily parade of humanity.

"And dogs," he said. "There's a guy who walks his little dog back and forth. I love dogs.

"I'm not a megamall person. I don't like crowds. I lean to the downtown, even though it's getting painful."

Painful?

"This downtown has been transmogrified," he said. "All these mausoleums -- tall, cold, stark buildings. I grew up here. Used to be a more blue-collar feel downtown. Bars where you could get a drink. Cafes. Now it's quasi-upper echelon. Nightclubs.

"I know there's been a proliferation of coffee shops. And Barnes & Noble -- they've been good to me. Let me sit here and write in my journal. But it's cold and stark downtown."

You see it in how people relate to each other, he said. Or in how they don't relate to each other.

"Everybody is privatizing their world," he said. "You can see it in their faces: 'You're not here. You don't exist. You're not in my world.' "

In "Smoke," Harvey Keitel's character, Augie, has a camera at his cigar shop. Every day, for 4,000 days, he takes the camera outside and, precisely at 8 a.m., snaps a picture of his corner.

"They're all the same," another character says, paging through Augie's albums.

You're looking at them too quickly, Augie says. Slow down.

"Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones," he says, watching as Paul, the novelist played by William Hurt, turns the pages more slowly. "Sometimes the different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear."

A city corner in winter

It's dark and quiet at 8th and Nicollet a little after 6 a.m. The coffee shop won't open for another hour, the bookstore for three. The first commuter buses have come through, but for minutes at a time, you could scamper about the intersection yelling, "The square is mine!" and nobody would notice or challenge you.

"The square is mine!"

But the buses come, and then they come furiously, like LSTs at Normandy on D-Day Plus Two, filling the square and the mall with people who move quickly, deliberately.

Most are coming. But some are leaving.

"Hey!" a woman yells at an empty southbound 18 bus, whose driver apparently didn't see her in the mists of exhaust and commuter breath. "HEY!!" The driver stops just past the intersection, and the woman -- a third-shift office cleaner? -- charges the bus, as determined to quit this corner as the throngs are to reach it.

It's snowing, and a brigade of little snow tanks maneuvers on the mall, brushing snow from sidewalks to clear the way for coming armies of foot shoppers. The little Toros and John Deeres zip about the mall all day, obsessive-compulsive in their urgency.

"It's awful!" a woman tells her companion, bending to shield her face from the wind and snow. "We always pick the bad days to come down here, don't we?"

"Let's pick summer next time," the other woman says -- not joking, but serious.

Cars skitter through the sleety, salty intersection like colts through a loading chute. Here and there, among hustling pedestrians, you hear the occasional snatch of conversation, and some of them make you want to run after and ask what they mean:

"That first winter in New Orleans was the coldest I ever . . ."

"He didn't know James Stewart! He didn't know who . . ."

"It's not an ice-fishing coat!"

Sit in the coffee shop and lean on the window counter and watch the people. See how diverse we are: not just in race and sex and age, but in headgear, footgear, stride, style, wealth, health, purpose, mood, facial hair, fear of the cold, contempt for the cold.

At 11 a.m., a centipede of children in pink and yellow slicks and galoshes stretches half a block in front of the doomed Conservatory, sliding in the slush because they want to, because they can. The children seem delighted by the tall, broad city's center, the Christmasy snow, the yellow caution tape pushing their line away from the Conservatory's side (not because the marble and steel will come down soon, but because monster icicles may).

At noon, Shawn Welsh, 33, waves his right thumb in the middlin' warm air of Barnes & Noble's vestibule.

"My hand is OK," the Salvation Army bell ringer says, "but my thumb froze."

Welsh plays blues guitar and writes music. And at Christmas, he rings a bell.

"I was down and out before, and they helped me," he says. "Now's my chance to help out."

Anybody exciting come by?

"Walter Mondale," Welsh said.

Did he drop a few yen in the kettle?

"Uh, no. But I'm sure he gave somewhere else."

Her corner, after all

Inside, Barnes & Noble supervisor Cynthia Ostrander, 43, said that she has seen Sinbad, Garrison Keillor, Keanu Reeves and Matt Dillon at her counters. "I waited on Matt Dillon and didn't recognize him," she said. "I thought he was just a good-looking kid with nice hair."

There are lesser-known customers, regulars, whose names she has come to know, such as Howard McQuitter, and there are regulars whose faces she knows. (Augie, again, in "Smoke": "It's my corner, after all.")

Ostrander has a window on the mall, plus a cafe and two floors of aisles and reading areas to roam. People-watching is best in the summer, she said.

"We get a lot of street musicians in the summer. There's this middle-aged black man, really good with the saxophone, and one day an old, drunk white guy comes up and gets in his face while he's singing. 'Excuse me, my brother,' the musician says, trying to get him to move on, and the white guy gets all emotional and throws his arms around him and says, 'You are my brother!' "

Another day, two women screeched and tore at each other in the vestibule until both went crashing through a plate glass window into the street.

A derelict trying to sleep in a reading area is a problem, Ostrander said. So is a woman dying her hair in the restroom. It doesn't happen every day, but it happens.

But when a customer, upset by a Muslim man who came into the store to pray, told Ostrander that the praying man should be told to leave, her response was "Why?"

He finds a quiet place, determines where he is in relation to Mecca, and prays, she said. That's not a problem.

Ostrander grew up in Chicago, and she confesses a fondness for busy, burly downtowns.

"There can be anonymity downtown, if that's what you want," she said. "You get a mix of people who are just being themselves. People come and go -- shoppers, working people, parents and their kids.

"Occasionally a person passes out on the street or sits down somewhere and goes to sleep. But I don't see people getting harassed.

"I have people, customers, call up sometimes. They're staying in a suburban motel. They've been to the Mall of America, and they want to come downtown, but they want to know if it's safe.

"My God, what do they think we are?"