Strange once-a-year sight on Nicollet Mall
Thanksgiving evening, my friend and I were driving through downtown Minneapolis, when we witnessed one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen:
A parade of cars driving along Nicollet Mall. None of them labelled as official vehicles or anything, just cars, slowly driving along Nicollet Mall.
After I got home, I looked it up and according to the city’s website, Thanksgiving night is the one night a year that you can legally drive your car along the Mall. The website says it’s so you can view the holiday decorations, but I have to say that this year, there’s not really that much to look at, at least not yet. In fact, it was pretty dark along the mall.
Related posts:
Historical context:
Nicollet Ave. downtown was converted to its current restricted-access form in the 1960s. Before that, it was a popular pasttime for families to drive slowly along Nicollet, to see the decorative illuminated holiday scenes, many of which featured moving parts, in the department-store windows. In those days along Nicollet there were several dept. stores, such as Daytons, Donaldsons, Powers, and J.C. Penney, between about 4th St. and 8th St.
That kinda reminds of when I was really little and my mom would take us to downtown Detroit to Hudson’s (same as Dayton’s) to see Santa and we would ride the trolley.
I never think of a department store as a destination unrelated to shopping for any reason anymore, Dayton’s/Marshall Fields/Macy’s Xmas display notwithstanding.