To go home, I exit off 70 at Branch. Right at the freeway exit, tucked next to the underpass, there are two old apartment buildings. One’s boarded up (though this summer, someone left two pots of plastic sunflowers out front), and the other is a church, which seems to have services most every night of the week. Some days, I come off the exit in time to witness a flock of bicyclists fresh off the Branch Street trestle; other days, I just see evidence of people sneaking off the highway to dump their trash at the footers of the overpass. (During our last neighborhood cleanup, we hauled away two surprisingly new, clean mattresses and a whole set of IHOP employee-of-the-month plaques. I’d like to know the story behind that.)
This tiny stretch of Branch is a threshold: the line between highway and city street, neighborhood and industry. Even though the near north riverfront industrial area is really close to my house, it took me a long time to cross that border. I guess I never had a reason to. My friend Claire used to go over there a lot with her camera before she moved to Detroit, and though her pictures of big shining mountains of colored glass, and anthropomorphized hazard signs, and spinning dogs always made my eyes widen, they never quite lured me over there.
Then, this spring when I was pushing wheelbarrows full of dirt in my front yard, trying to figure out how to build a raised bed for my vegetable garden, I saw a kid in a green mohawk zip by on a souped-up dirt bike. Most Sundays, if it wasn’t raining, I’d see him whiz by. Then came dozens of people driving little cars made of welded-together pipe, nothing more than a frame on wheels with a seat and a little engine. One night, I put down the wheelbarrow and followed one of these little cars as it turned the corner from Branch to 9th, and watched it go into an old warehouse with a crown and “Royalty Racing,” painted on it. I could see, silhouetted in yellow light, people with wrenches and blowtorches working on I wasn’t quite sure what. It reminded me, just a little, of something you might see in a Ben Katchor comic strip. It was hard to not start creeping past the Branch Street threshold after that.
Though its purpose has always been almost entirely practical—to make stuff, supply stuff, and recycle stuff—the Near North Riverfront is filled with enigmas and weird juxtapositions. Like the brand-new smutty video store, its windows lit with purple neon, across the street from a Christmas tree nursery that’s been in business for half a century. Or the Buddhist Temple behind the Broadway Bistro Zoo, which probably still hosts spaghetti-wrestling night, and has just changed its name to Daddy’s Money. (Which isn’t nearly as charming a name as the old Gaslight Square banjo bar, Your Father’s Moustache.)
There are gigantic things, like Proctor & Gamble’s corporate headquarters, and little things, like the boulder on Broadway (which marks the former site of St. Louis' biggest Indian mound). Sometimes the little things are there because of the big things—like the pigeons swarming the grain-covered road that leads out of the Archer Daniels Midland grain elevators—and sometimes they’re there despite of them, like the pair of trees that stand at the point where Dock Street terminates at the railroad tracks. There are scrap yards that recycle cars, factories that make perfume, and a place called Cotto-Waxo, which manufactures “sweeping compounds.” Then there are a bunch of cosmic-sounding businesses, including Solar Night Industries, Star Bedding, and Thor Distributing, which I like to think does trade in hammers and lightning bolts.
On an incredibly humid day in late summer, I used my phone to take this very blurry, not-very-artistic picture of an interesting subject: a big pile of blue sand. Though it is actually, I am pretty sure, a pile of blue salt. The last time I saw minerals the color of Ti-D-Bowl was back home in Salt Lake City, near the Morton Salt plant, where they dye the mineral deposits to help evaporate water out of them (or so I was told, though not by anyone from Morton Salt). I don’t have technical details about what’s actually going on in this picture, other than the Mississippi is flowing along its usual course, and there were some black-eyed Susans in that tangle of vegetation. To my eye (or maybe I was heatstroked), it looked like stretch of sky had trickled out of the atmosphere in powder form, and accumulated in a dune on the edge of the river. Until I get a decent ten-speed and start riding the Riverfront Trail, I still have no business on the Near North Riverfront—though I will say it never fails to fulfill my recommended daily allowance for mystery.
