Broken Pig's Eye

These photos were taken near Pig's Eye Lake along the Mississippi river, just southeast of Downtown Saint Paul.

 

Nearness of history
One of the things that appeals to me about this place is simply to see "Pig's Eye" on a map or a road sign. This seems to make the history of Saint Paul closer. The lake is not far from the location the bootlegger Pig's Eye Pete's bar (which gave the town the one-time name of Pig's Eye).

The Non-lake
This place also seems to contain some contradictions that fascinate me about Saint Paul.

Saint Paul to me is about rivers (the Mississippi and the Minnesota) and railroads (the actual rail lines as well as the historic influence of rail barons). Things that have to do with movement and progression, things that, unlike lakes and their attributes of reflection and contemplation, we do not think of as destinations in and of themselves.

Pig's Eye Lake is not an actual lake, but an inlet of the Mississippi. Such river backwaters are places that are at once connected with such linearity and motion while also looping back upon itself, pooling and reflecting.

Brokenness
This sort of lyric possibility that this place holds is interrupted by a long line of industrial structures and rail yards that border the river and lake shoreline. 

Trying to access or even see the waters here, I'm frustrated by this interruption, but at the same time there's something familiar and distinctly northern midwestern about the look of these industrial sections which I appreciate.

Continuing...
As I continue to learn about this place, I'm learning about the environmental history--about the unlined city dump located here where the city and railroad companies dumped drums of chemicals, garbage, and batteries until the 1970s. And about the cleanup efforts since the late 1990s that include community activism like the Lower Phalen Creek Project and Revival Field, a science-based art exhibit that involved detoxifying the land through plants.


- Nuria