Fifth Street cuts through the heart of downtown Minneapolis and ties together two eras of the city's commercial history. To your east, the IDS Tower — the tallest building in Minneapolis at 792 feet, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee and completed in 1973 — anchored a period of downtown investment that coincided with the creation of the skyway system, the network of enclosed second-floor pedestrian bridges that connects most of downtown's major buildings. There are now over eighty city blocks of skyway, allowing people to walk from the Target Center to the Convention Center without stepping outside — a genuine necessity in a city where January temperatures can drop to minus twenty.
The skyway system has been criticized for draining life from the street level, and there is something to that: on a cold weekday afternoon the streets can feel emptier than the second-floor corridors above them. But on a December night, or in a February blizzard, the skyway feels like the most humane piece of urban infrastructure imaginable. Fifth Street itself has undergone multiple reinventions, and the current streetscape reflects an attempt to bring retail and activity back to the street level rather than concentrating it in the skyway above.