The IDS Center: Reflections in blue glass

Every time my friend John says he becomes discombobulated when he can't see the IDS Tower, I know exactly what he means. The building has served as my compass -- in more ways than I can count -- since I was in the fourth grade.

When construction started on the IDS Center in 1969, my family lived in Brooklyn Center. For a kid raised on the supremacy of the Foshay Tower's slender obelisk profile, it was difficult to imagine the IDS' blunt impact on the city's then-modest skyline -- and on my life. But soon enough, the tower's rising steel framework surpassed the Foshay's television mast, and one of the five stations our black-and-white Motorola received at the time -- was it Channel 11? -- became little more than snow flurries.

A building that could alter broadcast reception? Now that impressed me, and from that point on my geeky self tried to get my hands on everything IDS-related, poring over the Minneapolis Star the moment it would land on our front steps in the hope of seeing a photographic progress report or, better yet, reading a blurb about the building in Barbara Flanagan's column, my Bible at the time.

The center's principal architect, Philip Johnson, quickly became my latest Person I Wanted to Be When I Grew Up. When the mighty IDS finally opened to the public, I begged my parents to take me there so I could experience it firsthand. Loving the tower was a foregone conclusion, and when I found myself standing at 8th and Nicollet, with those 57 stories of crisp blue glass looming above me, it knocked me out, just as I knew it would. Then I walked inside the Crystal Court, and I was blown away all over again. That day marked the start of a lifelong love affair.

Fast-forward three decades. It's a few days before Christmas, and while typically trying to shoehorn all of my holiday shopping into a single lunch hour, I short-cutted my way into the IDS from my favorite vantage point: street level, under the 8th Street skyway. As the court's soaring white canopy burst into view overhead, I unconsciously found myself repeating the silent ritual I'd been practicing since I was 12. Namely, stopping dead in my tracks, a single motionless speck among the court's criss-crossing swarm, and drinking in the sights of downtown's secular cathedral.

My private reverie came to an abrupt halt, in the form of a friend of a friend, someone I'd met a week earlier at a holiday party, where we had bonded over bad chardonnay and our mutual affection for the IDS. "Don't tell me, you're having a Philip Johnson moment, right?" he asked with a laugh. "Busted," I sheepishly replied. "I hear you," he said, his eyes looking upward. "Same here."