Streetscapes: Now-defunct Metrodome had a distinctly Midwestern charm

I moved to the Twin Cities in 1989 from northern Virginia. The first things I remember seeing, looming beneath the gorgeous Minneapolis skyline, were the stooped white shoulders of the Metrodome.

I wasn't smitten, exactly. Intrigued is more like it. The Dome hung under the sky, puffy without seeming lofty. It didn't overwhelm. It held my attention like a benign white whale. And from that point on, it formed part of the backdrop of my life in Minnesota.

For seven years, as a reporter for the Associated Press, I worked under the Dome's lumbering shadow, right across the street. Appropriately utilitarian, the stadium held an unpretentious Midwestern charm. Its steady presence comforted me like the cordial, shambling neighbor you'd see walking by with his dog every morning.

I didn't realize how much I'd counted on seeing it until it was no longer there.

When Mikhail Gorbachev visited the state in June 1990, he might as well have been the Pope. While more seasoned colleagues tracked the Soviet leader's every move from Minneapolis to St. Paul, I joined hundreds of other reporters in the Dome — specifically the Twins outfield — which served that day as the media's nerve center.

Later, as a sportswriter, I wrote dozens of stories under the Dome's Teflon sky, covering every game imaginable — soccer, baseball, football — from high school on up. Leaving the stadium, there was always that shriek and pull of the wind tunnel before I was spit into the real world again.

The Dome kept me warm and dry before two cold and rainy Twin Cities Marathons. It also kept me sane through many Minnesota winters. On most Tuesday and Thursday evenings between November and March, I happily shelled out a buck for the privilege of stripping down to my T-shirt and shorts near the Twins Fun Zone and running around its dim concourses with a few hundred others.

Warmth also came from the camaraderie I found there. One night in the early 1990s, I noticed a handful of fleet-footed women whizzing around the inside wall. Eventually, I found the nerve to ask if I could join them. They were members of the all-female, now sadly defunct Northern Lights Running Club, and they formed the basis of friendships that continue today.

I knew the Dome never got any respect. I knew all the nicknames: Marshmallow, Thunderdome, Rollerdome, Humpty Dump, Livestock Hall. But the Dome, at least, was always there when I needed it.

One morning in early 2014, I exited I-94 and turned right onto 11th Avenue and suddenly realized the Metrodome roof was deflated again. No, not merely deflated. This time it was gone.

Every time I drove by after that, it seemed another section of the Dome had been removed. By March, the upper-deck bleachers sat exposed, forlorn, until they, too, were razed. Only a pile of rubble remained after that, and soon enough even that was gone.

All the while, the new Vikings stadium was rising up around what remained of the old one.

The new stadium kept rising, a behemoth of pillars and girders, concrete, steel and glass. Its sloping roof banked upward, toward the west, its gigantic trusses rising to a point like the bow of a warship.

For a while, the structure reminded me of a gigantic ark that washed into town on an epic flood. Now it feels more like something out of "Star Wars." A friend compared it to the Sandcrawler, that huge treaded fortress built to shelter Jawas. I think she's on to something.

Now, when I drive into Minneapolis from my home in St. Paul, the nearly completed stadium seems to blot out much of the sky. It dwarfs everything around it. The much-maligned Dome wasn't pretty, but it was modest in its plainness. It didn't deign to impress, let alone threaten. It always let you know where you stood.

The Dome blended seamlessly with the gray winter sky, but the colossal new stadium makes no pretense of blending. I lose my bearings whenever I'm near it, as if I'm hit with a mild case of vertigo.

I'm sure that with its semitransparent roof and glass-laden walls, the inside will feel more open and airy and less like a vacuum-packed canister than did the Dome. But when I look out my window now, the stadium's high black walls take up two-thirds of my view.