Pictures of Minneapolis

I'd like to thank Geri Sullivan and www.skyscrapers.com for their help in identifying the buildings on this page
The Minneapolis skyline. In the centre, mirror-faced with a crane in front of it, the Piper Jaffray tower, and appearing to abut it on the left the Wells Fargo center. On the far left, spreading out at the top, the AT&T building. Below the street-light one-third of the way across, the Foshay Building with its dirigible-mooring mast, and towering behind it and to the left the IDS Center. The ziggurat-roofed building on the far right is the Metropolitan Center, with US Bank Place (with the circular crown on top) above it and to its left.
The Mall of America occupies a building of truly unreasonable size near the airport. I don't seem to have any pictures of the shops there, I was maybe more impressed by the medium-sized amusement park in the centre, and the collection of large Lego models of spaceships hanging on strings in one of the food areas.
In the centre of town there is a museum, with an impressive collection of rare and endangered species, carefully shot, stuffed and mounted by conservationists of an earlier era back when they were less endangered. To the left the loon; to the right the majestic moose, silent-stepping king of the tundra
Minnehaha Falls, one of Minneapolis's Famous Sites. The thing to the right is a huge ice-castle left over from the winter; I took this picture half-way through April, which suggests that the anecdotes of the Minnesotan winter are in no way exaggerated. I presume Longfellow's heroine in Hiawatha is named after these falls; a large chunk of the poem is carved into a wall in the park surrounding them.
I have a particular weakness for modern sky-scrapers, with the sides in terracotta-coloured stone and the windows fitted flush and blue with reflected sky (this particular one is the Opus Building). So I like Minneapolis. The mosaic effect from reflections in glass curtain-walls (in this case, the IDS Center reflecting the Wells Fargo tower) is just an added bonus.
A view from the Presidential Suite of the convention hotel; note the house-sized house built on the roof of one of the lesser sky-scrapers
More sky-scrapers, I'm afraid. Left to right, we see the IDS Center, Wells Fargo, the AT&T Building, and (at the edge of the picture) the Hilton where the convention was held. The Foshay Tower, once the tallest building west of the Mississippi, can be seen just peeking out from the right side of AT&T
This church is almost entirely lost among the mass of larger buildings that surround it, in the square outside the Hilton where the con was. So I've done a Silly Image Processing Trick to try to make it more obvious. I must have drawn round the church a dozen times before figuring out what tools to use in what combination to get this effect.