This way to the anvil drop!

Thursday was a beautiful day for an anvil drop. Our neighbor to the south, Gardner Hardware, started the tradition in 2004, heaving a bright-red anvil from the top  of their store, four floors up, onto an unsuspecting car below.

Thanks to Gopher Towing for providing the target! Enjoy the show.

They start from four stories up.

A colorful crowd was on hand.

My shutter was a little too slow to catch the moment of impact. You can see Taylor reacting to the noise.

Here's the result of the third drop. The red anvil in the hood kind of blends in with the car.

Just another day in the North Loop.

An event took place last summer that immediately entered Fast Horse lore. Someone glanced out the window one afternoon and said, “Hey, there’s some woman in a bikini and chains across the street.” It turned out that she was also wearing fur boots as she draped herself provocatively across a loading dock.

As we looked on, puzzled, we finally realized that it was a fashion photo shoot. Seems that our industrial North Loop neighborhood provides a fine example of the subtle combination of grit and glamor the artists are looking for. As the summer went on, we sometimes noticed chiseled, shirtless young men in existential poses on top of a building down the block. There’s also a modeling agency in that building, which helps explain things. They even used the corrugated metal siding of Fast Horse World Corporate HQ as a backdrop on a couple of occasions.

The other day we had the first model sighting this summer. The participants were intent on their work and slightly cool to my approach, so I didn’t quiz them about their choice of locale or even get their names. But they said I could take photos.

This is a favorite view of mine, just half a block from Fast Horse world HQ, that gives a sense of the wide streets and the sweep of the place. That’s the City Hall clock tower in the center, of course, and in the foreground is the brown, windowless skyway that connects two of the buildings at the C.J. Duffey Paper Co. I’ve often wondered whether the Duffey skyway existed before the glass-walled pedestrian skyways of the main downtown district. I stopped by the other day and asked the Duffey people about it. They weren’t positive exactly when it was built, but they were pretty sure it was in the late ’40s or early ’50s. So it probably does predate the main skyway system.

By the way, if you’re at all interested in Minneapolis history, you should visit lileks.com, the personal Web site of Star Tribune columnist James Lileks. Here’s a link to his Minneapolis history section. It’s got great photos of the buildings that used to exist in the Gateway district before they leveled it for urban renewal in the ’50s, along with Lileks’ pithy commentary. The North Loop somehow survived urban renewal — I guess because there were still thriving industrial businesses in this part of downtown, whereas the Gateway was more about eating, sleeping and carousing. Easier to knock down cheap saloons and flophouses than functioning warehouses.