June 26, 2004 has to be one of the most exciting days I have seen since I moved to Minneapolis in 1988. It certainly was the best transit day in all that time. This was the grand opening day of the long-awaited Hiawatha Line.
Grand Opening ceremonies were scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. at the Warehouse District station. I was excited, and even had two video cameras along in my backpack to document the day. My girlfriend Kristine and I rode our #18 bus from Northeast Minneapolis and got out on Hennepin. We walked the three blocks to the warehouse district station.
When I got there I hit the first of what would be a couple roadblocks that day. There was a barricade up separating the V.I.P. area, close to the stage and the ribbon cutting, and the non-V.I.P area, far away from the stage and the ribbon cutting. I was, of course, a non-V.I.P., so I had to brace my camera the best I could and try to get whatever video I could. Right before the speeches began, Minneapolis City Council President Paul Ostrow saw me behind the barricade and said he'd see if he could talk someone into letting me cross it, but by then the speeches had started and I stayed put.
So I got some very shaky shots of the speakers at the Grand Opening event, and some almost completely unusable video of the official ribbon cutting, but I was able to grab interviews with other people, with the public, the folks on the non-V.I.P side of the barricade.
Then it was time to ride the train! A line soon formed to get on the train at the Warehouse District station. My girlfriend and I walked to the end of the line, which went nearly all the way around the block! It took over an hour to get up to a loading train. I interviewed people up and down the line while we were waiting, and was excited because here was the best video I would get that day, very excited interviews with people just bursting because finally their town had gotten real public transit.
The second and most devastating roadblock was that the camera I was shooting with was having serious problems. Most of this great video I shot in the line didn't turn out at all. In all, about half the video I shot that day was useless, including some great interviews, including my interview with the mayor, including someone reciting to me the poem she had just written about the opening of the Hiawatha Line.
I wouldn't find this all out until the next day, so I shot on, recording more and more video that I would never be able to play back. After a while I took out my second camera, and used that. The video from that camera did work out.
We rode to a few stations and recorded just a small percentage of the activity at those stations. There was music, performance, and just good spirits. It was a marvelous day, sunny and yellow with the beautiful Bombadier train cars packed crush loads full of people. There was a lot of waiting in line, hours of waiting that day. But it was worth it to finally get a chance to ride real public transit here in our hometown.
It was a great day, but my video wasn't great, but I'm putting it together in a show anyway. There are lots of blips and breaks and burps in it, but maybe those spurts and sloppies even somehow represent in a strange way the giddy excitement of that day.
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