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Even more important than corporate giving is personal fund raising. Fund drives currently under way or about to begin in the Twin Cities amount to a staggering $300 million, of which $136 million has already been raised. The business effort is twofold—one for cultural activities, one for social and civic affairs. The leading family in both is the Daytons, five brothers who are dominant stockholders in the Dayton Hudson Corp., which last year rang up $1.4 billion in retail sales.
As downtown Minneapolis was deteriorating in the 1950s, the Daytons elected to keep their huge department store there rather than move it to the suburbs. Cooperating with the city, they turned Nicollet Avenue into a shopping mall and built a system of skyways linking the buildings along the street. The project, spearheaded by Donald C. Dayton, 58, has stimulated more than $200 million in new downtown construction, reversing the familiar urban pattern of decay and turning the area into a bright and active commercial district. The new 51-story IDS tower, designed by Philip Johnson, is the tallest and most distinguished building between Chicago and San Francisco. Other adornments: Minoru Yamasaki's gracefully pillared Northwestern National Life Insurance Co. Building, and Gunnar Birkerts' Federal Reserve Bank, built along the sweeping lines of a suspension bridge.
The Daytons are best known as patrons of the arts. Kenneth Dayton, 51, is deeply involved in fund raising for a new $18.5 million music-center complex, which he hopes will rival Washington's Kennedy Center in architecture and acoustics. Bruce B. Dayton, 55, is raising $26 million for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, with a new wing designed by Yamasaki. The Guthrie Theater is primarily the contribution of John Cowles Jr., head of the Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. But the list of big business contributors and fund raisers is much longer.
Migrations. Minnesotans tend to be participants in their communities, perhaps because for so long they were comparatively isolated and developed traditions of mutual reliance. Citizens' lobbies are a real force. The most no table is the Twin Cities Citizens League. Funded by membership fees, foundation and business grants, it includes lawyers, bankers, laborers and company vice presidents. Each fall, the league settles on a variety of projects to study. Committees are formed and meet once a week to hear an expert on the subject under scrutiny. Among the league's pioneering recommendations that became law: the Twin Cities metropolitan council creating an urban regional government and also a tax-sharing program in the seven-county metropolitan area. Through the tax reforms, the effects of new development in one part of the area are shared by all, thus eliminating the pockets of poverty and boom that characterize other urban sprawls. Quite aside from its other accomplishments, the council signals the end of a long and frequently childish rivalry between St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Some of Minnesota's success can be traced to its ethnic traditions. The earliest pioneers were American Yankees. Then came the migrations—Germans after the Revolution of 1848, then waves of Irish and Scandinavians, later an