Insider: Marcy-Holmes Gateway Installation

The Artwork

Thanks to sculptor Aldo Moroni, a journey from Alma to the St. Anthony Main riverfront isn’t your typical two-block walk—it’s time travel. Moroni’s early-2000s art installation, Sixth Avenue Stroll (also known as the Marcy-Holmes Gateway), which flanks 6th Avenue Southeast from University Avenue Southeast to Southeast Main Street, is 24 brick posts topped with miniature, somewhat Seussian sculptures of the area’s historic buildings and natural features. 

The Background

Commissioned by the City of Minneapolis Art in Public Places program, the project was meant to educate both visitors and community members about the historic neighborhood’s unique and noteworthy spots—some still around today, some long demolished. Moroni, a neighborhood notable who lived in the Pillsbury A-Mill Artist Lofts, worked with local historian Penny Petersen to choose the landmarks (she also wrote descriptions for the plaques affixed to each post). He set up a mobile studio in the neighborhood for weeks, pounding the pavement and getting to know the spots and then rendering sculptures in clay and casting them in bronze.

The Legacy

Throughout the past few decades, the Art in Public Places program has commissioned more than a dozen other neighborhood Gateways, from a sculpture in north Minneapolis’s Harrison neighborhood to a teahouse-esque structure in Powderhorn, meant to both educate and welcome people to the areas. But none are quite like those in Marcy-Holmes—largely thanks to Moroni’s dedication and offbeat style. “It will be like reading a book, except they’ll have to walk while they read,” the artist, who died in 2020, told the Pioneer Press in 2001. So next time you’re walking in the artist’s footsteps, you can learn a thing or two about the neighborhood that surrounds you.