A Switch Of Perspective In The Jordan Neighborhood

Photos By Kip Browne

You can live next to a house for months, years, decades and never go inside. But this foreclosure crisis presents many opportunities to explore spaces we once passed every day, chancing upon interior revelations large and small. These two photos from JACC chair Kip Browne capture that odd shift in perspective when you enter the place where you were always outside...

The top photo shows a door that has been boarded over--seen from the interior--and check it out! The other side of the board is not painted gray.

You kinda have to reside in North Minneapolis to realize what a mind-bender that is. We see gray boards on vacant buildings every day. Then one day you see one of the boards from the other side and--whoah. THAT side isn't painted.

It's not quite Alice-through-the-looking glass, is it? But it gives you a moment's pause.

Well, maybe not quite a moment. Perhaps more like a split second. But the PAUSE is definitely there.

The next photo was taken by Kip and provides much more of a mind bender. This photo represents Kip looking at his own house from the window of the property across the street...a troublesome house that required many 911 calls by Kip before it was finally foreclosed and vacant.

How many times did the n'er-do-wells look from this very window and say things like, "Look, he's CALLING again. I can see him in his window with a cell phone. Mother (expletive) is calling AGAIN!!!!"

From this one can postulate some hypothetical future; wherein decent people come to own and live in the house, and the bedroom where dope dealers once looked from the window, furtively, becomes a portal of positive neighborly perspectives.