Exploring Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk

Now that it’s FINALLY getting warm here in St. Paul, I can’t get enough of being outdoors.  One of my favorite things to do outside is pick a neighborhood and explore it.  Recently, I stumbled across a poem under my feet on a nearby sidewalk…no really, literally under my feet.  The poem was etched into the sidewalk!  Of course, I had to find out if there were more so I went home and immediately googled “sidewalk poetry”.

It turns out, in 2008, Public Art Saint Paul partnered with the city of Saint Paul to create a project known as Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk.  Every fall, the city would host a contest for local residents to submit their short poems.  The winners would receive a $100 prize and their work featured in one of Saint Paul’s neighborhoods.  When a section of sidewalk would need to be replaced or repaired, certain panels would feature one of the award-winning poems!

When doing my internet investigating, I found this helpful map to determine where large numbers of the sidewalk poems were located.  Luckily for me, I found a few clusters in my Cathedral Hill neighborhood!  I did notice as I was exploring that there were some repeat poems and that some were in better shape than others.  The average slab of sidewalk lasts 30-50 years, but if you’ve ever driven on a Minnesota road, you can imagine the Midwest winters are just as hard on the sidewalks.

In all, there are over a thousand installations and around 50-60 unique poems.  Their locations vary from residential areas to more commercial neighborhoods.  There’s even a Taco Bell with a poem right at the entrance to the Drive-Thru!  Saint Paul prides itself on a rich tradition of promoting arts and literature so this is a unique way to feature the work of the capital city residents.

What’s the most unique way you’ve seen local art featured in your community?