I-35 is an interstate highway stretching up from Laredo, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota. It transects six states, and at 1,569 miles, it is the 9th longest interstate. It is a fairly unremarkable highway, with none of the storied iconism of Route 66 or the breathtaking views of California’s Highway 1. However, I-35 has the only two split segments in the interstate system, doubling briefly into an East and West branch first in Dallas-Fort Worth, and then again in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
I grew up in Dallas-Ft. Worth, going to elementary school in the tree-lined college town of Denton just miles away from where I-35 East and West joins together again after their northward journey through Dallas and Ft. Worth, and high school in the northeast suburb Plano. DFW is a flat concrete sprawl, nestled in the North Texas shrub-lands and filled with strip malls, 5A mega high schools each with thousands of students, and endless franchises of Applebee’s, Chili’s, and Outback Steakhouses. Surrounded by cookie-cutter suburbs on almost every side are the two principal cities. Dallas, to the east, is the bigger, bustling, modern, industrial hub. It boasts a skyline full of glass and steel built by oil and banking money. Dallas is a concrete city filled with unabashed modernism and Fortune 500 companies. To the west, Ft. Worth is the smaller older brother. Home to the historic stockyards, Ft. Worth is turned more to the art deco past than to the brutalist future. It’s a nostalgic place of Beaux-Arts buildings, with a more eclectic personality than the preppier Dallas. Neighborhoods like Fairmount are full of sleeve tattoos, beards, and 3rd wave coffee.
This summer, I came to Minneapolis for a summer internship. After growing up near I-35 in Dallas-Ft. Worth, I was surprised to find the familiar thoroughfare again in the Twin Cities. Each passing week, I became more and more struck by the similarities between the two metro areas. The Twin Cities is like a fun-house mirror reflection of DFW. On the far side of I-35, the Twin Cities are also full of flat suburban sprawl, strip malls, megachurches, and over-sized high schools. To be fair there are differences: instead of What-a-burgers there are Culver’s, instead of shrubland there are dense croppings of oak and maple, instead of Tex-Mex this is a land of hot dish, and blistering summers are replaced with blistering winters. Nonetheless, just like in Texas, the Twin Cities boasts a larger, bustling, modern and concrete city filled with Fortune 500 companies (Minneapolis). Here also, St. Paul dutifully plays the part of the historic, eclectic, smaller binomial city, although here the smaller city lies to the west and not the east.
Funny enough, after growing up in the northeast suburbs of DFW, I find myself working in the southwest suburbs of the Twin Cities as an adult. After a decade away from home and over a thousand miles away, how strange to find the long lost twins (quadruplets?) to DFW here in Minnesota.
Jack Wang 