The Shoe Tree

Nobody agrees on why the shoes go up. University of Minnesota students have been throwing tied-together pairs into the branches of this hackberry since at least 1995, when the Minnesota Daily first wrote about it, and the explanations on offer run from graduation ritual to end-of-exams release to no reason anyone can name. The shoes hang until weather or the park takes them down. More arrive. It is a common hackberry, and that is the honest description: a plain North American tree with rough corky bark and no claim at all to age or size. Nobody has dated it and nobody has measured it. It is here because it is a landmark, which it unarguably is, with its own Wikipedia page and a University of Minnesota Libraries piece written about it, which is more attention than almost any other tree in this city gets. It stands in Bohemian Flats Park on the west bank of the Mississippi, directly under the Washington Avenue Bridge, on ground where an immigrant settlement of Bohemian, Slovak and Scandinavian families lived down in the river flats until the city cleared them out. The park kept their name. Go near the end of a semester if you want to catch the tradition in motion. The rest of the year it is a hackberry wearing what other people left behind.