🏫 "Like never-ending summer camp": Becketwood senior co-op turns 40

“It’s a little slice of Utopia in South Minneapolis.” 

That’s how Iric Nathanson describes Becketwood, his home of the past 15 years, as we stroll through the oak savannah that rings the campus. I’m talking to the 40-year Longfellow resident under the aegis of his role as one of Becketwood's de facto historians, as the cooperative approaches its 40th anniversary.

Like virtually everything else that gets done there, commemorating the 40th anniversary is a concerted group effort. Iric is one of a half-dozen residents who’ve formed a “40th Anniversary Committee" to plan a slate of programming around the milestone. His contribution includes a series of articles in the Becketwood Times — one of Becketwood's two internal news outlets – and a 30-page history publication that will be distributed to each of the facility’s residents. Which is separate from a compendium of self-written histories of Becketwood's most notable committees that another committee member, Lynn Pegg, compiled.

As we chat we pass by some of the 53 landscaping gardens that dot the grounds, each planted and tended by a volunteer from the Garden Stewards group. Which are not to be confused with the 84 raised plots in the community garden, each belonging to a resident, nor the adjacent communal plots of rhubarb and raspberries that anyone can harvest from. It's also distinct from the Fernwood Glen, where the Landscape and Garden Committee transformed an old dumping ground into an extensive wildflower garden, bisected by a wooden footbridge made by volunteers in the wood shop. (The name was chosen from a stack of 148 submissions by a separate naming committee.)

Every 30 seconds or so, Iric stops to exchange a pleasantry with somebody he knows by name. The sun dapples through the leaves; the chatter of the birds drowns out whatever car noise would otherwise bleed in from West River Parkway. Inside, a screening of a PBS documentary on improving the election process is wrapping up. Soon the dining room will fill up for dinner service — which several people take pains to tell me is head-and-shoulders above standard senior home fare — before the night concludes with a show by a South Minneapolis puppeteering group.

Utopia isn't just another way of saying "a very nice place." It's a genre of thought experiment about how people ought to live together, with common tropes: Isolated privacy; bucolic natural beauty; benevolent governance that anyone can partake in; wholesome stimulation; tight community. Maybe most alluringly, the classic Utopias feature people who spend most of their time and energy on what suits their interest, or skills, or sense of what’s worthwhile. 

By those criteria, Becketwood might just fit the bill. If you can get a spot, that is.

Background

In the speculative land-buying frenzy of the 1850s, early Minneapolis settler Richard Martin bought a 120-acre plot of riverside land just north of Minnehaha Falls, with an eye toward the development of a new city that never panned out. When he died in the 1890s, the Episcopalian willed the entire parcel to Sheltering Arms, the state's first orphanage, which a charismatic Episcopalian nun named Sister Annette Relf had opened in North Minneapolis in 1882.