The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

On December 1, 1989, about six hundred galleries, museums and arts organizations across America, concentrated primarily in New York but including some here in the Twin Cities, observed the first "A Day Without Art." Coordinated by a New York-based group called Visual AIDS, the idea was for these institutions to mark the impact that the AIDS epidemic had made in the art world by shutting dow

In ancient Rome, handwritten copies of a daily gazette called the Acta Diurna were posted in prominent public locations to keep citizens informed on everything from military developments to the latest divorces—and you can bet which part was read most avidly. In colonial America, the New World’s first newspaper, published in 1690, made a splash by publicizing a rumor that the king of France had royally screwed his son’s wife.

Each of the offices in the ten-story Ceresota Building on Fifth Street is, like a lot of offices these days, an island unto itself. Each floor of the converted flour mill holds three tenants at most. Some, like the Cooper Law Firm, take up an entire story. So despite the common first-floor cafeteria, interoffice communication seems limited mostly to polite nods in the elevator. There hasn’t been much gossip about the fifth floor, which is the world headquarters of a business that goes by dozens of names but whose office window reads “GeekTech, Inc.”