Got a long overnight in Minneapolis? This might make for an interesting trip.
It’s a windy October day, and my friend Liz and I are shivering in line outside Prince’s 65,000-square-foot recording studio and former residence in Chanhassen, Minn.
Paisley Park is legendary in Minnesota because of the late-night surprise concerts, often free, that the Purple One held here. Liz’s friend Tim Alevizos, a 52-year-old partner at a creative agency, remembers nights in the early ’90s spent waiting by the loading dock after midnight in the frigid cold for the doors to open. Prince’s hospitality meant something to Minnesotans. “Here, we lived in flyover country, and now we could step up and say we’re right there on the cutting edge with this guy,” Alevizos says.
After Prince died unexpectedly in April at 57, Alevizos pinned his LUVSXY license plate to the property’s chain-link fence as “a final goodbye.”
Regretfully, I never made it to a Paisley Park concert. But now that it has opened its doors as a museum, I made the 20ish-minute trek from Minneapolis hoping to find that a piece of our hometown legend survived inside the studio and performance space where he lived and worked for nearly 20 years.
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