A New View of the Twin Cities, with LEGOs

Thanks to Minneapolis bartender Ryan Fuchs, you can take a trip to Twin Cities landmarks like the IDS Center and Lee’s Liquor Lounge whenever you want—they’ll just be a bit smaller than you remember.

by Madison Bloomquist

January 5, 2021

5:46 AM

Photo courtesy of Ryan Fuchs

Nye's—in LEGO form

It seems like everyone has picked up a new or rediscovered hobby during COVID lockdowns. Suddenly your mom is a puzzle master, your best friend knits, and your niece and nephew are becoming chess grandmasters. But Ryan Fuchs took quarantine hobbies to a new level when he became a nearly full-time digital LEGO architect, recreating the Twin Cities in miniature.

Fuchs was laid off from his longtime bartending job in March and suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands. “I’ve always played with LEGOs, and I still collect sets as an adult,” he says. “When I was furloughed, I thought making the place I worked at, Otter’s Saloon, would be a fun challenge. Obviously I couldn’t afford to do that in real bricks, so I did some research and found a studio program so I could do it virtually. And it just kind of went from there.”

As nearly every parent or kid-adjacent person has eventually learned, LEGOs are expensive. Especially when you need specific colors and shapes to create shockingly factual replicas of the Twin Cities’ bars and landmarks, like Fuchs did. He estimates many of his LEGO projects (around 10 so far) would cost around $5,000–$6,000 to actually build in real life—even though he’d love to try it someday.

Instead, he’s built places like Lee’s Liquor Lounge, the IDS Center, the CC Club, and more, all brick-by-brick in a CAD program. As a former engineer (Fuchs studied mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota), combining software, LEGOs, and Minnesota icons felt natural. “With my engineer’s mind, I’ve done my best to use the type of bricks and techniques that I think they would be structurally sound,” he says—an impressive feat, considering his model of the Hennepin Avenue Bridge would be 20 feet long in real life.

Fuchs, who goes by the moniker Slye Fox, started getting noticed online for his LEGO attractions in late November, when he finished Lee’s Liquor Lounge. “I posted it to my friend Nate Dungan’s Facebook wall, who’s the lead singer of Trailer Trash, which used to play there,” he says. “And his fan base saw that, and it took off from there. All of a sudden I saw this post I made go from 30 shares, to 100 shares, 500 shares. And then someone’s texting me, ‘Dude, you’re on Reddit. You’re all over Twitter.’ And it took off from there.”

Fuchs hopes his new fanbase can help him crowdsource details for his latest project: the original Nye’s, which he wants to be exact, down to the back alleys and bathrooms. “There are so many archival photos, and none of them are of the bathrooms or the kitchen or the back of the building,” he says. “I’m getting a lot of help from my various friends in those regards, and that makes a big difference. Otherwise I’ll have to guess.”

And there’s always someone who notices if he gets a detail wrong.

“That happened with Lee’s,” Fuchs says. “I missed the sound guy and had to re-add him to the set, but the pictures are already out now.”

Even though the displays are always as factual as possible, Fuchs sneaks a few Easter eggs into each one. “In the Otter, my first creation, everybody in there is supposed to represent someone I know,” he says. “And I put my wife and I in each set, and I put Homer Simpson in each one just for fun.”

As fun of an outlet LEGO creations has been for Fuchs, he acknowledges that now the projects represent something bigger. “Everyone’s played with LEGOs at some point, or at least know what they are, and that brings a bit of nostalgia back,” he says. “And also, when I recreate a place like Lee’s or Nye’s that doesn’t exist anymore, it gives people a chance to revisit those memories.”

Check out Fuchs’s work at facebook.com/slyefox or flickr.com/people/slyeboxlego.

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