The Love We Make: Prince's Galpin Boulevard and Dearly Beloved

ecbalazs
1 day ago
5 min read

Updated: 4 hours ago

Still from Dearly Beloved (2026) Artwork Dan Lacey. — Still from *Dearly Beloved (2026)* Artwork Dan Lacey.

I don't really believe in time. I don't count lines in all the years.

I believe in the here and now, and I believe in the people.

— Prince Rogers Nelson, Rolling Stone, 1985

A disturbance at Galpin

When I climbed through a gap in the chain-link fence to visit Prince's vast and beautiful overgrown property on Galpin Boulevard in Chanhassen, MN, in 2016, I roamed across the fields, swimming through the shoulder-high grass. It was peaceful—rolling hills, no one in sight, only trees. Beyond the Prince symbol still intact, mapped out in bricks, I found the flat site where his house once stood—the birthplace of so much music. Sign O' the Times, The Black Album, Camille, Crystal Ball, Dream Factory, Roadhouse Garden. Just a few minutes drive to Paisley Park.

I walked around and found the site of the swimming pool, its line of trees now large and lanky, all these years on from the Gangster Glam video and stills I had carefully studied. I lay in the grass where the water once was and listened to the birds and to the earth. Did it still carry some echo of his music? I walked the concrete path to the windmill site and thought about the Uber driver who told me how he grew up around here. He recounted how he and his school friends once broke in and climbed up into the big wooden windmill. It was cool and thrilling, until the vicious barking of guard dogs shattered the quiet. The boys fled into the woods in the dark night, fearing they were about to be mauled. I said: "Wow, that must have been something, to grow up living near Prince." He nodded, lost in memories a moment, eyes shining, then looked away.

I sat on the tennis court, weeds growing through the cracks, and imagined Prince shooting hoops at the basketball ring mounted there. I saw him flash by on rollerskates. My camera was with me, as it often is, trying to capture the presence of an absence. I thought then about how artists and their audience co-exist. How we inter-are, as Vietnamese Buddhist monk and beloved teacher Thich Nhat Hanh so beautifully called this interdependence. Prince-like, he had to invent a word to describe what he was trying to show. "To be” he said, is always to “inter-be". We inter-are with one another and with all life.

Prince Rogers Nelson purchased this property in 1985 in the flush of Purple Rain success, and was able to build his home here, on this vast expanse, because of the work he had done. He fully honored his gift as an artist. He gave himself over to his music: to write, record, perform, to find a way to reach an audience. Then we all purchased his music. Millions of us everywhere. Our wages, our pocket money, our parents' wages, flowed into his hands and so he could move here, to this land and be its temporary, 20 year resident. His art, our love, transformed into this land, these trees.

In some way, it was this relationship between Prince and his audience that was holding this sacred place intact—preserving the woodland, housing the birds, and the deer who looked up at me but didn't flee. The wild turkey who left me a feather. Prince razed the house in 2005 following his divorce, but he kept the property. Who knows what his dreams for it might have been. At the time of my first visit in 2016, housing estates were dotted all around, but Prince's property kept a sense of wilderness in Chanhassen.

Sitting in the field, looking across the vista of nature that Prince once looked out over from his house, I prayed that a rich Prince fan, or a conglomerate of the Prince community, would purchase this property and turn it into some kind of peaceful, nature sanctuary for all.

Well, that didn't happen. I watched as the estate sold off his properties and the money drained back out. Now there are just purple-inflected street names in a new estate laid over the wild earth. I used to return to these fields whenever I needed time alone—to think, or to ponder the mystery of how Prince called me to Minnesota after his death. Now I don't want to see.

I'm glad I slipped through the fence all those years ago, like so many other people, following in Prince's wake. It was precious time, and I knew it then. Time to reflect in one of the places of his life, before this Prince site, like so many others, dissolved into memory.

The only love there is is the love we make. — Prince

The People's Museum for Prince

The Love We Make: Prince's Galpin Boulevard and Dearly Beloved

Recent Posts

Comments