- “For good or ill, Shoreview is known as the home of the TV towers,” former Shoreview Mayor Bill Ferrell told the late, great Pioneer Press columnist Don Boxmeyer in the early 1990s. “Even the pine trees on Shoreview’s official logo are mistaken for TV towers.”
- On the morning of September 7, 1971, while being constructed, the tower suddenly collapsed – “bent like spaghetti,” according to eyewitnesses.
- There is only one town, however, with three towers that are each roughly the same height as the IDS tower stacked on top of the Wells Fargo Center, and that town is Shoreview.
- The three aerial FM radio and television towers are just north along I-694 in Shoreview, the suburb just north of Arden Hills and Roseville on the St. Paul side of the Twin Cities. Telefarm Towers are the pair to the west, and KMSP Tower is to the east.
- You can see them from miles away, slowly materializing out of the ozone when you travel toward them on I-35W or 694 on a clear day, and the red safety lights pulsing through clouds or fog or the night sky.
- KMSP sits right in the middle of a county park, and, in fact, one set of guy wires that hold it aloft terminate on a jetty in the middle of a marshy lake.
- the surrounding area around KMSP is the more pleasant (or at least pedestrian-friendly), situated as it is within the boundaries of Vadnais-Snail Lakes Regional Park