Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
For many East African business owners, “Storefronts are culturally used differently, seen as something different than how we in our western capitalist society typically use them,” said Twin Cities artist and organizer Joan Vorderbruggen, who has spent last six months working with community businesses to improve the old storefronts.
It’s rather a suitable irony that the Red’s property would become a home for Listening House, also an organization that has survived for decades despite seemingly all forces arrayed against it.
For well over a century, the small staircase connected people across St. Paul’s social and physical geography, attracting everyone from locals to tourists to joggers to Cathedral Hill’s fluctuating unhoused community.
New exceptions create clearer rules around rent increases; make ordinance less likely to deter new housing from being built.
“The ghosts of racial exclusion are all around us,” author Chad Montrie said. “This doesn’t just happen in Edina or in Morningside or in Minnesota.”
Right now, the only name for the creek at the center of the future Highland Bridge is “central water feature.” But don’t let the classically St. Paul-style boring name fool you: It’s an amazing new space and surely soon will be named after some notable.
Build Back Better climate policies, originally proposed last fall, included a $900 tax credit for e-bikes, a provision missing from the legislation signed into law this week.
The Loring Park shuffleboard courts are one of the least likely spots in the Minneapolis vaunted park system. Whenever there’s action on the court, passers-by do double-takes, come up to the chain link fence and say, “What’s that?”
Like clockwork, the odd plaza along “7th Place” fills with rock music fans most weekends, and a corner of downtown St. Paul comes to life.
While driving extends our ability to move at high speed, it comes at the cost of almost every other kind of action.
During the unrest (of 2020), fires were set in many of the buildings on the corner, and the Coliseum did not escape. Fires burned the interior and triggered extensive water damage in fighting the blaze. Two years ago, the massive, three-story brick complex was slated for the wrecking ball.
While the traffic diverters circumvent plans and process, did the Minneapolis Police Department hit upon a solution to the increasing problem of speeding, reckless driving and vehicular violence?
“Buy one, get one” promotion includes 16 different businesses in the Longfellow, Cooper, Howe and Hiawatha neighborhoods.
If built, the new arenas and ballparks would occupy all of the Canadian Pacific parcel, along with another dozen acres of Highland Bridge land currently owned by Ryan Companies.
The decision is alarming because it discards years of work by a team of Minneapolis city planners and staff, makes irrelevant hundreds of public meetings attended by thousands of Minneapolis citizens and puts in limbo billions of dollars of development across the city.
The pending reconstruction of Summit Avenue gives St. Paul a golden opportunity to improve the street for the next generation.
For 11 years now, Open Streets have been a popular addition to the city’s summer calendar. But the organization that runs it, Our Streets Minneapolis, has hit a wall. A lack of funding has meant cuts to the number of events and limits to outreach.
The call by opponents of the Purple Line to “stop the bus invasion” begs the obvious question: Invasion of who?
The money allowed Ramsey County, like many local governments, to sign temporary leases for single-room occupancy shelters — making a huge difference for folks who had been out on the street.
The market coming back to the light rail stop marks a return to, if not normalcy, something that puts public space at the center of everyday life.
