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.
It’s one of the two dozen “branch factories” that Henry Ford built to produce the Model T. It ran as a car plant for 21 years, before eventually being bought by the state in the early ’70s. It was used for office space until 2004, and has been vacant ever since.
A proposed St. Paul apartment complex has sparked a lot of pushback in the surrounding Lex-Ham, Rondo, and Frogtown neighborhoods over what the building would do to affordability in the area.
The average annual number of fatal and severe crashes in the city has bounced around 100 for a decade, and that’s even with a lot of recent safety improvements.
The Dec. 28 storm resulted in around 500 crashes, dozens of severe injuries, and two deaths.
Shop windows still sit at the center of an ongoing debate in planning circles about how to foster street life.
Music sets a mood, creates a vibe, and can be an acoustic welcome mat for people to enjoy themselves in the city. Or, if you prefer, it pollutes the atmosphere and inflicts ear worms on innocent passers-by.
Once folks get enrolled, their card is registered under their name for a year, allowing them to get dollar fares at any fare box or light rail station.
Both counties are aggressively replacing four-lane street designs with a three-lane concept, where turning traffic takes up a center lane.
Moby Dick’s was a bar “that folks visited just to say they’d been there.” An excerpt from the forthcoming book, “Closing Time: Saloons, Taverns, Dives, and Watering Holes of the Twin Cities,” by Bill Lindeke and Andy Sturdevant.
The compromises forged at the end of last year’s legislative session included a new law that allows Minnesota cities to set their own speed limits on city streets.
Combating the chaos of pick-up and drop-off.
On a 5-3 vote, the Heritage Preservation Commission (HPC) gave the budding district the go-ahead Tuesday to receive further study and potential design guidelines that could shape future development in the 3.2 acre area.
From Sept. 7 to 14, the Chroma Zone Mural Festival will bring public art, placemaking, and whimsy out into the streets of St. Paul.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is spending the $47 million in three distinct phases, with a pause between each phase to collect data and evaluate how the grants and goals are working.
Especially in a time when so much time, money, and resources are spent planning for improved downtown transit, routine “box blocking” is a sure transportation travesty.
Thanks to demographics and changing tastes, the demand for soccer means that youth soccer clubs in St. Paul and Minneapolis sometimes have to travel to distant suburbs to find a playable pitch for their ostensible home games.
New zoning changes offer relief to people who own a whole category of historic properties that have been marginalized by city’s 20th-century codes.
St. Paul’s plan is currently in draft form, and the city is accepting comments now. The big goal is to become carbon neutral within 30 years.
“They have emergency situations, or a family member passes away,” said one renter, and soon people in crisis risk eviction and future denials of housing. Proposals are being developed to address these and other tenant issues, drawing pushback from some landlords.
Change is hard because golf is such a potent symbol. But fewer golfers and wetter conditions are creating dilemmas for local cities.
