Cityscape focuses on urban life in our metro area. Topics range from urban design and architecture to transportation, highways, traffic, transit, walking and biking. Cityscape also examines important urban issues — such as real estate development, education, crime, poverty and family life — as well as the arts, sports and entertainment in our community.
When bumping along a city street, it’s easy to get mad at the mayor or public works staff, and plenty of people on social media are doing just that. The truth behind how Minnesota’s roads are built, maintained, and reconstructed is more complicated.
The barriers between a central business districts for 9 to 5 office workers and residential neighborhoods for domestic quietude are breaking down, and zoning should reflect that.
Passenger rail service between the Twin Cities and Duluth, once the state’s big railroad rivals, operated for over a century until it died, ignominiously, in 1986. Since then, Minnesota intercity train travel has been largely dormant, despite the boom in tourism and travel between the metro and North Shore.
The seal itself, a complex messy affair, dates back to 1858, when it was created by Alexander Ramsey, Henry Sibley and Seth Eastman.
Connie Fortin, long-time chloride expert, is focusing upstream on low-salt infrastructure design to reduce saline pollution.
There needs to be another way, and luckily there is. Automated camera enforcement is used in cities around the world, and is proven to reduce speeding and death. It’s the kind of technological fix often embraced in other areas of public policy, but for some reason has been anathema to American driving culture.
LISC has been working for over a year to cultivate cohorts of people of color interested in becoming developers. It’s intended to change who’s included in the local real estate conversation.
Every winter, pavement conditions deteriorate. Each spring, drivers anxiously wait for temperatures to rise, so that the city’s asphalt plant can start filling the potholes. And each year it gets worse.
Riverside Plaza, the 1,300-unit modernist apartments that dominate the eastern Minneapolis skyline, quietly turned 50 years old last year.
A recent study looking at cell-phone data from millions of people around the world found that the U.S. ranks poorly when it comes to everyday walking. The average American takes just about 4,700 steps each day, a count that has surely declined since the pandemic and its work-from-home revolution.
“People downtown, their mood is different,” explained Calgar Kisa, working the week before Christmas at his downtown Minneapolis boutique. “It’s depressive. They don’t have a shopping mood; they have a working mood. They’re just busy, and say ‘I need to go home for the kids.’ I feel nobody can survive downtown in the retail business.”
After a century on 2nd Avenue hosting weddings, funerals, and the best basement bar in the metro, the Cro (as it’s universally known) is why half of South St. Paul counts themselves honorary Croatians.
Council Member Michael Rainville and a group of Northeast Minneapolis residents are trying to get 20 homes on Van Buren Street downzoned, restricting the size of apartment buildings that can be built.
The situation makes transit advocates desperate for an alternative to another round of triage, with seemingly no end in sight.
With the Minneapolis Lakers’ last game in 1960 came the end of city branding in our state. Out were the names Minneapolis and St. Paul, and in came teams with a statewide moniker: the Twins, Vikings, Timberwolves, and Wild.
From a city government perspective, embracing the new legal-pot future might be a bit much for many elected officials, at least as it stands right now.
Research finds multi-family zoning – allowing rental apartments to be built in residential neighborhoods – is directly correlated with regional racial segregation.
The crosswalk impasse is nobody’s idea of a good situation. That’s why it’s good news that St. Paul Public Works is reconstructing a half-mile of Grand Avenue, including the block through Macalester College.
The lifespan of a Minneapolis street sign varies wildly depending on weather conditions — and drivers.
At the corner of 46th Street and Minnehaha Avenue, a landscape that was once gas stations, parking lots, and windowless warehouses resembles a real city.
