Dero Bike Rack Company is honored to receive the League of American Bicyclists Bicycle Friendly Business (BFB) Gold Award. It is truly an honor to be one of the most bicycle friendly businesses in the nation. We believe that bicycling is a solution to many problems, and it also makes for a happy, healthy and [...]

FOR CIGS AND GUM

&

NOT AN ASHTRAY!
The plants are not an ashtray.
Please dispose of cigs and gum in garbage can provided.

[Tree and labeled can provided. Dinkytown, Minneapolis.]

Mary 2009

[Doorway. Northeast, Minneapolis.]

Got Joy?

[Woman. The Strip, Las Vegas.]

May 28, '69
Today?

[Yard. St. Anthony Park, Saint Paul.]


Icons

[Yard. Northeast, Minneapolis.]

Please
Do not push on doors
Until GREEN LIGHT above doors
is lit.

No need to shove hard -
Push Firm & Steady

Thank You

[Bus door. Minneapolis.]

Reverse
Corporate
Tax Cuts

[Woman. Loring Park, Minneapolis.]


Celebrate
OBAMA
Yes We Can

[Yard. Twin Cities.]


John OFF
the Week of
the 31st

&

Tom off 4 to 6
WEEKS Having
Surgery

[Barber Shop Door. North End, Saint Paul.]


Free
Rides
[Rickshaw. West Bank, Minneapolis.]

[Harmonica player on Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.]


[Guitar player in the University tunnels. West Bank, Minneapolis.]

[Trumpeter. Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.]

[Singer. Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.]

[Guitar and violin duo. Washington, DC.]


[Saxophone player. Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.]

[Guitar player. Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.]

[Guitar player on the University campus. West Bank, Minneapolis.]

[Trumpeter. Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.]

[Guitar player. Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.]

Sidewalk Rating: Melting

This the kind of weather that makes people from warm climates scratch their heads as they see Minnesotans walk around in flip-flops and T-shirts in 40 degree weather.

Well, get out there and talk a hike around your neigborhood. Extra points if you spot 'grass' for the first time in five months. (That is the green stuff scattered about on the ground.)


*** If every food review could be as good as this ... ***



*** Mini-Mineapolis ***

Miniatureapolis - 1st Ave & 5th St from Andrew Vickers on Vimeo.

*** The Underground Music Scene ***





*** Maybe we should all wear helmets? ***




*** Spring Cleaning ***



*** No Sitting ***



*** On Top of the World ***




*** Whistles Far and Wee ***



*** Winter Could Always Be Worse File ***

[Joel Kotkin & robot in his flying car suburbia.]

Some of you may have heard, as I did, "urban futurist" Joel Kotkin interviewed on Kerri Miller this morning.

Kotkin is a slippery bastard. He's probably the most visible of the anti-urbanist rear guard that is fighting to hold on to suburban sprawl for as long as they can. Along with folks like Randall O'Toole, Wendell Cox, and Robert Breuggman, Kotkin basically devotes his life to murking the waters about the environmental, economic, and social benefits of cities (transit, density, mixed-use &c). He mixes neoclassical economic liberalism with anti-urbanist ideology in such a willy-nilly way that its difficult to separate out which of the things he says are fabrications, imaginations, 'mainstream American economics', or actual common sense. (For example, when he talks about the myth of the information economy, or the need for a WPA-style jobs program, I agree with him.)

But the one thing that is certain is that Kotkin doesn't buy the idea that our environmental footprint is too large. The first half hour of the interview was basically a defense of unregulated suburban sprawl, and all the car trips, infrastructure costs, large home and retail construction, and metropolitan segregation that suburbia entails. The end result of Kotkin's "vision" is further marginalization of poor communities in segregated urban neighborhoods, and a continuation of energy intensive growth for growth's sake.


If he was speaking in 1950, his message that cities will be multi-polar, downtowns will lose their dominance, suburbs will grow, and the consumer economy will continue unabated might actually be interesting news. As it is, a visit to Kotkin's "New Geography" magazine is on par with the Paleo-Future website. He seems to be oblivious to the many growing and real problems that our communities are facing: scarce energy resources, climate change, severe imbalance between the global south and the global north.

If you listen carefully to the interview, you will hear Kotkin admit that he's being wildly optimistic. He pitches that 'power of positive thinking' argument, that we need to believe in "success" in order to achieve success. (If by success, you mean SUVs and gated McMansions.) Well, that's also a great way to delude yourself. In the end, Kotkin does nothing but pull the wool over our eyes, while maintaining the belief that we can use suburbia to build a house of cards.

Let it be known: Joel Kotkin sucks.


Bonus:
And the opportunity came along this week when Joel Kotkin, the New America Foundation fellow with a fondness for sprawl and a fear of "climate-change zealots [being] in our faces and wallets," took to the pages of Politico.

Kotkin's full piece, entitled "Smart growth must not ignore drivers," can be found here. Streetsblog's re-mix, entitled "Smart growth must not ignore is not the enemy of drivers," is below.

[DCStreetsblog]

According to neo-pseudo-centrist (best political label I can hang on him, implying he’s a kinder, gentler paleo-neo-con hybrid) Kotkin, environmentalists are why California is in the crapper. Or, to be more specific, they’re the prime cause of California’s narcissism:
The modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

This is wrong historically, sociologically, environmentally and more.

[SocraticGadfly]

You may have noticed that this winter spring, we've had the largest outburst of pothole related news stories in living memory. Seemingly every news organization has devoted teams of reporters to covering the start of the 'pothole filling season' (something that happens every year).

It's gotten to the absurd point where you'd think that the opening of the Saint Paul Asphalt Plant was akin to the naming of the next Pope.

[Crowds of onlookers watch as a puff of white smoke comes out of the Saint Paul Asphalt Plant chimney.]


Of course, its hard to blame increasingly desperate news editors. The potholes this winter are cavernous, the worst that anyone can remember.

My mother got a flat tire when she hit one the other day on a Freeway on-ramp. And a good friend of mine got a flat tire when she hit a pothole on Saint Paul's Raymond Avenue a few weeks ago. She pulled into the nearest parking lot to fix her flat, and during the 10 minutes that she was there, two other cars pulled into the lot with flat tires from the same pothole. It's a good time to get into the suspension repair business.

We must ask ourselves, what's behind this rash of potholes and pothole-centered news coverage? It is a coincidence? Happenstance?

Potholes form because of the happy fact that water expands when it freezes. Each winter, when the freeze/thaw cycle begins, water works its way down into the layers of asphalt and gravel, breaking apart the materials underneath the roadway. It's an inevitable process that gets worse over time, as cracks grow and the foundation underneath the roadbed becomes increasingly unstable over time. It leads to all sorts of different forms of driving disintegration. The only solution, apart from the temporary patches of hot pothole infill, are to re-make, re-surface, or re-pave every road every 10 - 20 years.



[A scientist explains the nature of potholes.]


Needless to say, that kind of road maintenance is very expensive. And transportation budgets are running in the red at every level of government, from the Feds on down to the townships. Barring the impossible hike in the gas tax, there's little chance that roads will be improving anytime soon.

Pothole'd pavement is just the most visible example of what a 'don't tax the rich' policy does to basic government services. For every pothole you hit with your front wheel, someone in the state goes without necessary health care.

[This pothole is dedicated in honor of cuts to state health care for the poor.]


So, drivers of the Twin Cities, imagine a future filled with potholes. What might this look like?

At one level, I'm kind of pleased. Potholes are like inverse speed bumps, and will probably force cars to slow down or risk destroying their undercarriage. On the other hand, a friend of mine hit a pothole on his bike that practically destroyed his rear wheel.

[Spelunking is an excellent hobby and fun for the whole family.]

Bonus:




[Public Radio's latest riveting piece of investigative journalism.]

My favorite recent bike-friendly move by Minneapolis was the decision last November to re-stripe Riverside Avenue. The calmed road down from 2 lanes + parking each way to 1 lane + a bike lane + parking each way.


[Wow! Riverside Avenue lost 100 lbs. with this Amazing Weight-Loss Formula!]


This was, I hoped, the first in a series of road diets that Minneapolis might initiate. Riverside Avenue on the West Bank is a great candidate for a road diet because of the large number of pedestrians, and the dense mix of residential and commercial buildings.

But, I'm not sure what kind of paint the city used for their re-striping, because there's no sign of it today. I know that winter can be hard on pavement, but how does brand new paint disappear from the roadway?

[Oh No! Riverside Avenue gained back all its weight in only 6 months!]


Now, just like before, cyclists have to contend with four lanes of weaving drivers speeding down the pothole-ridden stretch of Riverside Avenue.

Its dangerous, unpleasant, and this road really isn't big enough for 4 lanes of traffic anyway.

Yet another piece of half-assed bicycle infrastructure brought to you by Minneapolis Public Works?

When: Early in the morning during the springime

Object: When you see an icy patch on the sidewalk, pretend its a giant, deep lake. Try to walk across the ice without it cracking. If you break the ice, you fall to your watery grave.

[Caution! Thin Ice!]

[This content recycled from my now-mothballed website, www.excitablemedia.com.]

Surprised as I was when my back bedroom window wouldn't open, when it stuck and I strained and struggled and my reddening cheeks betrayed clenched teeth, I was more surprised when it opened suddenly and I sprang back and it sprung up a full foot just as a great gust blew in from the West blowing a massive cloud of dust smack into my face, an angry beeswarm of dirt and motes from months of accumulation, having lain there taking on a life of their own, veritably crawling, until gale-force fate took hold and blew it up into my suddenly hack-hewn mug. Achoo!

[Introvert.]

Opening up is hard to do, apparently. I've been trying my whole life, and I'm still a shrink-wrapped clamshell, an unemancipated Houdini, an outgoing misanthropic cocoon if one there ever was. But it sure helps to know I'm not alone. According to a 50-cent beige paperback I found in Salvation Army, Pandora opened up her box in a failed attempt at revenge against Prometheus for stealing fire from Olympus. Her name translates as "all gifts" and, if scholars are believed, her release of formerly-boxed abstractions like the blasé "all-the-evil-in-the-world" into the open air is a requisite corrolary to Promethean (trans. "one who can see quite far") technological hubris. From where I'm standing, that's right on. I'd spent half the year in an energy-efficient hole, a little hive devoted to preserving and prolonging the scant gas-fed flame in my basement. Millenia of technological Wintry adaptations have resulted in thick layers of granite-fill insulation blown between various plasters, sheetrocks, aluminum sidings, and the sub-zero outside world, and all its necessary consequences: dust, dirt, dead skin cells, now forgotten as all here-to-fore impervious surfaces are refenestrated.

[Solipsisms.]

This great outcoming isn't all in my head. You see it everywhere as people emerge blinking onto their porches to spin their bare arms about their heads like teeter-totting toddlers or tops. I've seen stoop-sitting sights, believe you me. A tweed-sporting man sitting on the frightfully-close-to-the-sidewalk white clapboard steps, looking wordlessly right at me with a great Cheshire smile and holding a cigar horizontally in front of his face mustache . . . did he disappear when I turned round for another glimpse? There was a lady tucked on the corner of her three-season with half-rimmed glasses on the end of her nose, reading something alongside a glass of red, two identical cats draped onto the porch steps ten feet away, who looked up with a smile so faint that it wasn't. There are the inevitable bar-b-ques, one of which I walked past while peramblating 'round rapidly gentrifying Nord-East, and the man beckoned us over with his olfactory Hello, declaring himself the best cooker of venison this side of South Carolina, while his silent friend remained stoically opposite. No doubt that people are opening up.

Me, in particular. Every time I see an "open" sign in a shop window my heart skips a beat. I go to art openings just to bask in the warm scent of ten dozen minglers. I've installed Dutch doors in my foyer--those that are bifuracted horizontally--to the end of doubling my open-and-shut possibilities. It's all going well so far, what with my open-toed sandals, my open-minded philosophy, my open-face sandwiches leading to open-heart surgery, opening up the V8 on the open road in my open-air automobile injects gaiety into what little time I have left before my open-marriages catch up with me.

But don't let thoughts of speed and purpose mislead. Like parachutes, openness really does slow you down. Not only can you waste a whole afternoon inspecting the minute openings of a springtime flower, but each old-fashioned rolltop desk inadvertently left open, every open door of every bank vault, each paneless window beckons with possibility such that I find myself daily lost in myriad social crevasses, the gaps and whimsy within the social façade. I can't walk past any perforation into the membrane of what's seen without wondering whys and whats.

And when the external lets me down, I can retreat back to my own orfices: ears and noses and bungholes, for example spending an hour pulling off a forearm scab left from when I tripped last week and gouged myself on a rusted pitchfork, leaving quite some flesh wound, to which, like a wounded animal, I have returned time and again, picking and prodding at this gap in my epidermal outside. To stick your finger in there and poke--despite the pain, isn't it the most interesting opening?

[Existentialist trappings.]

[Basically, the problem is that the best source of local streets & sidewalks news in Saint Paul is the Highland Villager. This wouldn't be a problem, except that its not available online. I'm reading the Highland Villager so that you don't have to. Until this newspaper goes online, sidewalk information must be set free.]


Total # of articles about sidewalks: 6
Total # of articles about sidewalks written by Jane McClure: 6


Title: Walgreens drafts third site plan for Highland Village. Development would encompass vacated Snyders property
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: The latest [nearly identical] story about a long saga over big box pharamacy store construction on Ford Parkway. [In the last round, the new Planning Commission rejected the proposal because it was not pedestrian-friendly. -Ed.] The new plan will not include a drive through lane. The article references how failure to design a building around the corner of the intersection can be overcome by the inclusion of an architectural "vertical element" at the corner [a la the atrocious CVS at Snelling and University -Ed].


Title: Commission denies request for auto sales on West 7th
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: A guy who owns a car repair shop cannot sell cars on his lot, according to the St Paul Planning Commission.


Title: Coleman replaces longtime planning commissioners with his appointees
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Very interesting article on the details of Planning Commission appointments. Apparently the mayor has just installed a large new contingent of Commissioners, something that is not done all that frequently in the Capitol City. [Worth a read if you're a process junkie. Hizzoner the Mayor is apparently trying to change things. One example might be the above Walgreens situation, where the new Commissioners seemed to really have made a difference in development and planning policy. -Ed.]


Title: On-street festival garden idea nixed for this Grand Old Day
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Follow-up to recent article on allowing a "festival garden" [i.e. "frat boy pen" -Ed.] at the East End of Grand Avenue for the GOD.


Title: Lawsuits, complaints continue to mount over Central Corridor line
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Boilerplate LRT history piece, with updates about a meeting held by a business association. Features business owners [Ax-Man! -Ed.] complaining about the loss of parking.


Title: West 7th Federation asked to revise district plan
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: After years of waiting for a response from the city, the proposed neighborhood district plan for the W 7th area is now out of date, as the economy has crashed and there is almost no hope of rehabbing the old Schmidts Brewery.

Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967) is at the top of my list of favorite sidewalk painters. He treats sidewalks and streets with such loving detail that you know he must have spent a lot of time looking out his Greenwich Village window, into other New York windows, and hanging around in parks. Plus, you have the added melancholic feeling of looking at the old lost, car-sparse city of the 1920s.

At the same time, to me his paintings are almost all about the inevitability of loneliness. All his images of cities and city streets seem to make the city beautiful but oppressive. The public spaces -- streets, cafes, big urban windows -- just seem all the more distant. Looking through his eyes at other people talking intimately always gives me that feeling of being a stranger, of walking through a city where you don't know anyone or anything, of 'not speaking the language'.

In this light, instead of being comforting, Hopper's virtuosic use of light becomes something frightening, alien, and harsh. Here light is something to shy away from. Yikes! Kind of a terrible vision of the city, but one that still enchants me.














More:

"Hopper became a pictorial poet who recorded the starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for example, in his pictures of lighthouses and harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing deserted streets at night. Some paintings, such as his celebrated image of a gas-station, Gas (1940), even have elements which anticipate Pop Art. Hopper once said: 'To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're travelling.'

"He painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and also liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theatres, cinemas and offices. But even in these paintings he stressed the theme of loneliness - his theatres are often semideserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage.

[Mark Harden's Artchive]


Urban architecture and cityscapes were also major subjects for Hopper. He was fascinated with the American urban scene, “our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo-gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not, with eye-searing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps.” [51]

In 1925, he produced House by the Railroad. This classic urban work depicts an isolated Victorian mansion and marked Hopper’s artistic maturity. Critic Lloyd Goodrich praised the work as “one of the most poignant and desolating pieces of realism.”[52] The work is the first of a series of stark urban and rural scenes that uses sharp lines and large shapes, played upon by unusual lighting to capture the lonely mood of his subjects.

[Wikipedia]

[Basically, the problem is that the best source of local streets & sidewalks news in Saint Paul is the Highland Villager. This wouldn't be a problem, except that its not available online. I'm reading the Highland Villager so that you don't have to. Until this newspaper goes online, sidewalk information must be set free.]


Total # of articles about sidewalks: 7
Total # of articles about sidewalks written by Jane McClure: 6


Title: Commissioners reject revised site plan for new Walgreens store
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Yet another story on the endless Walgreen's/Snyder's Ford Parkway affair. Planning Commission unapproved a previous approval of a “site plan” for a new drug store on the corner of Ford Pkwy and Finn St. Article points out how many new members of the commission there are now, and the new members cited the problem that the plan “follows the pattern of auto-oriented land uses, does not bring a mixed-use development to Highland”.

Also, a few commission members argued that the corner has too many vacant storefronts already. The corner entrance is also apparently not really at the corner [a la the atrocious CVS pharmacy at Snelling and University. -ed.].


Title: Decision made on Coldwater Spring Site: Demolition of federal bldgs, restoration of property planned
Author: Kevin Driscoll

Short short version: Eleven “dilapidated” buildings down by the river near Ft Snelling will be demolished, says the Federal Govt.


Title: Light rail chugs on without the benefit of federal funds. State and local officials risk $42M on project that is still awaiting FTA approval.
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: [Alarmist story about] LRT [shenanigans, apparently w/ the hook that the] project is still not approved. [This is par for the course on projets like this? –Ed.]


Title: St Paul won’t collect streetscape assessments until corridor completed
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: St Paul City Council voted to not collect the $2.9M in streetscape assessments from Univ. Ave. property owners until after the LRT line is running in 2014 [knock on wood -Ed.]. Move probably does a lot to assuage nail-biting business owners.


Title: Mixed-use building in Summit hill converted to residential
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Buidlng at 1041 osceola Avenue that has had both storefronts and apartments from 1921 until 1999 will now be a residential only buidling, according to a vote by the St Paul Planning Commission (sought by the owners). The list of businesses that had been in the building included a grocery store, an ice cream shop, a massage center, and a beauty salon.


Title: Village famer's market OK'd by city Planning Commission
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: St Paul Planning Commission is going to allow a farmer's market in Highland Park this summer. It will be behind the Starbucks every Saturday morning (2078 Ford Parkway).


Title: St Paul considers dropping bid for #1M Jefferson Ave. bike blvd. Residents on the east end of Jefferson want it, those on west end aren't so sure
Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Article detailing how the $750,000 in Federal pilot program money to build a "bike boulevard" [a street designed explicitly for safe biking, which would still allow cars, in the interest of encouraging people who don't bicycle regularly, such as children and older people, to do so. This works because Bike boulevards are far safer than bike lanes. -Ed.] in Saint Paul may get scuttled because of a lack of political ability to change transportation dynamics in the Capitol City. [Once again, this illustrates how Saint Paul can't do anything even remotely revolutionary. Minneapolis is going ahead with bike boulevards, only with far less money devoted to the projects. -Ed.] The sticking point is the citizens on the West End of the street, where neither the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood group, nor City Coucilmember Pat Harris, is supporting the project.

Update: According to my research, this issue has since been laid over twice by the City Council, and will next be on the agenda on March 10th.

Some streets news for you!

• Car hits, injures three people waiting for the bus (PiPress)
• StP  sets up new multi-mode Transportation Committee (Strib)
• Potholes on Summitt dangerous for StP cyclists (SeeClickFix)
• New mixed-use project at 43rd and Upton (SWJournal)

[Downtown Saint Paul.]



[Midtown Manhattan.]



[University/Raymond, Saint Paul.]



[Downtown Minneapolis.]



[Kingfield, South Minneapolis.]

Join Steve Flagg and Mary Henrickson, Tim Blumenthal and the
Minnesota bicycling community for an event to support Mayor R.T.
Rybak, candidate for Governor. Read more >

From the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition's website:

Our goal is to make Minneapolis better for bicycling. We are 100% volunteer driven, and we are always looking for new volunteers.

In 2010, we are focusing on four areas of advocacy:

1. Improve the Minneapolis Bike Plan
2. Advocate for better downtown biking
3. Increase bike parking in Uptown and Longfellow
4. Bring a Ciclovia to Minneapolis in 2010

Get involved!  If you're interested in any of these topics or other ways to make Minneapolis better for bicycling, email us at info@mplsbike.org

  Read more >

A few months ago, a little news story passed over my desktop. It was about a “guerrilla sidewalk” that one day appeared in a vacant (city owned) lot on Cedar Avenue. Unbeknownst to the city, some neighborhood locals banded together to install a sidewalk. “Foul!”, cried the planning commissioner. “Safe footsteps”, replied the neighborhood. This mystery sidewalk caused no large stir, but (as you can imagine) piqued my interest.

Without missing a step, I found myself walking over to Cedar-Riverside to investigate. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Cedar-Riverside is probably the most interesting spot in the Twin Cities, a historic immigrant mishmash that bears the scars of all possible eras of Midwestern American planning. Bordered on all sides by a trio of freeways and the Mississippi River, it has a ton of old brick mixed-use commercial buildings, an ever dwindling stock of 19th century slapped together wooden homes, a trio of massive post-war institutions, a few low-density pedestrian housing projects, and the largest clump of high rise ‘project’ public housing this side of Chicago’s South Side. Today, whirling mix of Somalis, hippies, frat boys and people with too much education, it’s a fascinating place to be for a city-phile.

At first, the sidewalk in question seems like nothing special. It lies in the vacant lot between the Nomad World Pub/West Bank Social Center and a two-storey building that houses a bunch of Somali coffee shops, a mosque, and a grocery. Its back side abuts a parking lot shared by a bunch of other buildings, including K-Wok Asian Restaurant, Hard Times Café, and some old apartments. (This particular vacant lot also boasts Minneapolis’s only bona fide memorial obelisk.)

[A guerrilla sidewalk cutting through a vacant lot.]

[Two desire paths leading through the snowdrifts.]

All the uses on all sides means that this vacant lot sees a lot of foot traffic. I’ve cut through this lot many times myself, on my way to or from any of the wonderful places on Cedar. Because of the heavy use, it bears some emergent footpaths (also called “desire paths”, because they are formed by the people’s collective off-road desires). So, in a way, its only natural that someone, somewhere should take it upon themselves to pave the path. (The logic is quite wonderful, actually, resembling an experiment I heard about once where a University campus landscaper left it up to the collective student body to determine which parts of the green space should be paved.)

[This particular vacant lot sits at the intersection of a bunch of destinations.]

Of course, the city didn’t see it that way. They own this particular property (and a lot of other property in the C-R), and even though city funds didn’t have to pay for the sidewalk, if ever the lot is sold and built upon, the sidewalk will undoubtedly cost more to destroy than that gravel that preceded it.

But there’s something more at work about this act of sidewalk resistance. What at first appears as transgression may just be an act of restoration. Not too long ago, before the engineers of ‘urban renewal’ got their freeway’d fingers on Cedar-Riverside, this particular vacant lot used to be a public street. South 5th Street runs, very awkwardly, into the back of this spot, dead-ending into an access alley. My guess is that the 60s planners chose to cut off the street to keep traffic from congesting Cedar Avenue, which became a key through-way for traffic between the awkward intercourse of Interstates 94 and 35-W. (That’s one reason why Cedar Avenue, which runs through one of the most pedestrian-heavy parts of the entire city, is a four-lane, parking-deprived, narrow-sidewalk’d travesty.)

[The intersection of Cedar and Riverside as it looked from above in 1947 (courtesy of the Borchert Map Library) ...

[ ... and the same place today, post multi-institutional makeover.]

Meanwhile, even after all these years, this bit of gravel covered ex-street could not be repressed. Just because some plan had it marked for a building didn’t mean that it didn’t make a lot of sense as a connecting point for foot traffic. This spot is haunted by the ghost of sidewalks past. The old corner of 5th and Cedar, strangely still marked by a stoplight, continues to whisper at the feet of the adventurous. And this sidewalk, which seemingly sprang from out of nothing, might merely mark the long-dormant rebirth of old Cedar Avenue. It may be the first sign of a spring in your step, after a long winter of concrete and modernism.

[The looming presence of Cedar-Riverside towers over the ghost of South 5th Street.]

The recent dustup about the 'winter parking rules' in Minneapolis point to an added benefit (or curse) of winter: the way that snowbanks make slow traffic on city side streets.

You've all been there, stuck in a game of chicken with another driver down a snowy winter street. Cars have to pull off to the side to allow oncoming traffic.

The effect reminds me of the Dutch 'woonerf' streets, which are 'calmed by uncertainty.' Because drivers aren't sure what's going to happen next, they proceed with extreme caution. While it may lengthen your commute time from your house to Point B, it helps to calm traffic on these residential streets, and makes it safer for everyone around.

What do you think? Is there a silver lining to the snowy Minnesota winter?

Sometime in the not too distant future, John wakes up in suburban Chicago on a Saturday morning and heads to a White Sox game...in Detroit. Join him on a 300 mile journey to Detroit's Comerica Park as he experiences the transportation options of the future: a neighborhood electric car share program, smart phone ticketing, high-speed rail, and connecting light rail. This clip is brought to you by America 2050 as part of its "A Better Tomorrow" project to visualize America's future communities and transportation systems.

Sidewalk Rating: Transitional

One side of the street has snow. The other side has mud. You know its that time of year when your bipolar disorder has arrived.

Go for a walk. Just make sure one of your shoes is a rubber boot.



*** Hypocrisy City ***
[Sidewalk vigilante justice, taking it to the man, taking it to the streets.]



*** Asphalt is organic ***
[Pothole Pawlenty strikes again and again and again and again and again...]



*** Bike parking is free ***
[Parking meter recycling.]



*** Sketchy ***
[So much depends on a giant snowpile.]



*** The best mustachio dancing in 100 years ***
[The most awesome old Minneapolis ad.]



*** Slumburbia ***
[The new 'hood.]



*** What NE looks like after a night on the town ***
[Twin Cities' Neon redux.]



*** Slime mold is smarter than you are ***
[A slime mold grows in(to) Brooklyn.]