This February saw record-breaking snowfall in the Twin Cities area. As any Minneapolis resident could ...
This February saw record-breaking snowfall in the Twin Cities area. As any Minneapolis resident could see — whether traveling by car, foot, bus or bike — our city’s infrastructure was not up to the challenge. That went double for the Metro Transit system, which needs all the support it can get these days. As a longtime reader […]
This morning, the North Loop was awoken by the sweet sound of pile driving as the Archive project started construction on a surface parking lot near the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The surface parking lot is one of the last in the area, with several being redeveloped in the last ten years into mixed-use […]
Framing of the second story has begun on the new North Loop mixed-use development by Solaris Redevelopment Corp. and Weiss Builders. The project broke ground on a set of large surface parking lots in July 2018. When complete, the property will house 156 residential units and approximately 22,670 square feet of commercial space. For parking, the developer […]
Join your friends at streets.mn for a Hopkins happy hour + bus trip. In case you missed the Red Line ride, or the A Line ride, these are fun ways to learn about transit, hanging out with fellow transit nerds, and see new parts of the city that might be worth a gander. Here we’re […]
I’m a casual bird watcher. I feed them in my Minneapolis back yard and keep lists of avian visitors there and at the nearby lake. It’s pretty amazing what shows up. My back yard list has 54 species, plus 42 more seen at the lake. Some are common, many are rarely seen and it’s a […]
The intersection of Smith Avenue and Dodd Road in West St. Paul may not seem remarkable, but it’s a bit of a local landmark. It’s the location of what is believed to be the smallest dedicated park in the U.S. Across the street, a small boulder in a strip mall parking lot is infamous on […]
Every day at The Overhead Wire we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the DC region. […]
In a departure from transit and housing, today we present a map created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej. This map shows the massive expanse of river basins across the United States, especially those which feed the Mississippi River. The rivers that feed the Mississippi are in hot pink. For those looking for high ground as we start to […]
[Part of the Saint Paul Field Guide to Public Spaces, put together by a geography class at Macalester College in fall 2018. See introduction here.] By Ellie Hohulin Urban Flower Field, located on the site of Pedro Park, exists temporarily in downtown St. Paul, or as “temporary” as you could call a five-year existence. Simple materials dot […]
St. Patrick’s Day, that day of green things which should not be green and (this year anyway) things which ought to be green are still buried under snow and ice. We could repurpose St. Patrick’s Day as a happy and green climate action day (and a few green beers would probably be ok in this […]
The Lind-Bohanon neighborhood is among the most northerly in Minneapolis and lies between Humboldt Avenue North and the Mississippi River, except that south of 48th Avenue North, it only extends as far east as Lyndale Avenue North. (The remaining strip between Lyndale and the river is part of the Camden Industrial Area.) On the route map, […]
Upon reading this recent post by Alicia Valenti, I decided to take a walk with my camera around my own neighborhood. Here is a “slide-show” (pun intended) of the proceedings: On my walk, I was able to talk with some others about their bipedal experiences of the day. Outside the MPD 3rd Precinct, I spoke with […]
Metro Transit has 14 lines that they advertise as high-frequency. According to Metro Transit, these lines, or the portions of them that are high-frequency, will have service every 15 minutes from 6 AM to 7 PM on weekdays, and from 9 AM to 6 PM on Saturdays. But do they? To find out, I checked […]
Randy Shaw’s new book, “Generation Priced Out“, is full of info about housing affordability in the US. It’s a complex topic, and Shaw is well versed in housing debates, patterns, and studies from his perch dealing with preserving low-income housing in San Francisco, the nation’s most expensive market. One of the challenges I always face […]
Presumably you’ve read my first and second article regarding the potential ordinance amendment for “Sustainable To-Go Packaging” for restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores and other establishments. If you haven’t please stop reading this article and go read the first 2. Welcome back! The vote in favor or against the Sustainable To-Go Ordinance update was supposed […]
Previously I’ve written a six part series of Minnesota’s trunk highway system. Now it’s time to go back periodically for topics that were skipped as outside the main story arc, or that were deserving of separate articles. One of these is the story of our interstate system. The Dawn of the Dream As late as […]
July 22, 2017 Macalester-Groveland, Summit Hill, Downtown, Lexington-Hamline (Union Park) 16.7 miles The very unconventional home at 1523 Sargent Avenue prompted my first pause, shortly after jumping on the bike. There are so many shapes, colors, angles and materials to take in. Summit Hill Downtown Pleasant Avenue became home to new townhomes in 2017 dubbed […]
Home & Garden Television (HGTV) recently announced a new special called Rock the Block. The premise of the show is that four of the network’s top designers will be given four nearly-identical houses on a suburban block and each a budget of $150,000 and four weeks to turn them into dream homes. The designer that […]
A cartographer living in Madison, Wisconsin, Daniel Huffman makes maps as an art form. He has created typewriter maps, a chart of islands called “Round Island,” a wine country map in the style of the Oregon Trail, an unfurled map of Lake Michigan’s shoreline and an entire series of River Transit Maps. It’s fascinating to see our waterways […]
It wasn’t always like this. This changed roughly five years ago. I’m talking about the parking restrictions, that is. See that sign? As I said, roughly five years ago my neighborhood’s sixty-year-old streets reached their functional end. When we moved in about 11 years back the streets were horrendous. Every Spring potholes were patched. The […]
