Milwaukee Avenue in Minneapolis’s Seward neighborhood..
The podcast this week is a conversation with Bob Roscoe, a Minneapolis architect, activist and author who wrote the book Milwaukee Avenue: Community Renewal in Minneapolis. If you didn’t know about it already, Milwaukee Avenue is one of the most unique streets in Minneapolis, a three-block long stretch of historic working class homes in the Seward neighborhood. The homes were saved from urban renewal demolition and converted to a pedestrian—only street back in the 1970s, and Bob was one of the people at the center of those efforts. He has spent the years working on preservation, architecture, and photography projects around historic urbanism in the Twin Cities, and recently wrote the definitive history of the street. We sat down the other day at the Seward Café, just two blocks from Milwaukee Avenue, to talk about urbanism and preservation in the 1970s, what makes Milwaukee Avenue unique, and what urbanists can learn from the older generation of activists interested in urban design.
The link to the audio is here! Thanks for listening.