By one count, there are over 7,600 streets named “ Main Street” in the United States. But there is only one that became the title of Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’ 1920 classic “Main Street”, and that’s the one in Sauk Centre, MN (alias “Gopher Prairie”), the writer’s hometown. Main Street—the novel—is about a progressive […]
One of the more challenging issues facing Main Streets in Minnesota is situations where that Main Street is also a Minnesota Trunk Highway. For most small towns, the designation of their Main Street as a Trunk Highway is bittersweet. Sweet, because it means the city is probably located along a trade route (or former trade route) deemed […]
Walker Street in Saint Louis Park is one of the oldest streets in the suburb. Walker Street and Lake Street are Saint Louis Park’s original “ main street” district. A block from that intersection is the city’s high school, varsity stadium, and an elementary Spanish language immersion school. With the TH 7/Louisiana Avenue intersection reconstruction […]
66th Street is Richfield’s main street, and with a planned reconstruction of 3.5 miles in 2016-17, it has the power to transform this first-ring city. It also has an enormous influence on adjacent South Minneapolis: 66th Street is the longest east-west street south of Lake Street, as well as home to the only major bus line […]
[…] Avenue, where I could cross the avenue from the 46th Street Station. Initially I walked north on Hiawatha to 45th Street—that’s the block shown in purple—then did the main blue loop from A back to B, with a few red spurs off of it, and finally repeated the purple block back to the station. On […]
[…] located one block parallel to another? 7th Street is Dayton’s Bluff commercial corridor. Why are we directing most of the traffic onto a residential street versus our main business district one block parallel? Looking up East Street Shows the residential nature of the street along with planted islands. So what are the problems […]
“Whoever designed the streets (in St. Paul) must have been drunk. I think it was those Irish guys, you know what they like to do.” – Jesse Ventura on Late Night with David Letterman We start in St. Paul, where 7th Street W. (running on old 8th Street) crosses 6th Street, and then 5th […]
[…] have enough of on Streets.mn? Huge, improbable, thought-provoking ideas. We’re all familiar with Nicollet Ave and a lot of the buildings that reside on it. It’s the Main Street of Minneapolis, representing a lot of what’s great about both cities. However, that’s Minneapolis; it’s not all of Minnesota and as we’ve seen in the recent political […]
[…] or so, Garland has been organizing to try and change the design for a street reconstruction project on Superior Street in downtown Duluth. Superior Street is Duluth’s main street, and there’s a huge reconstruction project planned for the next two years where the city will be re-doing all the curbs and pavement in the heart […]
St. Louis Park’s Excelsior and Grand wins 2012′s best New Urbanist Simulacrum of Main Street. The Twin Cities doesn’t have a Seaside, Kentlands or even a Celebration. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because we have an Uptown, St. Anthony Main, Warehouse District, Cathedral Hill, etc. Our New Urbanist (NU) town centers are few and […]