by Luke Sageser Take a walk through the skyways at noon on a weekday, and you get the impression that you have stumbled into a hybridization of a mall, an apartment complex, and the waiting area of your local bank. The crowds hum as people criss-cross building complexes, making their way to food courts […]
[…] the Downtown Journal (in Minneapolis). I was chastised at the time and suppose I will be again. However, with the recent opening of a new, $3 million skyway link to better connect the Accenture tower to adjacent blocks, as well as the new Downtown 2025 Plan taking on the “Skyway Paradox,” I was persuaded […]
The podcast this week is a conversation with Eric Dayton, the founder and chief booster of the Minneapolis Skyway Avoidance Society. Eric Dayton is the owner of two downtown Minneapolis businesses – the Bachelor Farmer restaurant and Askov-Finlayson, a clothing retailer – and, of course, son of Minnesota governor Marc Dayton. We sat down […]
Sam Newberg’s recent streets.mn post arguing for the destruction of the skyways crossing Nicollet Mall could not have been more wrong-headed. The skyways are not only a critical piece of infrastructure that make Minneapolis a great place to work and live, they are also a key piece of our Minnesota identity. Tear down the […]
A topic of conversation recently has been the need for better public connections between Nicollet Mall and the downtown Minneapolis skyway system, to meld our distressingly disparate pair of pedestrian pathways into a unified urbanist utopia. Both a Minnpost article and a discussion on the forums came to the conclusion that the Nicollet Mall project’s abandonment of […]
While my post on this website suggesting that we gradually remove the skyways from downtown Minneapolis over a 50-year timeline got a couple compliments and a rebuke by our own David Levinson, it was also picked up by the Star Tribune. In that piece, Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak was quoted as saying “I don’t […]
Did you know there’s a bike lane in there? Whether the Minneapolis skyway system contributes good things to the livability of downtown has been well discussed for a while on this site, but the conversation has been brought to a wider audience recently with local businessman Eric Dayton coming out aggressively against them. Dayton […]
As it says (down there) in my bio, I’m a pretty regular user of Minneapolis skyways, especially in any form of inclement weather. Nonetheless, some days, especially this time of year, are not quite cold or inclement enough to make me want to retreat entirely indoors, but still chilly enough to make an entirely outdoor […]
[…] is breathtaking. I highly recommend it, but that’s not the reason for this post. Each year we park in the Kellogg Blvd. ramp and walk across the skyway, which is constructed of vertical and diagonal steel beams that meet at floor level in a series of 45 degree angles. There are at least a dozen of […]
A skyway sits empty in downtown Minneapolis last March. Photo courtesy of Chris Juhn for MPR News