For more than a year, Ramsey County has been conducting a study to determine the best plan for the future of Rice Street–or, as Ramsey County highway engineers like to call it, Ramsey County Highway 49. We’ve had meetings, meetings, and still more meetings. At every turn the divides in the neighborhood seem to get […]
On November 7th, Saint Paul elected a new mayor for the first time in twelve years, former Ward 1 City Council Member Melvin Carter III. Carter campaigned on a platform that pledged to move Saint Paul forward, calling to “reduce our city’s carbon footprint by expanding transit, biking, and pedestrian opportunities citywide” and to “design […]
Rice Street, the main drag of Saint Paul’s polyglot, working-class North End, has long been seen as a street that primarily serves suburban commuters. Despite the narrow (66′) right-of-way, Rice has four lanes of high-speed traffic all the way from downtown to a block short of Wheelock Parkway, where it switches to a three-lane layout […]
If you ever attend a neighborhood meeting in Saint Paul (or probably any city), you’re likely to hear a lot about the perceived or actual animosity of homeowners against renters. For example, in my own neighborhood in the North End, a recent meeting drew some audible expressions of surprise when someone quoted the statistic that […]
In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration devised a classification scheme for urban residential properties as part of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a New Deal program intended to refinance existing home mortgages and to make the process more accessible for new homebuyers. The HOLC system classified homes and neighborhoods into four tiers, ranging from the […]
Here’s a map of the neighborhoods of Downtown Minneapolis, along with a couple of unofficial districts and landmarks. Recently, Metro Transit announced that it would be dropping the “Downtown East” name from that Metro stop in favor of US Bank Stadium, followed swiftly by news of this study on new names and identities for the […]
On Tuesday evening around 6 o’clock, my girlfriend and I decided to take a trip from our home in Stevens Square to the first-ever Northeast Night Market at 13th and Tyler St NE. We chose to bike; the sun was shining, the air was hot (but not too hot yet), and we knew that with […]