The United States is widely regarded as a global economic superpower. Citation: I’m sure that sentence has appeared verbatim in Time Magazine before. But on a recent roadtrip throughout the middle and Eastern US, I found myself wondering, ‘If we’re such an economic superpower – If we’ve been plundering this land for centuries – what […]
It’s been pointed out many times that the Washington Ave. transit mall is over-regulated and most people ignore the signals. My schedule happens to take me down and across the transit mall a couple times a week on foot, and while it’s true that most people ignore them, I still too often see timid pedestrians […]
It’s rare that I bike more than a few blocks on Lake St. without having some variation on “Get the fuck out of the fucking road!” shouted at me from a passing car. Given the overall vibe on Lake, this isn’t remotely surprising. The other day, I was biking down the Greenway near Nicollet when […]
A few weeks ago I was biking on 24th st. near Bloomington when out of a passing car a voice yelled, “There’s a sidewalk right over there!” Literally the next day, a bike lane appeared on 24th st. I imagined the gentleman who yelled at me driving down the street, dumbstruck – was I friends […]
I’d like to introduce you to a little game I call My Thoughts Exactly, where the natural reaction to a scene is represented by a human face on a nearby poster or advertisement. The subject of this edition is the newly opened Target Field Station and its immediate surroundings. The area right around Target Field […]
A month ago Bill Lindeke wrote a post about potholes. He noted that potholes are an absence, or separation, that reveal a connectivity often taken for granted. Potholes can also be seen as windows. Since our roadways follow the law of superposition, potholes are windows into the past. If this pothole could talk, it would […]
Local architect Robert Roscoe recently published a book called Milwaukee Avenue: Community Renewal in Minneapolis. It details the Housing and Redevelopment Authority’s plan to condemn and acquire the area for urban renewal, and Roscoe’s role in ultimately defeating the plan and rehabbing the street. He kindly lent me his photo archives for this post. Milwaukee […]
Most new construction tends to rub me the wrong way, even when it conforms to enlightened urban design principles. It recently dawned on me when trying to come up with a rational explanation for my dislike of the West River Commons development, that the most significant factor affecting my negative reaction was its scale. For […]
No one can agree on whether SWLRT sucks too much to exist, or if it’s just OK enough to merit being built with a bunch of free money. But I think we can all agree that a light rail train going through a sea of parking and office towers says Minneapolis the way Painted Ladies […]
People in the 1890’s must have had a lot of time on their hands, going up in hot air balloons and drawing entire cities building by building. Check out the full resolution here and additional maps archived at the Library of Congress.