The exact intersection of the Phillips, Seward, and Cedar-Riverside neighborhoods is at the center of this photograph: We all know the story. These neighborhoods were sacrificed for the convenience of newly minted suburbanites. It’s weird how vigorously the government reshaped our patterns of living in the era of urban freeway building, and how timidly it now approaches […]
July 11, 2015 12.05 miles Highland Park, Summit-University (Summit Hill) The small house movement caught on in the late 1990s. It’s easy to understand, with the dramatic rise in housing prices. Even so, there’s been a steady surge in home size with the average U.S. home growing from 2,521 square feet in 2007 to about […]
June 26, 2015 19.96 miles (but I’m saying 20 miles) Macalester-Groveland, Summit-University, St. Anthony Park, Hamline-Midway When you mention Summit Avenue, most people think of the eastern part of the Avenue, home to the mansions built for industrialists like the Hills, Weyerhaeusers, and Ordways. Summit became the place favored to live by Saint Paul’s most […]
June 21, 2015 – Macalester-Groveland, West End/West 7th, West Side – 14.7 miles Today is the summer solstice, one of my favorite days, mainly because it’s the longest day of the year (more play time!) In Saint Paul, we enjoy 15 hours, 37 minutes, and 4 seconds of daylight. To top it off, it’s also […]
Please donate to streets.mn for the “streets to the max” day! Thank you for your support. Note: This post is part of the streets.mn/Nice Ride crowdsource conversation, a series of crowdsourced looks at how to expand or improve Nice Ride planning.Check out the rest here. One of the cooler facts that I learned from the recently […]
Last Friday, streets.mn published Part 1 of author Wolfie Browender’s adventures exploring the now-defunct Ramsey County jail. If you missed it, go check it out and learn about inmate moonings and buttonless elevators! This post continues his journey exploring the jail from the outside and chronicles his journey home. June 16, 2015 – Highland Park, […]
June 16, 2015 Highland Park, West End/West 7th, Downtown 16.2 miles It was fabulous to be back on my bike. First, it had been almost two months since my last ride due to a medley of out-of-town travel, bad weather and a non-biking related injury. Second, it got me out of work on a spectacular […]
The quality of masonry in the built environment has dropped significantly in the past century. I would like to blame this on the rise of the Anti-Masonic Party and William Wirt, unfortunately for my desire for a tidy history, that was in 1832, and preceded the decline of masonry by about a century. Furthermore, freemasonry and stonemasonry in practice are not terribly […]
The St. Paul Parks Department recently finished the restoration of an historic pedestrian bridge that was used by streetcar passengers to cross the tracks in Como Park. Streetcars connected downtown St. Paul with Como Park in 1891, and turned around at a rambling wood depot. In 1898 the “Como Interurban” was extended to downtown Minneapolis via […]
Frank Lloyd Wright is a renowned as a great architect. His city plans are less well-loved. In the 1930s he proposed Broadacre City, a new American landscape where everyone would have an acre of land, a car, and a gyrocopter. Fueling those cars requires gasoline. Gasoline requires Gas Stations. FLW, being an architect, had a gas […]